there’s no Eden anyway
I think I don’t believe there’s any positive or creative choice. There’s no choice that allows you to become your “best self”, which is the great idea in the western world. It’s the dream of entrepreneurialism and the dream of self-perfection. On my Peloton bike, it says that you can be whatever you want to be, that sort of thing. This is the propaganda of choice, I think, that comes in the world. It suggests that with the right frame of mind and the right effort and the right commitment you can be rich or you can be successful or you can be happier or you can just be your best self (that’s what it is at its most fundamental). And that is connected with the idea of being free: free from pain and free from money worries. If you watch the video channel Rumble, which is what they call the “free speech alternative”, all the ads that I get when I watch it are either weight-loss or they’re room heaters that don’t use any energy apparently or they’re meditation techniques for manifesting abundance. You get this yogi guy saying “this is why you’re failing to manifest abundance”. So what those adverts tell me is that they’re being directed to desperate people and they’re feeding a kind of false hope.
I think there is a choice. There’s a choice—not to give up hope, but not to accept the con-trick propaganda that if you just meditate right or work hard enough or whatever it takes to succeed in this cult of success…
And if we look around, our whole world is defined by the new class of the billionaire. By definition there aren’t very many. But the billionaire is the ideal that people dream of: to be a billionaire. The very existence of the billionaire sets off this kind of chain reaction of hope and aspiration and secret longing to be this powerful master. And I don’t think it’s freedom if you’re striving for this fantasy of success which in practical terms you’re never going to achieve because we can’t all be billionaires, and in fact almost none of us are going to be billionaires or Hollywood stars or influencers or football players. If you sign up to that dream of success which implies that you are free if you just work hard enough or whatever the recipe is, then you’re already not free because the price of your freedom is fantasy.
If there is something like a freedom it’s an opt-out. It’s the refusal of that whole narrative, that whole con. And so what is left then? What’s left is a kind of negation, a refusal, a denial. And I think that does take you potentially into a place of freedom but a place of freedom precisely which doesn’t have defined goals, doesn’t have a defined landscape. It’s an empty place without a script, without a value-system, and I think it’s frightening. It’s a place where you can go mad, where you can lose faith, where you can live in deep sadness, where you don’t necessarily have a backward path. The doors get locked behind you.
I had this sense that possibly the person who commits suicide believes too much in freedom. So suicide is this act of, in a certain way, absolute power, absolute self-determination, even though it’s self-destruction. It’s an act of supreme decision and will. It must also be an act of terrible desolation and so forth. I once spoke to a Catholic priest and he said to me, “I think that people who commit suicide think they’re going on holiday.” It was interesting—I think I had this conversation not long after Mark had died—and what it helped me with was to think about suicide as something other than that cliché of “it’s an act of unconscious revenge and aggression against the people around you”. This was how people tended to think about suicide. And I also noticed that something happens after a suicide which is that the person who has committed suicide becomes totally fair game to be talked about. Anyone can speculate about their motives and their frame of mind, and I didn’t like that I have to say.
So what I’m saying is that there comes a point when somebody doesn’t feel that they can go on. Or there’s this terrible un-future in front of them. Whatever it is: maybe it’s a bright light, a holiday space, or maybe it’s a brick wall, and suicide is that way of escape. But the escape into life rather than the escape into death is something else. I think when there’s nothing left to go forward into except death, then logically the way to escape is to go backwards. There is a pathway of reflection on the past, on oneself, which is the way forward as well, the way forward into life.
There’s a song called “Frisco Depot” [CREDIT]. It’s a Country and Western standard that’s been rerecorded by lots of people. If you listen to the re-recordings, I think you appreciate that people don’t understand the song because the original is a very powerful and beautiful song. It’s about a drifter, a hobo, and it says “when you’ve been alone for so long”, and then it’s not exactly clear what the song says—“there’s no one left for giving”—and it goes “then you find yourself searching your past for the links in the chain”. That’s the end of the song. I think it’s very beautiful and it has this profound understanding that the way of escape into life is to see the links in the chain.
What is connected to this entrepreneurial fanaticism—it’s almost a mysticism of entrepreneurialism, a capitalist mysticism—what is strongly connected to it is an idea about subjective time, about the experience of time. At its most straightforward it’s to do with living in the present and always aiming for the future, always striving to be better, enjoying every moment. If you’re a cancer survivor this is one of the most boring and frequent pieces of advice for carrying on living. The secret of self-care is to look after your needs and desires in the moment—not to dwell on the past, not to worry too much about what if the cancer comes back or things like this. In a sense that’s at the heart of the way we’re supposed to learn to be. We learn to be these kinds of machines of limited time-perception. What that excludes are other kinds of experience of time that are increasingly looked at as unhealthy or sick or depressed. Illness is an obvious one. We’re living through his time when, among many people, there’s this absolute horror of the normal process of dying. Which is leading to the assisted suicide legislation. But if you’ve had cancer, I think it’s very difficult to escape from the awareness that it might come back, and that it’s like this shadow, this cold wind. I think it’s very difficult to escape except if you bully yourself into this narrow time-perception.
What I’m trying to say is that I don’t think it works like that. There are other dimensions of lived time and one of them is when you discover something, or you suddenly see something, which makes you understand the past in a new way. This happened—I’m not going to talk about it, it’s too complicated, and also in a way too specific, I’m not trying to be autobiographical or confessional and I’m trying not to tell other people’s stories—something happened a long time after my father died, where I discovered something (it was something about finances) and I suddenly had to see him in a new light, twenty years after he had died, and it was a light in which he seemed much more vulnerable than I ever realised he was, and trapped, and I was at peace with his death for a long time and suddenly I wasn’t at peace at all—
I think what interests me or what strikes me more often is much more to do with lack of power and lack of agency, and I think in particular the sense of how impressionable people are; how fragile and shifting and not-quite-there personality and subjectivity are. I think that is what is very disturbing in the psychotherapeutic set-up potentially—although I think less so because the psychoanalytic methodology is going out, which is very much about the idea of the transference, where repressed energies and emotions and experiences come out in all their revived rawness. But I think you can put two people or more than two people together in a space which is supposed to be controlled by professional boundaries and constraints, and actually something can happen between people which no-one is in control of. And almost that’s the norm: that people lose themselves very easily in certain circumstances. There’s this pretence of power whereas in fact there are all sorts of subjugation of the people into a kind of a machine or a madness—yeah, a madness I think that happens. I think there are power games, I think they’re incredibly important, but I think there’s also a sense in which people are puppets, and highly suggestible, and able to be possessed and indoctrinated and gaslit and influenced (influenced, that’s a good word) much more than people commonly acknowledge.
One of the great writers on totalitarianism and the Nazis, she said about Germany that conscience disappeared. So few people resisted and stood up in Nazi Germany. It’s a great mystery, a great difficulty, a great secret if you like, in recent history and among people, that there’s this lack of personality and power.
—Also did you notice the title?
—I did.
—It hasn’t got a title. You didn’t see the page with the title on it?
—Is it “memory-essay”?
—It’s “memory-essay #2”.
—Very nice. I did yes.
—I quite liked that about the monologue because it doesn’t actually make all that much sense. It’s not actually really clear what it’s about.
—Well it is a memory-essay.
—Well yeah, but is it about the depth of reality or is it about what people remember or is it about cancer? I quite liked that. It’s the opposite of what you would do in writing. If I was writing I’d have to go back and work out what is it exactly I’m trying to say. Actually that might be quite interesting. I should have been recording the audio actually.
…my father, and he’s looking up to the camera and his face is just very, very gentle and friendly. Partly I think his wife must have drawn attention to herself and so he looks up and he sees her and he’s happy to see her and the camera, but it also seemed to me that this was his true face.
In doing these videos I’m editing myself and my own face, and I don’t see anything like that true face that I see in that picture of my father. I’m not this gentle, friendly—I don’t have that face, but I think he did have that face and I think that photo captured him.
What I’m trying to say is that in this experience of ageing—I think that when people die, often they’re forgotten about or they’re fixed in a certain kind of perhaps sentimental or convenient image. But I think also you can look back and the image changes, and with a different vantage point and perhaps more information, it suddenly becomes possible to see someone who you knew so closely but in this parent–child relationship, which of course after death no longer exists in the same way, and then as the years pass, and suddenly the dead parent becomes closer to you in age. And suddenly it becomes possible to have this idea of this true and vulnerable and good and perhaps helpless, perhaps unfairly treated, manipulated, deceived—because it’s easy to deceive someone who is good-natured like that.
It’s some kind of process of self-examination, or coming to terms with, or thinking through something. There’s some quite deep process going on. If I thought it was a kind of self-therapy, I would stop doing it I think. I don’t want to be doing that. And I don’t think it’s exactly creative either.
I’m definitely aware that these encounters with you and with the camera are having an impact on me, they’re doing something to me.
Do I need an audience or an interlocutor? Obviously you’re here and I’m speaking to you and I don’t think I could set up a camera and just do it sitting on my own, like a video diary or something like this. Your presence here is part of what enables me to speak but I also have this sense that all my life maybe—for a long, long time—I was trying to be able to speak in certain ways and wanting some kind of recognition or affirmation.
Making a certain kind of commitment to this somewhat isolated, self-referential thinking-something-through-but-recording-it, but without any claim or demand or ambition for it to be received, comes at a cost. It might not be a cost that you’ve chosen to pay, but the cost is a certain distancing from other people. And so you go with it. You say: “Ok, I can’t not see it so I’ll accept seeing it on my own, and saying what I see without the fuss and commotion of these kinds of statements that come from other people and from the culture at large, that any seeing and saying is subjective and coloured by mood.” As soon as things start needing to be negotiable and seeking the affirmation and validation of some reality norm, then it becomes a battle and a minefield and an argument. And so in more or less literal ways there’s some decision to speak for oneself, on one’s own, on my own.
I was reading Dante in translation. It’s a sonnet of his, or a poem of his. It has the line “love came to me in pilgrim’s rags” [CREDIT]. So obviously it comes out of a tradition of love poetry where the discourse was a lot about the anguish of love, the yearning for the loved object and the pain of love. I suppose it can be difficult to remember that emphasis on a certain spiritual suffering in the name of love was a standard idea. But I think what was also a familiar idea was the idea of the pilgrim—the person travelling in poverty and hardship in order to reach a holy place.