by J.W. Carey
Adjective Narcissism
John Carey
Copyright 2013 John Carey
Cover by John Carey
Adjective Narcissism
A Broken Polemic
By John Carey
Contents:
Adjective Narcissism
- Me
- T.S. Elliot
- Bob Dylan
- Frank Turner
- Plato
- Leo Tolstoy
- F. Scott. Fitzgerald
- Alan Wilson Watts
- Robert Frost
Honesty
Contact
Adjective Narcissism
A Broken Polemic
By John Carey
Though I would desire to deny it, that I may be able to maintain any sense of humility, however false said humility may be, there is something undeniably satisfying in seeing those eight words finally positioned above this parody of prose. To know that I have struggled and, despite the fact that I have done so in adversity of nothing, have created something. I, me, have drawn something from some quasi-intellectual dimension, something towards which I cannot explain my compulsion, something which I cannot justify before my peers or my superiors, (for surely there are no inferiors to a creature such as I?), but can grasp at the trailing skirts of Understanding as she passes me by in smokeless bars occupied by hazy lights and wiser characters than I.
I can pretend to an intellect that I know I lack and, though I refuse the act in of itself, the very acknowledgement that such an option exists should, if you carry a similar stain of sensitivity as I am not ashamed to admit I possess, offer you some internal view into the text you are about to suffer through and then abandon to the empty corners of your memory; its temporary position on some ignoble coffee table, long-forgotten, or some street corner occupied by second-hand cigarettes and the occasional temptation of copper, before it ends.
But examples of literature, such as they are, which can be said to bear that execrable adjective of ‘Experimental’ carry with them a certain stylised stimulation, a noxious scent which can be said to possess more than a hint of failure’s own particular brand of cheap eau de toilette.
Though I am not yet confident that this fragmented piece of prose possesses either the authority or the self-awareness to slot itself neatly amongst such other examples, in that virtually unattended festival of interesting folly, one headlined by such crowd-pleasing acts as Shields and Danielewski, I would position a warning here and now, penned directly for your benefit and not for mine.
This is not a ‘work’, ignorant of all those negative connotations which that vile word carries with it, which needs to be read. Offering little more than myself and my optimistic mediocrity an excuse for our intertwined existence, I would state now, in what meagre sense of honesty which remains within this shell of imagined authority, that this is something which needs to be written, not necessarily for, but rather by, myself.
This ostensibly linked series of typographical errors; each one refusing to be tied to a solitary failure, but, instead, a collective mistake of such lofty proportions that neither these lexical decisions, nor the lack of any encompassing theme, possess any redeeming features. It cannot be said to offer you innovative narrative discourse, it cannot claim to offer you dramatised monologue. Across these severely limited pages you will find no evidence of a literary upbringing, no clever imagery referential to a modern life and few shared experiences, ones designed to make you feel as though you are not alone, ones tasked with interjecting my personality into your solitude.
Within my words, or these words which once I possessed the audacity to call my own, you will not find wit, nor love of life or death or the grey existence caught in between the two, and nor will you find a purpose, an answer, or any fragmentation which could, through the wasteful use of a monarch’s legions and the produce of dead horses, be metamorphosed into either. This is a text bare of emotion and fact, one empty of meaning and absent in it desire.
This is objective narcissism described in uncomfortably fitting, and deliberately ill-fitting, adjectives, given physicality solely for the purpose of the unnamed figure, for that Authorial characterisation, for that Worthless God hidden amongst the obvious truths, and yet, hidden all the same.
‘It is easy to ‘appear’ intelligent when involved in the creation of any text, of any work, no matter the form it may decide to take. All you need to do is ask yourself ‘why’, ‘why’ you have involved yourself in such a thing. You take the absent question mark and, in your self-proclaimed genius, you hang it above yourself, like an empty noose awaiting a heretic.’
Me
Firstly, before what little impact the following text, this randomly-extracted honest account of self-abasement and composed, for the most part, of the theft of words penned by better personifications than I, can be allowed to launch its attack on those few senses of yours that you actually care to spare for it, as though it were a pauper slouching in the shadow of a doorway, I would pose to you a series of questions. I know you didn’t come to me, if you actually believe that is what you are doing, to be judged and in a wholly physical reality I would have no right to do so.
But in this world, I am the author. You are a visitor into this, the subconscious of a man I have locked away, chained to a prose absent of narrative, in a maelstrom of deceit, alcohol, music and the cages of those humanitarian deities I have worshipped since I hid a refusal to utter the words of a Lord’s Prayer behind the laughter of my peers.
Am I really the voice of the author, or the character dreaming of a man he could be, or some omnipotent narrator, one possessing a voyeur’s perversion taken to the very limit of its ability? Is this, am I, the logical conclusion of an obsessive society? By what mythical authority do I, a man of such complex simplicity and simplified complexity that I cannot even begin to make sense of myself, possess the right to tell you any narrative, whether it is my own or not? Why would you let someone with just such a sickness of the mind as mine into your own consciousness, if only for these next few pages, tortured beyond all recognition?
Why are you reading this, this non-sensical series of queries, when you could be doing so much more? You could write as simplistically as I am wont to do, at the pace of a spavined snail and understandable even by the child. You could create a narrative with meaning, one containing purpose, something to set the world alight or to quench the collective thirst of a generation a hundred years hence. You could sit by the roadside, your head carelessly positioned against some crumbling brick wall, and learn more of the world than I can hope to offer you, even if I had the talent of Joyce, the contempt of Carlin and the longevity of Methuselah himself.
Do you trust me? And, if so, why should you? You don’t know me, or the odds that you do are so fantastically small that the absence of our familiarity is all but a guarantee, and yet you would allow me into the world you have carefully constructed around you. You would let me, either by an apparent apathy or unhidden self-destructive desires, to have an impact, no matter how slight, on the life you live. A life immeasurably separate to my own, separated by the depth of a shadow, and connected through words destined to fade in the ether as soon as your idly spinning, though hopefully temporarily fixated eyes seek something with a more satisfying air, something that will offer you resolution. If we had not met like this, as I speak down to you from a position of assumed authority, in a uniform stolen from the anal annals of history, of course you would not.
However, there is an inherent code of conduct within this relationship of ours, that I will take you on a journey so fantastical that you know it could not possibly be true, however much you would wish it so, or it would carry such an air of depressing realism t
hat any room for doubt at the veracity of my words would, instead, be filled with rotten streets, desperate buildings and a stale sense of outrage, a lone voice crying out ‘We’re not dead yet!’, or something equally as pointless, something equally as untrue.
Though, in a similar way, I could ask the same of myself. And, in my purported honesty, I do not know what answer I could possibly offer you. How can I trust you? You, with such maturity and such common sense, could take my words and wring them by the neck, warp them into a meaning I have never intended, a message so far from these empty words which rattle like change in that metaphorical beggar’s rusting can. Weddings and wars, revolutions and persecutions and religions themselves have begun over much less than the ramblings of a drunk, self-inflicting this unearned weariness of our symbiotically colourless existence.
And then, I must ask the question to which I know the answer, but I have no desire to share. Can I trust myself? Do I believe that this following narrative is the truth, as best as I can recall it, through the haze of self-abasement and the arrogance hidden behind that thick smog? But then, does a sense of self-awareness, one which I am confident that I possess, (or possess the mental faculties to falsify the possession thereof), make that arrogance seem less pronounced? Does it push it deeper in to the mists of metaphor, like the Ripper fleeing into the close of the evening?
Are my half-formed politics, the combination of my deliberate disgust and unconscious love for this society in which we live, the twinned driving forces behind this rambled nonsense? Or is this merely a plea for consolation, for acceptance, for someone to see through these overly-embittered eyes of mine, to assuage my loneliness? Is this refuse, or art, or a madman’s scribbling, no doubt to be found lying on the floor of some ancient asylum in years hence, and to have too much read into it by the shadows of scholarly children yet unborn?
That will do. For now. At least until the seed of this message, conjured as it is by me, by this arrogant narcissist who dares to place himself so far above you, has taken root inside my own soil and can be nurtured it into some grand literary theory, some epoch-defining poetry or eternal piece of prose, one to match the wits of Yeats and Huxley, of Lovecraft and Shakespeare and all those other depersonalised shades I struggle not to feel in this encompassing solitude.
Who are you to ask me for anything more?
I will tell you, because I know who you are, even if you find yourself lacking in that knowledge. Because, in this idle vision, you are what I have decided you are, as I wish I had the authority to elect a different role for myself within this modern-day horror, within the confines of this narrative lacking in phantasm, absent in purpose and, instead, offering a paradoxical replication of this stranger’s mentality.
As you are no idle prince on the outskirts of my scene, I am no hero with his shoulders drawn back, with carefully kept hair and eyes carrying some reminiscence of the sky. I am no prophet, as I was supposed to be, and you are no fool to be tricked and trapped in your own insight, no rogue to be led into the silken jail of a narrative to which I lay my claim.
Simply put, dear reader, you are the critic and I am the drunk.
T.S. Elliot
It wasn’t until I opened my eyes, peeling them apart like the tarnished steel of broken elevator doors trapped within some long abandoned mine, and saw the state of the vented metal below me that I realised the extent of the trouble I had ignorantly dropped myself in. My mouth or, at least, the mouth which spread a few inches below my blurred eyes, hung open slackly, weakly coughing out the hopefully final, spattered remnants of the person who had held possession of my body for the previous few hours. I saw the brackish, yellowish liquid, which seemed to disgorge itself from the depths of my throat without ever requiring the slightest amount of effort from myself.
Through a wave of nausea, loathing and, yet, an undeniable sense of pride, I watched it race its merry, self-indulgent way along the rusting steel, occasionally slipping into the black holes regularly dispersed amongst the warm metal. I don’t know how long I sat there, watching my creation, my head pushed deep into my arm, knuckles tightening about the flaking paint of a twisted steel bar, slippery with a stranger’s sweat. When, finally, I did manage to raise my head for something besides vomiting into the cowering dark beneath me, it took almost as long again for me to summon a single coherent thought into the maelstrom raging behind my eyes, fighting its way between the hammer of one personality and the anvil of another, until it reaches the broken piece of burnt steel I would call ‘me’.
I think, looking back with what I would hope could be named a critical eye, the best description I can offer of the world outside that rattling, empty vehicle, was that it was a flashing darkness. The bruised sky offered no sympathetic brightness, and so the only light available came from the flickering illuminations which advertised failing business after failing business, supported by the terror of headlights glancing across the chequer board of water which now layered the bus’ window. It wasn’t, however, until I saw the irritatingly cheerful, unmistakably purple light of Lenny Henry’s favourite chain of hotels some distance away that the terror struck. Colour, that sickly unfamiliar entity, has never forced any great emotion on me, besides the typical connotations driven into everyone’s psyche by the swinging, Damoclean threat of advertising, but in that moment, that specific shade of purple drove tendrils of sudden, blinding, sobering panic through the thick cloud of relative contentment I had formed around my senses. It split apart, not quite fading, but instead torn by that ancient Royalist’s colour, as though the roar of a thunder-clap through the silence of some undiscovered, unknowable tropic.
Pulling apart my dry, cracked lips, I found it to be my own particular contribution to the encompassing scent of the bus which slipped back into my throat first and, as though some ill-conceived defence mechanism, I returned my head to the crook of my arm, hiding the foetid air emerging from a pair of lungs which, if pressed, I would have hesitantly been forced to call my own.
I felt the pressure of public transport for the first time since emerging into the encroaching darkness hours before, felt that anonymous, eclectic gaze which falls upon you the very moment you emerge from your front door and, unusually, welcomed it as a weakly flattering symbol of sobriety. With the overly careful movement of the quite incredibly drunk, I turned my head to gaze out of the window opposite me.
I saw her reflected in the darkness, too far behind me. Despite the blur, a mixture of the sheeting rain on the window and my own incoherent pupils, I could see her carefully not staring at me. I would have like to have said that her mouth was the first thing I saw, that those lips, twisted into a sneer of disgust, was the thing gave me control of my own body, that sent the boiling personification of inebriation in my veins back to a gentle simmer. I would have loved that to be true but, instead; it was her forearm that drew my attention. Her skin was plainly suffering under the same delusion of the mind that was infecting an increasing proportion of the women, and an admittedly uncomfortable percentage of men, who would call my home-town the same, that exposing genuine flesh to a ‘surprisingly’ unhealthy amount of radiation created a more attractive tone, a more approachable complexion.
However, squatting over the orange dust clinging to her skin was a hand-print. Not one of her own unique shade, as though she slept in that hot, claustrophobic capsule with one hand unintentionally tightened around her arm, but instead it was red and raised and ugly, with thick fingers that left little more than a molecule’s breadth of un-bruised colour between their incongruous absence.
* * *
Had her disgust been as strong as I consciously desired, this narrative would have ended here. It is where it should have ended, with our protagonist begging for forgiveness from some physical representation of an imagined God, with our Author leaving some basic morality at the end of a pointless text. The story could be wrapped up with, perhaps, an additional paragraph about how he changes his life, free from this authorial influence, and goes
on to enjoy great success as a legitimate businessman, that vague phrase of ultimate aspiration. Some morally unquestionable employee of BCCI?
Or the CEO of Dignitas, perhaps?
Then, it could be submitted to some respected literary magazine, or some general, widely-read tabloid. Neither would allow this narrative to become that which I would blatantly and egotistically desire, but it would allow me to feel as though I were a success, if only for a few days, before the doubts and the self-deceit return in some silent, unnoticed invasion.
Had the world been different, and the sight of a youth caught in the waterspout of his own destructive tendencies been a more shocking image, then how our protagonist’s future, now an unalterable past, could have changed!
* * *
My imagination, what little of it remained amidst the feverish remnants of my mentality, stricken down by the dark Irish malady I had welcomed and, indeed, paid for the privilege of, took control of my flickering eyesight then. I saw, as clear as I had seen the vomit sinking into the metal beneath me, as clear as the disapproving glare of the bus’ driver and the uncomfortable shifting of my subject, a creature’s huge meaty paw swinging drunkenly around the dark and foetid room. Something of such a demeanour, of such an easy contemptibility, does not deserve the same title of humanity as the grey-faces, those one struggles to see against the replicated pavement, wandering the dead street.
Smoke hangs heavy in the air, against which the light of the television screen is, not reflected, but at least defined. One collective of exotic foreigners dressed in the uniform of Mancunians fails against a perversely inverted image of themselves, and it roars out its rage like the Minotaur, like some terrible Lovecraftian deity. It takes another drink, little less than a mouthful of some cheap, individually sold can from the eastern European-import shop situated around the corner to the west. And it hears the door creak open, the simple sound spitting nervousness into the ignoble air, into his ignoble air.