Twenty-eight minutes had passed. I realised this with some surprise — my subjective sense of time had fallen away. The screen: still no change, no development. Only the serene and gaping anus, and the soothing lull of ambient sound, like closing one’s eyes in an airport. I was awed, and somehow fearful. Scanning myself for the cause of my unease, I realised I was apprehensive that something sudden and monstrous would happen to the anus. I thought of Andy Warhol’s film Empire, in which we see nothing but the Empire State Building, from a static viewpoint, in real-time over the course of many, many hours: there is a celebrated moment in that film when, suddenly, after an immense period of monotony, all the lights in the building are turned on at once — a sublime and whimsical moment, indeed a moment of madness, and the severe freedom of madness. What if some surprise lay ahead in this bizarre, unearthly, and, it had to be said, beautiful video that I was watching? Perhaps the film-maker — the man behind the camera — was a sadist, luring me into a trance of vulnerability before unleashing a sight so horrific, I would be traumatised for ever, left pallid and mumbling, fearful of all sex, all anuses.
I commanded myself to become calm. I would watch the video to the end, come what may. Having resolved thus, I began to relax. And nothing happened — there was no Empire moment. Just an anus on screen, in real-time, close-up. Once more I began to recognise the strange beauty of the film, though I could not re-attain the state of transcendent resonance I had experienced before my anxieties took hold.
After forty-three minutes, the video ended, as abruptly and inexplicably as it had begun. I shut down my laptop and went to bed, no longer in thrall to fevers of drug-inflamed lust. I have since tried to find the video again, but even the degrading website where I saw it eludes me. I suspect it has been deleted; or rather, that it is still there, but invisible now, floating in the cybernetic mists, a kind of ghost-ship.
On Nietzsche
Some time ago, as my twenties drew to a close, I became filled with an overwhelming desire to write a book about Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work had fascinated me since I’d first read him at age nineteen, exhilarated by the grandeur, strangeness and brilliance of his thought. I can see now that the desire to write a book about Nietzsche disguised a deeper, more personal need: to confront and drive out the sense of total futility that had pervaded my life and thoughts for more than a decade, and had driven me to a despair so chronic and total it was no longer even perceptible. By way of a protracted and intensive engagement with the work of Nietzsche I hoped to determine, once and for all, whether there was hope of ever forging a deeper, more sustaining sense of purpose in a world which, it seemed to me, had lost its vital illusions, its grand hopes and its narrative direction.
Most people who decide to write a book about Nietzsche or any philosopher will probably do so through the university system. And this is what my remaining academic acquaintances urged me to do, one former professor back in Dublin even offering to oversee my doctoral thesis. However, my desire to write about Nietzsche arose alongside another, equally strong desire: to travel, to move, to be elsewhere. I decided I would leave London at the soonest possible moment, in the company of my girlfriend Natasha; I would cram my backpack with books by and about Nietzsche, and work while on the move. Eventually I would stop in some attractive city or town — possibly Turin, where Nietzsche spent his last productive years before collapsing into insanity — and begin refining the notes I’d have made into the first draft of a book.
It was not, however, possible for Natasha and me to leave London immediately. It would take us, Natasha calculated, another four months to save enough money to travel for a year or so, leaving behind the Hampstead flat in which we had both come to feel so trapped. Four months was plenty of time, she said, for me to ‘lay the foundations’ of my book about Nietzsche.
In the meantime, I turned thirty. This was an interesting event. At thirty, for the first time in my life, I began to dwell compulsively on the reality of my own death. This came as a surprise, not to say a shock. I had believed throughout my teens and twenties that I was the kind of person who thought of death a great deal; in fact I had prided myself on it. But I hadn’t really been thinking of death, I saw now; I’d merely been hypothesising, or play-acting. The surprise in genuinely confronting my own mortality was that it had less to do with the future — the coffin I’m bound for — than with the past. Specifically, death was knowing that my twenties — those horny, traumatic years — were gone for ever.
As a consequence of turning thirty and feeling the shadow of my own death fall on me for the first time, I looked in the mirror and said firmly that there was no more time to waste, death had my scent now and I needed to be absolutely ruthless and focused on what I wanted to achieve, which was to write a book about Nietzsche. This newfound sense of urgency at first seemed like a valuable asset and a consolation for the loss of my youth. Before long, however, I realised that it had the effect of inhibiting me from doing what I wanted, from doing anything at all. The sense of urgency was so strong it became indistinguishable from the most crippling anxiety. I was unable to get down to anything other than worry about the hurtling of time and the blooming fortunes of my peers, most of whom had not squandered their twenties in a fog of drink, drugs, obsessive reading and pointless travel, as I had.
Seized by anxiety, I lost the ability to concentrate, or what little I’d had of it to begin with. I was like an empty can, blown all over the place. Though I had spent my life doing little apart from reading — doing little so that I could read — it struck me as a wild presumption and madness to begin writing a book on Nietzsche without having read in their entirety certain other nineteenth-century authors who, although having no direct bearing on Nietzsche, nonetheless constituted the deep background for any serious intellectual endeavour involving a subject from that era. I thought about all the significant nineteenth-century books I still hadn’t read — books which were invariably long and demanding — and the sheer scale of the task inhibited me from reading even one of them. Weeks passed and I read nothing. I just watched YouTube videos or loitered on Twitter, where I saw writers five years younger than me announce the publication of their new books. A few times, unable to bear the internet any longer, I shut down my laptop, took a breath, and actually launched myself into some or other dusty volume. ‘This is it,’ I would tell myself. ‘The anxiety is clearing. A new phase commences, the crisis has passed.’ By the time I’d reached page five, though, I’d have the niggling sense that I was reading the wrong nineteenth-century author, wasting my time on a dispens-able book during a period of great urgency. I shouldn’t be reading Fichte (say) but von Hartmann, not Weber but Spencer. By page ten or fifteen, this niggling sense would rise to an intolerable howling in my skull. Fighting off panic, I would put away Fichte and switch to von Hartmann — only to quickly feel that I should really be reading Stendhal, or Comte, or whoever. By the end of the day I’d be back on Twitter, all literature abandoned, or else I’d call Raoul, my alcoholic friend, to come out and get hammered with me. (I thought of Raoul as my alcoholic friend as a way of denying my own undeniable alcoholism. What’s worse, this is not a revelation that came later on: I knew I was doing it even then, and persisted in doing it.) My mounting anxiety brought with it a heightened need to drink, because only when I was drinking was I able to forget the hurtling weeks, the pile-up of years, and the fact that I wasn’t achieving anything at all. And the less I achieved, the more I drank, and the more I drank the less I was able to achieve, until my life consisted of waking up late, going on Twitter, opening a bottle of wine, and finally calling Raoul, my alcoholic friend — who eventually stopped taking my calls.