My old man once sent me this excerpt from Brothers Karamazov, imploring me to pull my finger out and get on with reading it. Many literary cats of high esteem call it the best book ever written.
In it, so I’ve gathered from blurbs, he consolidates all his philosophy and a lifetime of thought, blending the big themes from his other tomes, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, Notes from Underground, this is his parting shot, the last book he wrote.
Here goes..
Much of earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown in you dies, then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it.
He’s released one album, nobody knows what the hell he’s doing ever, but somehow he’s mentioned in the top 5 of all time conversation regularly.
He released this on YouTube, unofficially, just one long stream of outstandingness. Act II. The Patents of Nobility. He uses samples and can’t be screwed to check them so nothing is on spotify.
Below is the first couple of minutes. I wrote it out so you can read it while you listen.
Sometimes that’s what you need to see yourself Break through and free yourself, accept your own and be yourself It’s magic The story of life is too tragic It’s magic
Sometimes that’s what you need to see yourself Break through and free yourself, accept your own and be yourself It’s magic The story of life is not tragic It’s a luxury
But she was there, in some flicker of every hour of every day. Her mop of hair, her belly giggle, the way she floated about an inch off the floor, moving like she was made of air, her teasing, the nicknames which became sympathetic vowel sounds and much laughing and cooing against my protestations and then smothering by her curls. Her brain that ran rings round mine, assessing family polemics, leaving the cinema. Her nonsense of direction, peering quizzically at me next to a traffic light. Her sulking, the sulking that did my head in as if the most important thing on the planet and in the history of the world, was her mood. Her dream sleep moaning, eating vegetables with her mouth wide open, ingesting them crunch by crunch as they came in on a conveyor belt, flickering her eyelashes and moaning in a bovine way, the tiny flowers she stopped traffic for to lead her investigations. Her tears in concerts, her hands gripping my arms as I held her from behind, sinking my nostrils into her hair. Her games. At breakfast she became a girl across a bar, half-glancing at me, looking away, looking back, staring down at her egg, coy, blushing. Her elegance and quiet grace. Her wilderness. I just wanna be free she yelled. She was something straight out of the woods, I would never find anybody like that ever again. Maybe I would grow to love somebody new, differently, but never again would I have her precise combinations, her intricacies, her fire. She broke my balls like no-one I had ever known and I never loved a girl more.
A ship sails and I stand waiting till she fades on the horizon and someone at my side says ‘she is gone.’ Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all; she is just as large as when I saw her. The diminished size, and total loss of sight is in me, not in her, and just at the moment when someone at my side says ‘she is gone’ there are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout, ‘There she comes!’
In the manner of the rain that has, of late, lashed unceasingly against the dank grey pavements of the city, navigating the puddles and potholes of my days I found a singular repetitive thought drumming against the roof of my brain. What the hell to do with my hairstyle.
I wasn’t drowning in options.
Having drawn the follicular short-straw and watched my forehead increase alarmingly in size over the last few years, it was a toss up between the backward combover flaunted by the Turkish guy in my Local 7 Eleven…
and Uncle Fester.
I tended towards the latter, simply because it was easier and cleaner and I’m a sucker for control and at times when I let it all hang out I’d catch my reflection and see patches where my hair wouldn’t grow and feel old and vagrant.
But the Fester option also came with problems, most notably the ‘head doubling as flashlight’ syndrome. The amount of light bouncing off the top of my melon was a source of contention. Useful for directing pals to my whereabouts on heaving dancefloors, but I was taking driving lessons, what if my dome was deemed hazardous to oncoming traffic by the DVLA.
Could I tan the shine out of me.
Seems not.
I mulled over the Coolio vibe.
Out of nowhere one sticky evening of early summer, scanning Netflix for some mindless flatscreen daydream to wallow in for a couple of hours, an answer came.
The message came loud and clear. I was focusing my energies in the wrong hemisphere. I went to the bathroom, steadied myself and summoned a deep intake of breath. With a deft swivel of the Braun series 9 titanium-coated beard-sculptor, a door to a new room in my soul creaked open. I walked tentatively through.
I had entered an unchartered realm.
The realm of the goatee.
I dusted off the loose stubble, splashed my face with water, towelled myself down, and focussing in once more I surveyed my reflection in the mirror. Staring back at me was someone I had never met before. I took some more photos.
Turns out I wasn’t the only one who was happy about it.
But something alarmed me. I’d had my fair share of questionable hairstyles over the years, but this was different. Never before had I, in under a minute of fairly unconcentrated coiffuring, revolutionised the way I looked at myself, how I perceived my own identity. There was something about the goatee that changed the interior of my being, deep down inside me. That took my 37 year old script, ripped it to shreds and flipped it on its head. That brought out a long forgotten darkness from my soul, something I knew I wasn’t going to be able to come back from. Lurking within its angles and symmetry, was something absolutely terrifying.
What was it exactly. It’s not like I was the first cat to test-drive this particular style. There was Brent.
But then there were some cool cats too. Brad, Leonardo, Pacino. I was in esteemed company. These guys were the epitome of class and continental allure.
In fact, these guys begged an all important question. If you don’t have a goatee, who the hell even are you. What had taken me so long?
And still my reflection terrified me. I wondered if it was the no hair plus goatee combination. Did a decent mane up-top adroitly balance out the sheer ridiculousness of having a goatee. What could be more intense than a goatee. What even is a goatee. An M25 for your lips, a holiday home for your chin. Pronounced and yet peculiarly isolated. The thing about stubble is that if you don’t shave stubble just happens. But a goatee is a whole new level of care and deliberateness. With my Uncle Fester flex, would going full Walter White draw too much attention to the rug doing a rodeo of my molars.
Was I just doing that thing fat people do to give themselves a jawline?
Questions poured down like the falling rain. Five hours in my crisis was hotting up, and on the verge of shaving it off I got a text from my mates inviting me round for a casual last-minute dinner. In the name of banter I kept it to show them, fishing out some festival Raybans to complete the look.
When I got there something unexpected happened. They said hello, we shot the breeze, and they passed no comment on my getup whatsoever. And when, after a second glass of wine I gingerly removed my shades and asked if there was anything peculiar about my appearance, they said simply ‘oh yes look, it suits you mingo, you look good’. I upturned the table, said something disparaging about both their mothers and got the hell out of there.
Walking back home in the fading light I caught my reflection in a car window and flinched. And I understood. At last it made sense what this darkness stomping around in a sealed-off wing of my soul was up to. Whatever the goatee was, was the opposite of who I wanted to be. And in the space of a few hours, like broken glass, it had fractured my identity.
I wanted to be a good person, to put good into the world, to connect with people, hold doors open, smile at strangers. Looking like this, I couldn’t do those things. I didn’t feel sensitive and polite and accommodating, with an especially hairy vagina for a mouth I felt the opposite. And were I to try and be the first things, looking like I did, I would come across as a weirdo. Proper cross to the opposite pavement vibes.
So I took an iron to the wrinkles of my malaise and got rid. But not, as my man Myles suggested, without going full Danny Trejo.
More like it.
The cool thing about trying to be as cool as Danny Trejo is accepting you’re going to die from uncoolness in the attempt. The extended handlebar ejected me instantly from the realms of the deeply tenuous beard-style, straight to looking like a knob. And this was breathing space. I felt superb.
I tried on a shirt I hadn’t worn in years.
Hit up the library.
Busted around the supermarket.
Around me audible gasps and bottled selfies soundtracked my day, I was the man and everyone knew it. In a post-covid world my handlebar was flipping the script, I could tell strangers just wanted to be near me. On a solo trip to the cinema, killing time with some peanut m&ms before they opened the auditorium, I lensed a killer selfie.
And from the corner of the screen my world came crashing down.
What’s with the screw face, I asked the kid who’d just photo-bombed me.
You look like a twat, he said.
I took his word for it, went home and fell asleep for a week. So came to an end my saga with the goatee and the extended handlebar. Both bad looks, in different ways. The goatee didn’t work for me, its legitimacy rendered it confusing. On the strained expressions of the folk I encountered was writ the question: are you for real? The goatee was awful, too forced, too laboured, too deliberate. It made me feel strange. Even stranger that the only two people who commented on it said it actually suited me. That was the terrifying thing. And then it took a ten year old in a cinema to affirm that I actually looked like a twat.
If there’s a moral to this nonsense, it’s think twice before you get out the beard trimmer in an inquisitive state of mind. But more accurately, as a wise man once said, you’ll stop caring what people think about you when you realise how seldom they do.
Far past your leaving we’ll stay enveloped in your presence Forever erring yearning an affection so relentless A love supreme to boundless for a muddle of lame sentences The Vauxhall hatchback backscratch giver hither heaven-sent to us The walking talking nagging Lemsip Extra Strength for us The Super Woman standing tall above the sentimentalist You dropped a beat in me and gently pushed me out to sea And now mummy you see I’m trying to make sense of it
Extract from a letter from C. G. Jung to Victor White, on the subject of psychedelics. June 1954.
Is the LSD drug you’re referring to mescaline? It has indeed very curious effects, of which I know far too little. I don’t know either what it’s psychotherapeutic value with neurotic or psychotic patients is. I only know there is no point in wishing to know more of the collective unconscious than one gets through dreams and intuition. The more you know of it, the greater and heavier becomes your moral burden, because the unconscious contents transform themselves into your individual tasks and duties as soon as they become conscious. Do you want to increase loneliness and misunderstanding? Do you want to find more and more complications and increasing responsibilities? You get enough of it.
If I once could say that I had done everything I know I had to do, then perhaps I should realise a legitimate need to take mescaline. If I should take it now I would not be at all sure that I had not taken it out of idle curiosity. I should hate the thought that I had touched on the sphere where the paint is made that colours the world, where the light is created that makes shine the splendour of the dawn, the lines and shapes of all form, the sound that fills the orbit, the thought that illuminates the darkness of the void.
There are some impoverished creatures perhaps, for whom mescaline would be a heaven sent gift without a counter poison, but I am profoundly mistrustful of the pure “gifts of the gods”, you pay very dearly for them.
This is not the point at all, to know of or about the unconscious, nor does the story end here. On the contrary, it is how and where you begin the real quest. If you are too unconscious, it is a great relief to know a bit of the collective unconscious. But it soon becomes dangerous to know more, because one does not learn at the same time how to balance it through a conscious equivalent. That is the mistake Aldous Huxley makes, he does not know that he is in the role of Zauberlehrling, sorcerer’s apprentice, who learned from his master how to call the ghosts, but did not know how to get rid of them again.
Sadly for Chantelle the phone reception on the beach that evening was not her friend and the picture of the sunset she was trying to post kept buffering unsuccessfully. All the while the sunset she was in the middle of was evanescing in the manner of sunsets, and just out to sea the water rippled and glistened in the fading light, and still she stared impatiently at her phone and swore and the sun grew faint and the temperature dropped, and slowly and imperceptibly the wind picked up. When she at last looked up her eyes were hurting and dark was all around her.
The beers were no match for the heat of the afternoon and were flat and tepid. Charlie started mouthing off about not seeing the fucking point in drinking warm fucking beer for fucks sake and went off in search of a beach bar. Leanne scowled in the passive aggressive manner she had been perfecting since their relationship had begun to sour a few months back after reading the texts she wasn’t meant to read, and turned her back, tipping the bottle over which began to seep slowly through her beach towel.
With the surging adrenaline that comes from a story well told, an anecdote about getting a tug from the waiter in the carpark of the Mexican joint, T-J swan-dived into the water, deaf to the screams from his entourage that the evening’s entire stash of coke was in his pocket.
In 2016 me and my mate Wilma took on ‘the hardest bike race outside of France’. Whatever we anticipated might occur, turned out completely differently. Boneshaker the bike magazine published my account of the ordeal.
25 days, one dangerous eye infection, one fucked knee, ten days in and one rider down, 15 more days, relentless rain, 38 degree heat, one endless mountain range that became an unending desert, another fucked knee, two mental breakdowns, 3 hours of snatched sleep a night for a week later, a sorry whimpering excuse for a human being crawls to the Mexican border fence at Antelope Wells, extends a skeletal finger and grabs ahold of it, drops to his knees and passes out in a cardiac-arrested heap of stinking crap on the desert floor.
Perhaps not that dramatic.
I cracked a not so ice-cold Bud took a sip and passed out.
Giles Coren is best known as the angry man who writes scathing reviews of restaurants. But some years back The Times gave him an opinion column on Saturdays from which to pontificate over things above and beyond the culinary.
Yea exactly.
But one idle Saturday of early April Giles ripped up the script. In my time as a seasoned attendee of the broadsheet milieu I can put it down as one of the most pleasurable reading experiences of my career. I felt the need to tell him. He said ‘thanks’.
In defiance of Murdoch’s paywall I Assange’d the situation and transcribed the thing last night while my mate stood me up at the pub. And I can’t type very fast. It took me ages. I even threw in some pictures to season the sirloin.
*
Leaving aside such tedious familiar responses as “me wife” and “me kids” and “me ‘elf”, the most important thing in my life is my Kindle. It’s not just that it has doubled the number of books I read in a month and tripled the number I buy – doing immense service both to my brain and to the coffers of a desperate publishing industry – nor that it has rid my walls of decaying organic matter, nor even than it has revolutionised my packing for holidays, creating a space in my luggage where 20 paperbacks used to be that can now be filled with budgie-smugglers in every imaginable hue. Above all, what my Kindle has done is give me a new way of reading and thus led me to new ways of thinking.
For most of my life, I read one book at a time. The old-fashioned textual delivery method encouraged a teleological commitment that drew one inevitably to the end of each book before starting the next. But since moving wholesale to electronic formats, I find myself reading at least two, but more usually four or five books at once. I always have one vast work of non-fiction on the go for reading on public transport, alone in restaurants and while sitting on the sofa watching Tom and Jerry with my children (when distraction is called for, but plots cannot be followed). And also a modern, ambitious literary novel for a quiet hour in bed before sleep, when the deep, private part of the brain can be fully engaged.
Then I have usually a collection of letters or diaries standing by to offset the tedium of the morning stool and some sort of cheap sadomasochistic pornography for lonely nights in provincial business hotels. Add at least one awful book by a friend that has to be ploughed through for a single nugget of praise that can be delivered without actually laughing, and you have five books being read at once in a sort of literary jigsaw that previously never existed. Certainly not in a portable form that could be accessed without plan or forethought and with a single unifying typeface, page size, colour and heft.
And what happens then – which is quite fascinating – is that these unrelated books begin to read to and against each other, existing as they do almost simultaneously in my imagination, and to make new books that did not exist before and generate ideas their authors never intended. So i found myself reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success at the beginning of this year alongside the third volume of Fifty Shades of Grey, and thus endlessly musing on why one person should come to be confident and accomplished at rough sex, and another not. Genetics or education? Practice or natural gift?
I read Stephen Grosz’s TheExaminedLife (a collection of psychoanalytic case histories) page for page with Ian McEwan spy novel SweetTooth, at times when Will Self’s giant neo-modernist riff on mental illness, Umbrella, was more than my head could handle, and found myself unwittingly formulating a psychoanalytic model for the causes of the Cold War that would blow your mind. And a simultaneous reading of Bring Up The Bodies with Claire Tomalin’s life of Dickens, Charles Moore’s Thatcher biography and the letters of Ronald Reagan gave me a massive new story of how public power has emerged out of individual solipsism across five centuries.
This is the post-structuralist dream of the truly free text, unhinged from all notions of authorial intent and cultural location, at play in the world in a Derridean loop of self-generated semantic crisis. This week it reached its apogee for me in a simultaneous reading of Max Hasting’s Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 and Dave Eggers’ The Circle.
It is hard to imagine two more different books. One is a vast, rather butch anatomy of European politics in the run-up to the First World War and the slide towards mass slaughter, the other is a slim American science-fiction novel rooted firmly in the 20th-century dystopian prophetic tradition of Orwell, Huxley and Wells, set on the campus of a Californian technology company that has already consumed Facebook, Twitter and Google and is on the point of “closing the circle” so every lived moment is accessible online and all human activity is controlled by an invisible, omniscient, commercially motivated will. But both, I suddenly realised in bed last night, are about the same thing: humanity rushing dumbly towards its doom.
In 1913-14, the world stood on the brink of a confrontation in which the old would collide with the new in a most horrific way. Modern technology – originally developed with the best of intentions – would sweep away a generation that had rushed eagerly into the fray, polishing its new boots, winking at girls and singing It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. All that was good and sound and beautiful would be lost because nobody thought the worst could happen and once it had started to happen nobody had room to manoeuvre out of it.
We stand there once again, exactly 100 years later. On the brink. The shift of everything we know – communication, social interaction, sex, shopping, sport, morality – from the physical to the digital universe is happening so fast that it is now out of our hands. The world we knew is in its death throes. The lamps are going out. Our young people are marching off into a future where every single element of their life is filmed, phoned, liked, poked, tweeted, retweeted, slapped… (I begin to run out of terms and sound old and fatally disconnected) and every facet of human existence is validated exclusively by its digital mediation (even I am aware, for example, that this rather esoteric* column will not attract the attention I get with one of my “ban all triangular things and lock up the Belgians” pieces, so will not make the “most read online” league table come Monday morning, and will be judged therefore as worthless by our marketing department).
I see young people, shackled to their phones and tablets and their lifeless jobs of pointless information-sharing and I see lions led by donkey Zuckerberg, the donkey Gates, Jobs, Brin, Dorsey and Wales – whose names will live in infamy alongside Haig, French, Rawlinson and the rest – sending millions of young men and women to their doom in the blind service of their own reputations and fortunes. A whole generation brainwashed not by the twin mirages of king and country, but by something else altogether. Though I am too old to understand what it is. Connectivity?
It does not have an anthem to lament it, this doomed youth. But I see young people at restaurants, in pubs or at the cinema, hunched over their flickering interfaces, pissing their very lives away, and I think, “bent double, like old beggars under sacks… an ecstasy of fumbling… his hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin…” They churn and moo outside their schools, grazing the internet for tiny molecules of sustenance and I think: “What passing bells for those who die as cattle?”
There isn’t any turning back now, as there was not 100 years ago. And just like 100 years ago there are vested interests, in cold alliance with lazy thinkers, telling us to stop worrying, it is all going to be fine. But it wasn’t then. And it won’t be this time either.
[If you spotted the grand irony that i only arrived at this gloomy realisation through the technological advance represented by my Kindle, congratulations. But i never meant to suggest technology was useless, only that it is murderous.]
At the end of Blow, Johnny Depp’s character does this monologue from jail assessing the manner in which he has lived.
And drops this bomb:
Life passes most people by while they’re making grand plans for it.
A mate of mine with a ropey beard alerted me the other day to some cat called Jedidiah Jenkins, who on turning 30 had decided to embark on a 7,000 mile bike trip for reasons he felt central to his existence. Describing it as ‘a choice to look squarely at the decisions we all feel like we have to make, and the priorities we all forget’.
When you’ve read a fair few accounts of voyages of self-discovery and the various motivations behind them, it’s rare that you come across something written in a way you’ve never seen before.
The spice of life coughs up many different people in this world, with a range of different priorities, some of whom are never going to embark on this kind of mammoth physical hardship. That’s not the way the world works comes the chorus from the office blocks. Fair enough. But I dare even the most resolutely realistic of you to not take something from the below.
Some more comfortably than others, but at the end of the day if you’re reading this, odds-on the manner in which you live is a choice you are able to make.
*
There was something about drawing close to 30 that felt like I was losing something. The newness of life and career and cities and friends began to find their comfortable patterns, and once you see the pattern, time speeds up.
That’s why we hear old people always warning us of how fast life passes. It really doesn’t pass by any faster than those long childhood summers, but we just lose fascination, or I should say we lose wonder.
We are no longer astonished by the way the world works.
Human beings amass comfort and minimize risk as they age. I get it. I can see the value in that. But both of those things have a tendency to diminish character.
I am 30 now, and I don’t want a mortgage. I don’t want property-based responsibility because I think it’ll change my brain chemistry.
It makes you focus on protecting what you have rather than fighting for what could be.
It seems like the observable transition from idealism to conservatism. As for now, I do not want that.
I want to pursue wonder, appreciation, and adventure. I want to meet people and learn from them and write their stories and tell others. I want to become a man that pursues virtue and character and colour and romance. It feels like the people in our lives who seem to have done that are the ones we love most. If I have a family some day, I want to give them a father full of stories and whimsy and love for being alive. I see too little of that.
You may think I am prolonging adolescence and avoiding responsibility. Well, I can simply say that I am not impressed by grownups or their society. But I will also say that I disagree with you.
The choice to pursue a dream, at the destruction of my comfort, with the loss of safety and certainty, all for the purpose of doing something that inspires others to a fuller life of wonder and creativity and quality, to me that is a burden of responsibility worth carrying.
From my armchair I nurse a glass of just-sodastreamed refrigerated tap water and exhale the breath of time immemorial and as the evening clock strikes seven I turn on the Channel 4 news. And I see people bobbing about in whirlpools of political terminology, hanging themselves by their colourful ties, forgetting the real issues at stake.
Take the fall of the Berlin Wall for example. Throw the end of Communism at me, the pulling back of the Iron Curtain, the rise of democracy, the collective clenched fist of a city at breaking point after three decades of subjugation, but let’s be honest now.
Let’s look a little closer.
The Nike Air Flight Hi’s.
Oh gawsh.
This is 1989.
This is no re-release.
We’re talking OGs.
No construction in history was going to withstand the weight of footwear that heavy.
My thinking is that the new standard of latte might be not too far removed from the old standard of latte, which means for three quid you’ll be the recipient of an over-frothed watered-down airy cup of liquid tenuousness that would make Giuseppi from La Casa Del Caffè Taza D’oro a mere stone’s throw from Il Pantheon spit out his triple ristretto.
But why keep going on about Starbucks bro?
I can think of four reasons.
Firstly this absolute honey works in my local and unlike most of the people who populate the Starbucks environ she smiles once in a while and could probably walk in straight line without falling over if you asked politely.
Secondly I like the bottles of iced coffee frappuccino they sell.
Next up without the sour the sweet can never be so sweet, and spending all of five minutes in there every morning brightens up my day in the knowledge that things can’t get that much worse.
Last but by no means least, what other coffee house can lay claim to caffeinated libations expertly served up by Super Heroes.
Thus we never see the true State of our Condition, till it is illustrated to us by its Contraries: nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.
