xenogothic

Inhumanities

I return to Goldsmiths to take a look around. It continues to function as a kind of “save point”, visited every few years to remind myself of who I once was.

I have changed, but not a lot changes here. The k-punk mural is still there, ten years on. There is still a strike happening with a picket line out front, ten years on. There are still lots of the same names and faces, ten years on. I think I’ve been about four different people… But not really. There is a throughline; a core. The spine of a life grows, gets stronger, more muscular, more principled, scaffolded by lessons learned and truths extracted.

Sitting outside a café on campus, I return to Philosophy for Militants. Badiou has a peculiar turn of phrase borrowed from Lyotard, describing our capacity for creativity as “that element of inhumanity within the human element itself.” This inhumanity “is not reducible to animality”; it is rather a term for our more Promethean qualities: “that part of human ‘nature’ which does not yet exist but must become.”

As I walk down the Visual Cultures corridor at Goldsmiths, traipsing past Mark and Kodwo’s old office, which feels so bare without the bookshelf housing so many of Mark’s minor literatures, I feel taller than I did when here before. My back stands straighter, more rigid, less hunched over, like I am supplemented by invisible prostheses or inhabit a new exoskeleton, built around and protecting that flawed version of self that once wandered down this corridor under depression clouds a few times a week.

I think about the last time I saw Mark, evidently under a similar cloud, in December 2016. He was talking to an administrator in the department. I smiled at him, but he looked back at me hollow. I didn’t see him again.

Mark once said he wanted to found a Department for the Inhumanities inside the university. Only such a place would convince me to return to academia. It would be a wonderful thing to build and become, but it feels like an unlikely project in the neoliberal university.

The World Ends In Error

In late 2016, Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community moved me beyond myself. “There is here a desperate attempt to sovereignly deny sovereignty.”

His chapter on ‘The Community of Lovers’ begins with a quotation from Jean-Luc Nancy that threads the needle of 2026: “The sole law of abandonment, like the law of love, is to be without return and without recourse.” A person does not have to die for us to grieve them.

Blanchot quotes Marguerite Duras, who asks how love can happen:

Perhaps through a lapse in the logic of the universe […] Through a mistake, for instance […] Never through an act of will.

Love, Blanchot continues, is in this way an “overbidding, an outrage of life that cannot be contained within life which thus, interrupting the pretension of always persevering in being, opens to the strangeness of an interminable dying or of an endless ‘error’.”

Love found is world-ending. Love lost is world-ending.

Isn’t it Lacan who said (maybe an inaccurate quotation): to desire means to give what one does not have to someone who does not want it? Which does not mean that love can be lived only according to a mode of expectation or nostalgia, terms too reducible to a psychological register, while the relationship that is at stake here is not mundane, given that it presupposes the disappearance, even the collapse, of the world. Let us remember Isolde’s words: “We have lost the world, and the world, us.”

I walk the ruins interminably, looking for salvage.

Survival in Part

My insufferable social-media algorithm shows me nothing but content about break-ups and attachment styles. Meta is always listening. “Instagram is teaching you to leave the people who love you.” “How to self-regulate as an anxious partner.” “What really happens during an avoidant shutdown.” Some of this disastrous content actually gives me pause – that’s how they get you.

A woman addresses her camera to say that each of life’s loves should exceed a limit – your own limit – instilling new capacities to love in you, which make your heart grow. It is one of the few videos to speak some sort of sense to me. Stoicism becomes easier as I get older.

Another video is almost self-aware, undercutting all the others, discussing how social media encourages us to overanalyse our relationships, encasing them in a business ontology of ‘capacities’, as if ‘good’ love were only a case of time management and workload optimization, best plotted on spreadsheets.

I keep scrolling until I see a video of Toni Morrison, who says:

Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part, but the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about, you know, being as fearless as one can and behaving as beautifully as one can under impossible circumstances. It’s that that makes it elegant […] We are already born, we are going to die, so you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.

I did the best I could.

What is love?

An interest in ethics perhaps arises from a desire to refound oneself, continuously, as a new person or subject in response to events.

Badiou writes that an engagement with our inhumanity “is a matter of investigating which law is capable of structuring a subject devoid of all identity and suspended to an event whose only ‘proof’ lies precisely in its having been declared by a subject.” From here, “the general logic of love, as it is seized in the crack (faille) between (universal) truths and (sexuated) forms of knowledge shall […] be put to the test of singular fictions.”

A philosopher’s definition of love, undoubtedly. We may be none the wiser as to what love ‘is’, what it ‘means’ or entails. What isn’t love, then? For Badiou, love is not “fusional”; it is not Two becoming One. It is not “oblative”; “love is not even an experience of the other, but an experience of the world, or of the situation under the postevental condition that there are Two.” Love also:

does not compensate for anything. Love supplements […] It is a production of truth […] The truth that the Two, not only the One, proceeds in the situation.

Two out of balance is a sorry state of affairs. Something goes wrong. I am left trying to understand what that was. I am left looking for the source of the crack-up, interrogating whatever behaviours may have made the world of Two ultimately uninhabitable. Could anything have been done differently? It is all facile bargaining. I can think of no true regret. There is no solution nor perfect praxis; only a reaching for the good.

Still Walking

The walks continue. I still average ten miles a day. It does not go unnoticed. Friends begin quoting philosophies of walking at me. There is a common theme. Nietzsche, for instance, once said: “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” Kierkegaard too wrote to his sister in a letter:

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.

I stop writing a lot of my walking thoughts down. That only happens when I return home, when my legs ache too much to continue, but a vicarious walk still entices me to engage in some onward travel.

To write is to retrace my steps and walk at the kitchen table.

The Unlife of Writing

“To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience”, Deleuze writes. “Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any liveable or lived experience.”

For a long time, I have viewed writing as a kind of workout. After the heady Ccru-adjacent days of Goldsmiths rewiring, when writing oneself into a delirium was romanticised, the tendency had to be reversed if the writing was to continue. The breakdown preceded the breakthrough. Something had to be broken down before a new self could be rebuilt, stronger, more versatile, more steadfast.

“All writing involves an athleticism,” Deleuze continues, “but far from reconciling literature with sports or turning writing into an Olympic event, this athleticism is exercised in flight and in the breakdown of the organic body.” Writing at 3am in drunken stupors and clouds of cigarette smoke, organic breakdown was taken all too literally as an assault on the lungs and the liver. Writing will never suffice as a replacement for breathing or that waste-filtering, bile-producing, protein-making, nutrient-storing gland. Writing is not an organic excretion reducible to a product of anatomy. For all Deleuze’s woolly vitalism, the ‘writing life’ is an unlife of inhuman production. “Syntax is the set of necessary detours that are created in each case to reveal the life in things.”

If writing is a product of the inorganic, inhuman body, then it is also not a product of the mind:

We do not write with our neuroses. Neuroses and psychoses are not passages of life, but states into which we fall when the process is interrupted, blocked, or plugged up. Illness is not a process but a stopping of the process […] Moreover, the writer as such is not a patient but rather a physician, the physician of himself and of the world. The world is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man.

All writing tends to come from an imperative to heal. The inhuman function of writing tends towards building bridges over the canyons of the crack-up. The writing flows most freely as a release of pressure within states of shellshock:

Literature then appears as an enterprise of health: not that the writer would necessarily be in good both […] but he possesses an irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him, while nonetheless giving him the becomings that a dominant and substantial health would render impossible. The writer returns from what he has seen and heard with bloodshot eyes and pierced eardrums.

New Tenderness

In 2022, on arrival in Newcastle, whilst putting the final touches on Narcissus in Bloom, it was not a new militancy I was striving for but a ‘new tenderness’. New softness was a necessary prelude to new strength.

Today, the state fights those opposed to it with new powers of overextension and exception. So much energy is spent on strengthening our resistance to these forces. It is a resistenace easier affirmed and uttered than achieved in practice. In flexing its muscle, the state seeks to disimpassion, to disempower, to disintegrate. The wearing-thin of relationships is its sustenance. The state engorges itself on whatever opposes it. It seeks to break movements. Within those movements are networks of relation, vulnerable to paranoia, over-analysis, interrogation, burnout, and dispersal.

As I write with eyes bloodshot, fractured and displaced, withering but walking, building strength through disappearance into the city, striving to become a person (impersonally) among a people, I feel unmoved from a steadfastness and openheartedness that led to now. The state can suck a fat one.

The grief is nonetheless overwhelming. Something is unplugged from a relational matrix and leaves a hole. I walk again and again through London’s mazes and milieus along a series of pathways and urban hiking trails where the land is least likely to shift and crumble underfoot. I walk around the hole not as some inconvenience, like a pothole, but as a canyon or a crater. Its grandeur is harrowing; the view from the edge is still beautiful.

Missed Visit

I was due to visit Amu in prison on Sunday but found myself too worn out to wake up in time. My body aches as my mind gets stronger.

Amu calls me right after the visit should have concluded. (It went ahead with two others.) They ask what happened. I say that I don’t know. I am rundown and exhausted. I still end up going out for another walk. I tell them I’m okay. Rest is important, even if I have found it difficult to take. To stop walking is to feel ill.

“Have you been to Hampstead Heath yet?” they ask.

Not yet, I say, or at least not since I arrived. (I relay memories of the heath from another life.)

“You should go and take in the view. Vistas help.”

It does. I feel like the view is all I am taking in. A wanderer over a sea.

Turner

I walk the full length of Regent’s Canal before taking a bus down to the north bank of the Thames. Inside Tate Britain, there is an exhibition of Turners and Constables. In one room, a lone Rothko sits alongside Turner’s seascapes.

Each of the paintings is subtractive. They capture pure light shrouding rudimentary forms. Seas, fogs, mists. Layers of colour. They provide a sense of place without identity, like looking out from a familiar coastline. In the later, more abstract works, Turner has eschewed all nationalism. There are no mythological vistas of European idylls and Biblical landscapes here. All melts into air. All affect dissolves without overdetermination.

Island Thoughts At Sea

Even as it teeters on the edge of (or fully descends into) cliché, I’ve always enjoyed the way in which Christopher Nolan’s Inception dramatizes the unconscious.

Dreams within dreams take place in cities within cities or apartment blocks or grand palaces, where geometries are malleable and whole urbanities can be folded over on themselves. At the limit of it all, gnawing at the crumbling edges of oneiric architectures, lies the sea. To wash ashore on its terminal beach is to be lost inside one’s own mind. I have always wondered what might happen if someone dreamt themselves a boat and set out across it.

The great outdoors folds over on itself and reflects stormy seas within. “The inside as an operation of the outside”, Deleuze writes, “as if the ship were a folding of the sea.” He quotes Foucault on “the subject of the Renaissance madman who is put to sea in his boat”:

He is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely […] a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage.

For Gilles Grelet, there “are those who go to sea to leave the world behind, to purge themselves of it, and those who annex the sea to the world, who make it as worldly as they can.” To be at sea is to be in constant revolt against worldly forces. “Inscribe the consistency of rebellion in the very void itself,” Grelet insists, “in the very radical inconsistency to which the human holds, lose yourself in it – for otherwise the world will have won by serving as a support for that which refuses it.”

There is an essential inhumanity to coastal life, or life on the water. Perhaps this is why I am enjoying my walks down London canals so much.

My ex’s dad used to have a boat. He was a mathematician at the University of Manchester working on inverse problems. I helped him sail it from Fort William to Inverness, before he embarked on a voyage across the North Sea to land in Copenhagen. There, he spent six months on residency at a Danish university. I remember how different living felt on that boat. Life had a unique texture, smell, and calm. I miss the early mornings, cabin-cooked breakfasts, the awkward shits in the woods, the smell of engine oil, the locks and lochs, the island hopping, the grime of the work and the glamour of the sea, the dolphins that helped guide us between Beauly Firth and Moray Firth.

“That’s all there is: awaiting the joy that attacks the world”, Grelet writes. We must ‘hold fast’ to it: “regularising gravity, to provoke the grace that will volatilise it.” There may be no better figure of this graceful volatility than the dance of a solitary sailor, but the confidence that is built when weaving through the crowds of central London starts to come close.

Is this therefore a return to the wilderness that does not even transgress prohibitions, given that it ignores them, or to the ‘anogistic’ (Hölderlin) which unsettles any social relationship, just or unjust, and, contumacious to any third party, cannot be satisfied with a society of two where reciprocity of the ‘I-you’ would reign, but prefers to invoke the original, precreational chaos, the night without end, the outside, the fundamental unhinging? (For the Greeks, according to Phaedrus, Love is nearly as ancient as Chaos.)

– Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community

You better start a-walking, babe
Love takes miles

– Cameron Winter

Excerpt from a Prison Letter,
Dated Wednesday 12^th November 2025

On my way into town yesterday to buy stamps and meet Jenny for coffee, the bright red poppies of a wreath laid for Remembrance Sunday caught my eye. They were lying flat beneath the giant statue next to Haymarket station, by the university, which we’ve walked passed many times after getting off the Metro or at the bus station next door, first dipping into the Asian supermarket down the road for Thai tea, then going back the way we came towards home. I had never read the inscription on the statue’s base before. It reads: “Steadfast in life, valiant in death.”

[…] I thought, “Steadfast in life, yes, but valiant in life also.” […] Still, this weird military context… […] The relationship between ‘mile’, as a measure of distance, and ‘military’ is no coincidence. […] Badiou talks about this at some point […] ‘Military’ is less about following orders than it is about going the distance, no matter the destination, and that is something true of any more errant wanderer as well.

Militant Marching

It is Bruno Bosteels who situates Badiou’s ‘figure of the soldier’ within the etymology of ‘militancy’, which “links the old Latin miles to mill(ia)-ites or millia passum euntes – that is, ‘mile-goers’.” A militant, he adds, “simply put, is somebody who not only talks the talk but also walks the walk, or who goes the full mile.”

It is a declaration I have borrowed for multiple purposes. When last reflecting on this sentiment a year ago, love and politics were irrevocably entwined. Or perhaps they were only in parallel. For the time being, they remain so and I can’t imagine the present any differently. Stakes were raised, principles affirmed, sacrifices made. I could think of no other response than to match one form of militancy with another.

I leaned into a supportive role within a community of activists, and also within a relationship, and therein found a new and profound sense of purpose. To witness someone else make a sacrifice for something so much bigger than our own little lives changed everything. It meant I had to be willing to sacrifice anything to assist them through the consequences. I quit my job and must have travelled thousands of miles, written a million words, just to be there. I didn’t think much about it at the time. My focus was on ensuring someone else could survive. It felt necessary, automatic, natural. It felt like a ‘true’ response. Yes, I uncovered a new truth.

My position in relation to everything feels different now. But there is no going backwards; only new ways forward. There will be new truths…

Truth-Procedures

Peter Hallward writes on Badiou’s “four general fields of truth” – politics, science, art, and love:

True politics is a matter of collective mobilization guided by a general will … Within the limits of the private sphere, genuine love begins in the wake of an unpredictable encounter that escapes the conventional representation of sexual roles, continues as a fidelity to the consequences of that encounter, and is sustained through an exposure to what Lacan famously described as the impossibility of sexual relationship. True art and true science proceed in somewhat the same way, through a searching experimental commitment to a line of enquiry opened up by a new discovery or break with tradition.

For Badiou, love and politics are two conditions under which events are produced. To affirm what happens in either domain is to intensify our fidelity to their implications (if we so choose – and we may well choose not to).

In this sense, love and politics, as conditions of new thought and action, must develop procedures towards ‘truths’ that exceed our (previously ‘consistent’) in-situational point of view. An event must not arrest us; it must trigger new forms of movement, irrespective of whether we are assured that the direction of travel is ultimately ‘right’ for us. We must have faith. Hallward continues:

The best examples of affirmations whose truth exceeds the resources of proof or justification are precisely ones that begin with an initially obscure but irreversible break with the established routine governing a situation – the decisions required to sustain, for instance, a political or artistic revolution, or an unexpected declaration of love. The people who adhere to the consequences of such affirmations will not easily convince sceptical onlookers of their validity, unless they are able to develop means of conviction capable of changing the prevailing logic of the situation.

Thus, what “Badiou calls a truth is the process that, sparked by a break with routine, persists in an affirmation whose progressive imposition transforms the very way things appear in the situation.”

I Love You, Palestine

In my own life, a recent entanglement of love and politics gave way to such a process that was faithful to the consequences of actions and declarations alike. ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘I love you’ named imperatives to do whatever I was capable of – and indeed, to go much further than what I might have previously deemed myself capable of before the actions and declarations in question were uttered, affirmed, and undertaken.

The consequences have nonetheless been hard to weather, but they have been weathered and they are weathered still. Freedoms are curtailed, loves are lost, but only on a limited scale. In terms of world-historical currents that are unfolding, we enter and remain inside a terrifying and exciting new situation where anything can happen. Terror abounds (although not from where the state misidentifies it).

Still, I am left wondering how Badiou might frame not only the truth of ‘love’, as a condition of the new, but of heartbreak, which may only destroy the old…

New Militancy

My recent arrival in London constitutes an unexpected fresh start. I had wanted things to go differently. Feeling thrown from a path marched down militantly, I soon pick myself up out of my foetal position and tap back into a resolve that had carried me forward over the past thirteen months. There is no longer a preconceived (or at least hoped-for) destination in mind. Nevertheless, in trying to reacquire a sense of loving, political militancy, I affirm my movement more literally.

I tell Amu on the phone from prison that I am walking ten miles a day. “What’s on your feet?!” they ask. I buy myself new and more suitable shoes that evening and lean into the habit.

Living in Newcastle, such a habit was unthinkable. Everything I might need, locally at least, was within a one-mile radius of my flat. I never travelled far on foot. Now, I have found myself towed down Regent’s Canal or buffeted by semio-blitz towards Bloomsbury. I drift on long dérives towards the Thames or an art gallery or through the bustling streets of central London where I immerse myself in a new anonymity, a new impersonality.

Most often, I walk alone. Sometimes I walk with a friend. One foot in front of another, one word after another, I map out my new world. I talk incessantly through my feelings. I stop on park benches to write things down. I trace lines of flight across maps and connect dots between old selves and new. Although it feels like passively doing the surveillance-state’s work for it, I enjoy the forms drawn across my ‘timeline’ on Google Maps especially.

I first began taking note of this feature on my prison visits to Derby last winter, when I’d return home flattened and exhausted, trying to make sense of the miles travelled in a single day. ‘Love Takes Miles’ was an earworm and constant refrain then. I walk the city now to fall back in love with self.

I feel like I am actively embarking on a salvage mission, wanting to keep loving how I have learnt to love over the last two years, albeit now redirected, since love has been spurned away. For the time being, I mostly direct love inwards. I direct it outwards towards my friends as well, at every opportunity. I make new friends; I maintain or rebuild relationships with old ones. I try to meet up with someone new every day.

Every time I reconnect with an old friend, my heart is mentioned. Worn on my sleeve for the last two years, during an ordeal and before it, they acknowledge the heart they have seen emblazoned bright on everything. I embrace other people’s desires to be closer to it. The last six wilderness years in the northeast are paid no mind. I am afforded the opportunity to pick up my old London life where I left it. I am ready for it. My heart is bigger now than it ever has been. It beats more calmly as I walk this way and that. I start to take photographs again. I send an old camera off for refurbishment. I want to immerse myself in the city again. I enter into a new milieu.

Cognitive Mapping

“The map expresses the identity of the journey and what one journeys through.” I walk in large, misshapen circles. Archaeology faces off against a new cartography. I revisit old haunts. I think about people known, places lived, pubs drunk in, clubs danced in, houses partied at, beds slept or not slept in, exhibitions seen, parks picnicked in, buses cried on, offices worked in. There are no traces of these moments, even if so many of the places remain unchanged. Who is passing through them now? Propelled by what forces? Which commitments? Carrying what wounds? Innumerable scars were drawn here and there. They are healed now. New wounds weep as I marched across the city, slicking the ground beneath my feet.

I wonder about another’s trajectories. Have they taken up new routes through life’s familiar places? Is the routine the same as the one I knew? How was your day? I did not know before now what I would come to miss. It was openly pondered together for a moment. I was left feeling like I had more to miss than they did.

I can say now that what I miss is the freedom to care, to take an interest. Show me your favourite places. Fuck me there. I am haunted by every public place that now carries the memory of our most private intimacies. I can’t understand how a friendship aimed for does not register as the most profound of losses. My friends do not know me like they do. Few lovers have either. My first true love – unconventional, unexpected, endlessly surprising. It feels irreplaceable, and it is. If love ever returns, it will be so utterly different. This love was singular. It will be beautiful again, passionate again, adventurous, comfortable, homely. I would not accept anything less than the heights of what once was. A standard of love was raised and then climbed down from. I remain on my perch, wondering who might reach me now. Certainly no one for a long time.

This is what I walk through. At other times, I walk blankly, empty, music in my ears and nothing else on my mind. There is a hole.

I try to walk back into an activist community, but this too is now haunted by the hole. The political event endures and its implications must still be followed through. I walk as if to steady myself and find my way back into the fray. My thoughts slow down and become less frantic. In my mind, I walk around the periphery of a problem that I do not and cannot understand. I come to accept its presence, its inexpressibility, as well as a more ultimate truth, which is that it does not belong to me. It affects me, it has affected me, but it is not mine.

So I walk. I walk away from the hole. It follows. I get ahead. It trails. I cover new ground. It overshadows. I speed up. It digs down. I walk a multitude of paths, each circling a hole I cannot fill nor wish to spend too much time peering into. I try to make peace with its constant emanations. I keep writing things down. I love for miles and miles and miles. I walk. It is the only activity that makes me feel good at present.

Peripatetic

On 1^st October, I meet Paula at Caledonian Park. She has just arrived in the city as well, having flown in from Madrid, and finds me reading Badiou’s Philosophy for Militants under the shadow of the Caledonian clock tower. We meander this way and that, covering three or four miles, before arriving at St. Paul’s Cathedral by twilight.

We occasionally puzzle through our respective mother tongues, swapping idioms and untranslatables between English and Spanish. We talk across each other before identifying one word in particular we have been looking for – ‘peripatetic’ – as we circumnavigate Farringdon Station.

Militant Writing

Walking and writing and thinking and talking. Each process informs and mirrors the others. All are reparative. Writing and walking, in particular, are healing. Daniel W. Smith, in his introduction to Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical, writes in terms that apply equally well to both:

“The aim of writing,” he [Deleuze] says, “is to carry life to the state of a non-personal power.” The writer, like each of us, begins with the multiplicities that have invented him or her as a formed subject, in an actualized world, with an organic body, in a given political order, having learned a certain language. But at its highest point, writing, as an activity, follows the abstract movement of a line of flight that extracts or produces differential elements from these multiplicities of lived experience and makes them function as variables on an immanent “place of composition.” “This is what it’s like on the plane of immanence: multiplicities fill it, singularities connect with one another, processes or becomings unfold, intensities rise and fall.” The task of the writer is to establish nonpreexistent relations between these variables in order to make them function together in a singular and nonhomogenous whole, and thus to participate in the construction of “new possibilities of life”: the invention of new compositions in language (style and syntax), the formation of new blocks of sensation (intensities and becomings), the constitution of a people (speech acts and fabulation), the creation of a world (singularities and events). The negative terms we have used to describe the above rubrics (destruction, dissolution, disintegration, and so on) are therefore only partial characterizations, since they are merely the necessary propaedeutic to this productive activity of creation and invention. “To be present at the dawn of the world…”

Renewed Apprenticeship

Writing is a most peculiar apprenticeship, as is an engagement with any artform in general. Arriving back in London, I can’t help but reflect on life’s looping. I have arrived back in London impoverished and frantic, pained by everything left behind and all that is to come, just like last time.

Ten years ago, almost to the day, I arrived in this city bedraggled and traumatized, running away from everything. I came here to be a writer. I had been a photographer before. The motor behind each impulse is the same: “that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control” – as it was for Gillian Rose. But I was not a disciplined photographer. I took pictures like a compulsive note-taker, but lacked the wherewithal to transform these notes into anything that might resemble a statement or a work.

Mark Fisher’s death crystallised something in me. I hardly knew him, having only met a few months before, but I loved him. I had uprooted my life to be near him, learn from him – although, admittedly, whatever roots I had did not run deep. I arrived, I got to work, I became distracted by everything this city had to offer, and when Mark died, I felt the entire reason for arriving in London had suddenly passed me by. The apprenticeship had been a non-starter.

Writing is “a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and agony of loving”, Rose adds. But it was all I had left (or so I thought). To write about Mark’s work and become known for doing so was a product of miracle and discipline all the same. It was not the aim. It happened through a sense of conviction and commitment to a man who was no longer around to be told just how much he had meant to me, as a student and a reader.

I was already preoccupied by ethics before Mark’s death; I took a module in ‘Curating & Ethics’ within the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths. I wrote about transgressive performance art – that of Throbbing Gristle, COUM Transmissions, and their associates – and wondered about the role that ethics and conviction still had to play in what is otherwise anethical.

Bataille was central then. His wartime diaries were similarly an ethical investigation into an anethical world. But I didn’t really know what ethics was – not until I was faced with my first real commitment to another, who had died. On reflection, it seems clear that this ethics was Badiouan without knowing it. With Mark’s death, which served less as “a moment of inspiration” than did the collective response to it, I have done my best to follow the imperatives laid out messily in that moment by our thrown-together, grieving community ever since.

Writing became my life. I sacrificed love for it. I became too self-involved. It wasn’t until writing a second book about the death of a self that I felt ready to live and love again. But now the decade comes full circle. I am left to established anew what life I want to lead and what love I want to be led by.

What aches is the knowledge that commitment is not always, in and of itself, sufficient to withstand contingency. Indeed, each contingency may well produce a new commitment, and as life unfolds, a series of knots are added to its string. These knots can suffocate, become rigid as circumstances change and subjectivities struggle to keep up. I wish we had more patience for each other as we undertook the work necessary. There are truths to be unearthed in this work, often in surprising places. But truths in one domain can curdle with those in another.

A Love Story

Over summer in 2025, we watched Sean McAllister’s 2015 documentary A Syrian Love Story. It was haunting.

A man waits for his wife, a political writer and activist, to be released from prison for opposing the Assad regime. He bides his time and looks after their children. The revolution frees her and we watch as their relationship crumbles in the aftermath.

Gaining asylum in France, the children find their own lives, but the parents are miserable so far from home. Eventually, she returns to Syria to rebuild the nation; he remains in France to maintain their children’s new lives.

Love and politics – or rather, the public and the private – face off against each other. Both are ruptured by the same event. Neither reconciliation – of state or marriage – is wholly successful or unsuccessful. Truths drift.

Did it really have to end that way?

Lessons Learned

I have thought a lot about how much I ran from my last relationship. It endured for a decade through highs and lows. We went through a lot together. I went through a lot on my own.

There was always something else to chase. I know my ex suspected infidelity, but my self-sabotage was never so simple as a wandering eye. There are so many ways to be unfaithful than pursuing another person. I was more driven to distraction by an inner life in turmoil, fizzing with trauma, uncontainable, leaking over everything.

Sometimes there were people who’d try and scoop some of me up for themselves and I’d almost let them until every attempt at being held or lusted over felt like being hunted, trapped, preyed upon in a vulnerability I was not willing to occupy with anyone else.

When she left me, it wrecked me. I came to regret my absentmindedness. I felt like someone utterly without conviction. I made sure I would never do that to someone ever again, nor to myself. My clichéd fear of commitment in relationships was less a misplaced fear of containment than it was an indicator of my own doubt in the value of living. I felt I could only live freely in living for myself. Nothing could have been further from the truth. When I truly took the opportunity to go through life alone, a rebirth took place where love of self was hard won. Love of another followed remarkably quickly afterwards.

Unfortunately, we can only learn such lessons for ourselves; not for others. Timing is everything. Sometimes our timing is off. Sometimes it really is a kindness to let go and have patience. We must maintain a commitment to our contingencies.

Excerpt from a Prison Letter,
Dated Monday 20^th October 2025

I am a quivering wreck, but for a very cute reason. I just got home from Ernest, three cappuccinos deep, already juddering with caffeine, having posted another soppy letter to you, and I came home to a blue tit flapping around in my bay window. Its little friend was lurking on the other side of the window, worried sick. I grabbed a towel and tried to grab it for maybe 30 mins, both of us terrified and getting exhausted. Total adrenaline overload. I was petrified of wrapping it too forcefully in the towel and hurting it. But my grip was too loose and it kept escaping. I finally did it and I had a little cry with relief […] it felt like this horribly stressful situation that mirrored what we’re going thru. I am inside and out. Waiting for you. Holding out a towel to grab you. And I did it. My knees shake but I did it. The bird is okay and so am I.

Excerpt from a Prison Letter,
Dated Thursday 30^th October 2025

Maybe the issue is that writing with an open heart is always double-edged. I affirm its openness for you, free to enter, its chambers all decorated with trinkets and comforts that make you feel at home there. But an open heart is still a vulnerable thing. I know this already from the time when we first met, wanting so desperately to hoover and tidy and make the chambers presentable to you, but maybe to the point of not revealing how a heart looks and beats on an average day. Then I remember what you said down the phone the other day, the surreality of your memories of reading blogposts, written just as openheartedly as my letters, and perhaps not expecting to find a home in that place that you’d admired from outside. But you opened yourself up to me too, and after paying each other a few visits, we knocked through a wall to conjoin our two bleeding domiciles. The vulnerability of two is a beautiful and tender thing.

I keep thinking a lot about the blue tit in my flat, and the frantic nerve-wracking action taken to scoop up this most delicate thing, finding the right position between a firm grip aiming for freedom and a delicate touch that did no harm. It was stressful, in the same way this situation is. I hope I am continuing to do right by you, my chirping creature.

Last night you said that you were newly struck by the poem I wrote about the end of my exile. I don’t want you to take that on your shoulders as a weighty responsibility. I do not feel like exile is somewhere I have now returned to. Maybe it is you that now feels exiled instead, and I want to approach you with the same generosity and care you demonstrated when you approached mine 18 months ago. There is no return to exile possible whilst we continue to live in a world where our hearts beat together. Home will make itself known again…

Lines of Flight

I long for a new relationship with birds. I think about leaving seed on the windowsills of our new place, perhaps befriending a crow or mothering a bedraggled London pigeon. I would not keep it in a cage. I would only curate an inviting perch and teach it to know it as a place of care, rarer than what the wider world has to offer.

The other day, legs crossed camply on a park bench eating pastries, a pigeon took my foot for a perch. It craned its neck inquisitively, like I have only seen dogs do. It flew away after a few moments to join to rest of its kin.

I like to see these non-migratory swoopers flock together in the parks, dazzling in the space between buildings and all else that seems immovable.

I am a bird now.

In 2010, Monique David-Ménard wrote a short survey of ‘anti-Oedipal’ critiques of psychoanalysis, all made in orbit of the year 1974. With reference to Michel Foucault, Wladimir Granoff, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jacques Lacan – all in dialogue and yet often talking past each other – she summarises their fractured debate by writing that:

we are dealing with philosophers of the event in all these cases, even if it means studying more closely how the unpredictability of the event detaches from its determinations. This is undoubtedly the problem that psychoanalysis shares with History.

The Oedipus complex is itself an event – for some, a universal event – that takes place within (or otherwise signifies the oblique beginning of) our social development. Indeed, it is the event of social initiation as such (or, what amounts to the same thing, an initiation into language).

A series of questions follows the establishment of this argument as a universal for each of the above philosophers in turn: How do we contend with the plethora of responses that may result from this event? Society pre-exists us, and so the event of Oedipus seems predetermined, but in what ways are we then determined by it? What sorts of subjectivity are produced by Oedipus? Are alternatives possible, which exceed the standardised conditions of Oedipus’s emergence? Is Oedipus really the most significant initiatory event for the subject? Do all subsequent events tend to mirror its unfolding? And so on and so on…

In despite of their differences, David-Ménard identifies the major themes of each philosopher’s work to be “contingency and chance” and “the deterritorialization of desire”. Where they differ, most obviously, is in where they place their emphasis when describing how ‘events’ in general are to be understood. Lacan, for instance – although he does not speak of ‘events’ as explicitly as others – describes encounters and ruptures that disrupt the symbolic order; he is interested in confrontations or collisions with the Real. Deleuze, on the other hand, refers to events as durational becomings – an event like ‘getting older’ or ‘becoming-older’, for example, which we might intuit in certain encounters (there is a new wrinkle on my face or a new grey hair on my head), but which must also be understood as part of processes that are always ongoing. Both might invite confrontations with our mortality, in the present example, but temporally speaking, these differing perspectives have major implications for how thought of the event unfolds.

In the mid-2000s, however, there was a shift in how these philosophies were understood as a whole. A reader’s emphasis was shifted from the primacy of the ‘event’ as such to an ‘ethics of the event’. Indeed, despite their differing perspectives on the contingency of events, each philosopher nonetheless shares a sense of commitment in how we are able to respond to ‘what happens’. This provided an opportunity to synthesise philosophies of contingency that had otherwise been viewed in disagreement with one another, in order to propose a newly pluralistic or universalist philosophy of commitment. (Important differences in approach emerge here too, of course.)

By way of an example, which I keep returning to at the moment, we can note Mark Fisher’s 2005 report on a lecture delivered by the philosopher Peter Hallward on this very topic, in which Hallward presents a novel reading of Deleuze-Guattari’s work in particular, alongside that of the notably Lacanian Alain Badiou. It is an intriguing report to read from Fisher, as it contains an expression of an ethico-political position that runs contrary to the clichéd associations Fisher’s own name still carries.

It must first be noted that Badiou is approached here for his “subtractive ontology”. Hallward writes elsewhere:

As the name implies, a subtractive ontology is to be distinguished from a discourse which pretends to convey being as something present and substantial, something accessible to a sort of direct experience or articulation (as it is, in different ways, for the pre-Socratics, Aristotle, Leibniz or Deleuze, for instance).

Contrary to the example of a Deleuzian ‘getting-older’ – a rudimentary and very basic example that may at least help us gain access to the problem – this is only a signifying opportunity to register difference and change, but this does not speak to the process ongoing underneath without some sort of a posteriori reasoning on our own part, as we notice a process that otherwise passes us by in its general imperceptivity. This is to say that we may only notice changes in our appearance, for example, when looking at two photographs of ourselves taken at different times, but there is no possibility of us keeping track of these changes except at intervals. For Badiou, then, Hallward continues:

ontology does not speak being or participate in its revelation; it articulates, on the basis of a conceptual framework indifferent to poetry or intuition, the precise way in which being is withdrawn or subtracted from articulation.

For Badiou, this necessitates an understanding of the event as “that moment when ordinary rules according to which things consist in a situation are suspended, and the indistinguishable ‘stuff’ that is thus made consistent is for a passing instant exposed as what it is, as pure inconsistency or pure indetermination.” Deleuze’s ‘becoming-older’, to remain with the example a little longer, is registered as a pure indetermination only when the encounter with a noticeable change occurs. We might understand ‘intuitively’ that we are always getting older only in that instance, but the occasion of our noticing does not mark the beginning or end of the event as such, which is a process ultimately indeterminate and withdrawn from perception.

The more interesting question, for Badiou, is how we then respond to this sort of encounter and the knowledge of an event it brings to the fore. Do we panic? Dye our hair? Get some Botox? Do we try to fix our ‘being’ in some way? Or do we embrace the impact of the encounter and adjust my comportment accordingly in light of the event’s more durational nuances? Here, an ethics of the event becomes all the more important:

The impact of the encounter depends entirely on the militant conviction of those who affirm its occurrence and elaborate some means of developing its implications.

Fisher writes of this position with admiration for both Hallward and Badiou when surveying the more technical aspects of Badiou’s ontology:

Badiou’s philosophy […] is defined by its refusal of Reform at all levels; his substractive [sic] ontology is not then part of post-modern/structuralist nostalgia for presence, fullness, authenticity – such nostalgia is nowhere more in evidence than in the denial of the possibility of these states: hence the depressive plaint of the always-already undead: of course, presence was never possible, so of course all we can do is mourn the non-existence of what was never there, nor ever could be… While this pious melancholia turns shilly-shallying lack of commitment into the highest ethical injunction, Badiou’s is a philosophy of engagement and active decision. His subtractive procedure is the ruthless evacuation of everything taken-for-granted as a prelude to the construction of a new Good.

An encounter with our ‘getting-older’ might give rise to all manner of melancholic resentments and anxieties. We might even get existential about it. We realise we have always been ‘getting older’, and we may feel like, when we were younger, we did not fully appreciate our ‘prime’. But this presupposes an ‘ideal’ age, or a Good age, or a fetishism for ‘youth’. Ejecting this slippage of sense in our becoming, it is far better that we embrace an enduring sense of change and think only of how new conditions for agentic decision-making can arise from it.

Although their perspectives on the event differ, Deleuze and Badiou arguably drift into form of agreement here. Deleuze engages with Nietzsche’s eternal return, for example, as a kind of event that necessitates the enactment of a “selective principle”. (The film Groundhog Day remains my favourite example.) As discussed previously, he insists that we always “make ourselves worthy of what happens to us.” For Peter Dews, Badiou’s ethics is not so different: “In brief, to behave ethically, for Badiou, is to remain faithful to a moment of inspiration or insight and to pursue whatever line of thought and action is required to sustain this fidelity.”

In Mark Fisher, we have an attempt to newly tie these philosophies of commitment and contingency together. His 2009 debut, Capitalist Realism, published a few years after his report on the Hallward lecture, warrants a re-reading along these lines. Its negativity (contrary to the pessimism it is often attributed) is likewise “a ruthless evacuation of everything taken-for-granted” under capitalism. That capitalism itself is taken for granted is the capitalist-realist position in a nutshell, after all, leading to the passive acknowledgement that the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of the system itself. This was not Fisher’s personal position, but rather a societal observation. It is a observation of what is already embedded unreflexively within a pessimistic society. His negative task – that is, the task of negation – is thus to excavate this ‘given’ from its ideological cushioning within ‘common sense’, showing it for what it really is, and thus revealing all manner of new possibilities that might be built on the other side of it.

The timing of the publication of Capitalist Realism in 2009 is significant here. Just as Fisher was influenced by these “philosophers of the event” who sought to study “how the unpredictability of the event detaches from its determinations”, so did he regarded the 2007/08 financial crash in this context as well, which he called “an event without a subject, whose implications are yet to be played out”.

Fisher’s task, then, in Capitalist Realism, was to provide the groundwork for a new politics of emancipation that could respond to capitalism’s own contingencies, humiliating its sense of its own inevitability and consistency, and open up new spaces for thinking about and acting toward its supersession.

The key line from Capitalist Realism in this regard – which was later stencilled on the walls of Goldsmiths, University of London, shortly after Fisher’s death – reads as follows:

Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.

This required a full appreciation of the undecidability of the financial crash and its aftermath as the event to be responded to by leftists around the world. However, having written his prolegomena, we unfortunately did not get Fisher’s full treatment plan for this diagnosis, although breadcrumbs remain scattered across the web.

Nevertheless, we can easily identify the question Fisher hoped to answer in his unfinished Acid Communism: once capitalism itself has been reframed as a contingency, what follows it? It is not so simply ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’, since these terms remain perpetually underdefined in relation to the world-historical situation within which they might arise. The question must be perpetually updated. What would follow capitalism if it collapsed today? Fisher’s work in the 2010s was therefore a new form of engagement, informed by an active decision-making process in the face of all possible (even ‘impossible’) alternatives. It was also, significantly, an implicit return to Deleuzo-Guattarian conceptions of desire, following a Badiouian appraisal of the financial crash a decade earlier.

“Badiou’s biggest break from Continentalism is in his return to conviction and engagement”, Fisher writes in 2005. But even at this time, he notes that, even if they differ on the details, Deleuze-Guattari are not the antithesis of this. On the contrary, the discordance between Deleuze-Guattari and Badiou lies in their close and combative interrelation with regards to their primary concerns. Fisher concludes:

The most productive area of conceptual discordance is that between Badiou and Deleuze-Guattari. Perhaps we’re in a position to use each to decode the blind spots of the other.

This is because Badiou and Deleuze-Guattari are all “philosophers of commitment, in which philosophy knows its place: as a theory of action, not a substitute for it.”

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These debates have re-positioned themselves back at the forefront of my mind over the last year, and they have sharpened into a probing and painful point over the last two weeks especially.

On 18^th September 2026, I left Newcastle and moved back to London. I have been orbiting this experience in everything I’ve written recently, and I suspect I will for some time to come. It has been the most significant shift in my life for some years. I was hoping for a change in circumstance, enabling my new immersion in a community of activists I have frequently visited over the past thirteen months and quickly gotten to know. Still, my base was in Newcastle, and for all these new connections, I felt painfully distant from them up in Northumberland.

This move was made possible by a job I had as an commissioning editor at a British newspaper, and further encouraged by a relationship that I no longer wanted to be defined as ‘long distance’. Then it all went wrong. I arrived in London unemployed and single. Feelings of redundancy were compounded in all directions. My mental health was shattered as I found myself already plagued by panic attacks from work stress and a total nervous system in total shutdown after a year navigating the British injustice system. As joyous as the move was meant to be, the timing of everything made me deeply afraid it might ruin me. Insomnia took hold. The new life I’d moved bravely towards crumbled before my eyes. It has been a series of shocks to the system that I have found hard to take.

But a lot has changed since I last moved cities. My arrival in Newcastle four years ago was similarly disastrous. I had weathered the end of a relationship but found the big change left me vulnerable. Within a year, I was homeless, mentally ill and unemployed. I spent another year putting my head back together.

Thankfully, I have forgotten nothing from that time. I have drawn on inner resources arduously acquired and speedrun a breakdown to implement a breakthrough. Thanks to the generosity of my community, I have enough of a financial buffer to give myself a month of recovery as I establish a new routine. I am still grieving, and I suspect I will be for many months to come, but I am alive and loving it. I am once again aiming to make myself worthy of what has happened to me. In the process, I am reflecting on all that has helped me survive the last year so far. In fact, the ruminations written to another increasingly feel like reminders written to a future self. I retrace my steps, only to continue the march onwards to a new future unknown. I weather a multiplicity of contingencies and commitments.

I’m reflecting on this a lot at the moment. I have been going on long walks everyday, a bag of books on my back, pottering in parks and along Regent’s Canal, trying to re-formulate some sense of commitment amidst the consequences of so many contingent happenings. I have already started to do this over the last few posts, but something new is coming into view. It felt necessary to provide this context as a prelude before going further…

The recipe of a work of art — its ingredients — how to make it — the formula.

1. There must be a clear preoccupation with death — imitations of mortality … Tragic art, romantic art, etc., deals with the knowledge of death.
2. Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. It is a lustful relationship to things that exist.
3. Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.
4. Irony. This is a modern ingredient — the self-effacement and examination by which a man for an instant can go on to something else.
5. Wit and play … for the human element.
6. The ephemeral and chance … for the human element.
7. Hope. 10% to make the tragic concept more endurable.

— Mark Rothko, “Address to Pratt Institute”, November 1958

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My recent return to the Rothko Room at Tate Modern was prefigured by a renewed interest in his work that I had acquired back in Newcastle.

With the majority of my life already packed up in boxes, ready for the London move, there were not many books at my disposal. One that I kept out of storage and by my desk, for reasons I could not name, was a 2008 exhibition entitled Mark Rothko: The Late Series.

I think I went to the exhibition, also held at Tate Modern, but I can’t remember it. The catalogue itself was “borrowed” from my secondary school almost twenty years ago and I guess I forgot to return it…

What follows are some ruminations that grew out of that catalogue and its texts, which have come back into focus for me over the past few days.

The Unnameable

What has fascinated me about Rothko since my adolescence is his ambiguity or – it may well amount to the same thing – his dance with the sublime. His paintings depict a profound “nothing” that becomes all-encompassing. They are revelatory in this way, which is to say that they are revealing, but of what it is hard to say.

Abstract art in general is too often reduced to some sort of Rorschach function, but the power of Rothko’s work is that whatever it elicits is hard to put into words. Indeed, for all its ‘anti-expressive’ nature, what is being expressed could only be expressed in a painterly manner. As it was for Deleuze: “If philosophy expects something from painting, it’s something that only painting can offer it”, but certainly not in the same terms that philosophy (or anything else for that matter) employs for its particular epistemologies.

Rothko’s late works instead confront you with an unnameable something – perhaps something inside yourself. In this way, they have a ‘spiritual’ quality. The fact that there is something unnameable within, reflected from without, is the revelation on offer. Any resulting clarity is yours alone. Rothko only beckons you into a fog – one that may or may not be familiar already. It may only be a feeling, and that feeling may remain ambiguous, but it is all the more sublime for that reason.

This quality announces Rothko as a painter who mastered his discipline in a marvellous way. Although the works are “relentlessly abstract”, each captures that decisive moment when he decided to stop, before moving onto the next; when out of the nothing, presumably an affect emerged. You feel “it” too, and from there an intimacy arises.

The sensation of an artist reaching out across the future and imparting something to you is cliché, but with Rothko, it arrives with a new intensity. He becomes a sort of Nietzschean Last Man, but far from unburdened of risk-taking at the end of everything, Rothko keeps painting thresholds between worlds. As his friend, the poet Stanley Kunitz, once wrote, “the way backward and the way forward are the same”, and so Rothko too paints and enlarges minute details from art’s past and future as he steps into a new modality beyond all representation.

Reflecting the ultimate decomposition of a modernist tradition specifically, right before abstract art’s enduring era of zombie formalism took over, what is abstracted in Rothko’s work are entire histories. To cast your eye over them, in order to find anything to cling onto, you find shades of art’s millennia in the oily strata. Everything, reduced to almost nothing, is still everything.

Rothko’s late-modernist attempts to “make it new” thus situate him as both undertaker and midwife; both absurdist and tragedian. His paintings are beset by a profound calm, whilst the artist himself was often described by his peers as restless and impatient. All of these sensibilities are visible in his paintings if you look at them long enough.

Faithful Commitments, Aesthetic and Political

These sensibilities may be ambiguous, but they are undergirded by principles that are exacting and well-established. Indeed, moving further against any suggestion that, in its abstraction, in its anti-expressionism, Rothko’s works are beyond language and thus humiliate description, for his friend Dore Ashton, things are not so simple:

Rothko was an intellectual among painters. His mind was nurtured within a certain intellectual frame and his great task was to translate his principles into the nondiscursive language of painting with its secret emanation.

She notes further that:

there were many who regarded such an idea as pretentious, as an intellectualizing approach to a genre of painting that lacked content […] But it was precisely the quest for a kind of truth, a kind of transcendence of petty and temporal arguments, that ruled his moral universe – the universe of his work.

She aligns this moral universe to Rothko’s politics, where his “free-form” paintings – not free of form, but forms freed – take on:

the message of the old anarchists, whose vision of unity in freedom was, in practical terms, probably impossible. Still […] his dream was to be a labor leader, and the vision of social transformation remained uppermost in his mind. The subsequent transformation of himself, from a social rebel to an aesthetic rebel, occurred no doubt because he was innately and unavoidably drawn to the arts. Yet his struggle was always marked by impatience with tradition and a longing to find and enforce an ideal in his life which, by his mid-twenties, had become wholly art. His was a temperament that sought commitment.

This sense of commitment is more often translated into a kind of “faith”. Many may, at this point, think of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas – a non-denominational space of reflection and worship that, rather than aping religiosity, can instead be seen as a space of meditative contemplation resistant to all dogma and institutionalised power. To the contrary of this power, Rothko’s faith, his commitment, is to freedom above all else, even in its impossibility.

The approach reminds me of Alain Badiou’s notion of a “truth-procedure”. In a blogpost from 2014, Levi Bryant writes:

A truth-procedure is not representation, but a composition, an activity of building […] So long as we believe something is impossible and act accordingly, we will ensure that it is impossible […] The valences of truth as Badiou uses the term are therefore “fidelity” and “infidelity”. You bear fidelity to a truth procedure when you keep working towards making something a reality despite all of the odds stacked against you. You fall into infidelity whenever you betray that work, bowing to the exigencies of what is possible and abandoning the project.

This notion of a fidelity to truth is extracted from the writings of St. Paul by Badiou. Bryant explains:

Truth, for Badiou, is a commitment to something that cannot be proven in the present. It is not, as we say, a “commitment to truth”, but is rather a sort of project or activity. In this respect, it is very similar to what Paul describes as “faith” in the epistles. Here we have to be careful, for “faith” has come to signify “belief or conviction without evidence.” However, when you read Paul, this is not what faith sounds like. Rather, faith sounds like a sort of activity; in particular, an activity involved in construction. What is the work of faith? What is it constructing? For Paul, what is being constructed appears to be a society based on love, not law, that does not require tribal identity (being Jewish, Greek, or Roman) for membership or participation. The work of faith is the ongoing activity of building that community.

What, then, is Rothko’s truth-procedure? His activity, obviously, is painting. What is the truth which it so impossibly contains? It may remain something like love – love of form, love of sensuality, love of tension, love of irony, love of wit and play, love of the ephemeral and chance, love of hope. Above all, perhaps it is his love of an intimacy drawn from the infinite.

Rothko once reflected that, whilst he recognises the weight of tradition behind producing very large paintings, which often wish to convey something “grandiose and pompous”, he is attempting to instead convey something more “intimate”. His works are inherently contradictory in this way, and rather than seek to hyperbolise the experience of looking at them or explain it away, the attraction is more simply a secular reclamation of an experience religion has long tried to monopolise.

The anxious calm that emanates from the spaces where his work is held beckons to the “faithful” of all stripes – those who have faith in standing in the light, knees trembling. This faith in truth is not the same as a faith in certainty. I never know what I will feel when I look at a Rothko painting, but I return to Tate’s Rothko Room again and again, having faith in its anxious calm and the moment of reflection it will provide.

Some people take themselves faithfully to church each Sunday. I take myself to the Seagram Murals every few months or years. Rothko too once said:

If a thing is worth doing once, it is worth doing over and over again — exploring it, probing it, demanding by this repetition that the public look at it.

Foggy Introspection

It’s hard not to think about my occasional bursts of blogger energy when reading the above quotation. Manic is how I presume they appear. But writing grounds me. It is a way to self-soothe. The self-elected task of putting this word or that in front of or after another helps put something else in order vicariously.

Entering some sort of flow state displaces whatever is troubling me into the background. It helps me cope better with some emotional blockage – most likely grief – that I cannot shift from front and centre. Better to work at expressing something else – some encounter with art, or a book, or a song – than the inexpressibility of grief in all its forms. But as Wittgenstein once put it: “the inexpressible is – inexpressibly – contained in what is expressed.”

Whenever I seek to bring thoughts on the periphery into view, they seem to pass through the obstacle as if by osmosis. The act of writing soon amounts to a chase, a game of cat and mouse, between the expressible and inexpressible, especially when it is repetitive. Even after I’ve chosen to stop my pursuit for the time being, perhaps because something vague has been encapsulated through the manic meander, it’s never too long before I take up the charge again. Even when the subject matter is the same, revisited again and again, pondering the same memories, pursuing the same sensations, there is a sense of purpose that arises unexpectedly.

I am not suggesting that to read what I write so repetitively may evoke a feeling that is anything like a Rothko painting, but at its best, the act of writing does evoke something similar, if only for me.

I used to feel self-conscious about how often I would turn to this blog whenever some unnameable feeling overtook me, and all I would end up doing with it was writing about writing. Most of the time, I don’t even start to write because I have had an idea, but simply because I feel like writing. Ideas crystallise on the journey. Forms emerge from what is formless. I have faith that writing will rescue me from my troubles because the act of construction always helps to alleviate something, even if only in part. So, whenever I feel a fog descend, rather than let myself be suffocated by it, I set about writing until something – anything – comes into view. When I’m finished, I often feel empty. I have to come back again. I have to re-enter the fog.

The beauty, the sublimity, the profundity of a Rothko painting is its quiet testament to this sort of experience. Rather than only being inferred through what is expressed, Rothko works in the raw inexpressibly. In fact, no other painter, to my mind, has ever come so close to expressing creation’s inexpressibilities in this way. It goes to show how generative our faith in the impossible can become…

I often think about Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, perhaps more so now than ever.

Benjamin’s angel, Klee’s angel,

who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched… His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

Benjamin’s storm is totalising. This is hardly surprising, given his theses on history were written in Paris in 1940, only five months before the city fell under wartime occupation. The storm he saw approaching was about to engulf Europe, and later the whole world.

It is tragically ironic that Benjamin would still refer to this storm as the storm of “progress”. Given the wider context in which Benjamin was writing, it hardly feels progressive (in its more acutely political sense) at all. It is true, nonetheless, that time advances relentlessly. Perhaps this is the rub upon which his theses lie. Benjamin’s theses on history are at once loyal to a “historical materialism” and cynically disparaging of what it has become — which is, he suggests, little more than Marxism’s “mechanical Turk”.

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We must remember that, for Marx and Engels:

The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure…

For Benjamin, as it must be for us, it is essential that we recognise the privileged modes of production that sustain our constant state of emergency. “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ’emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule”, he writes.

Then and now, the privileged modes of production are those that are most likely to lead to our destruction. Our plastic world, our world of military-grade metals, wherein economies are fuelled by the constant ramping up of the war machine. War becomes the basis of all social structure. This is the storm of “progress” in which we live, just as Benjamin did.

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Klee’s angel starts to appear all too naive in his depiction. For all his admiration for the painting, Benjamin’s angel is perhaps better rendered as “biblically accurate”.

Most days, I find myself encased in the revolving eyes of this biblical storm. At the same time, I feel bereft watching worldly chaos unfold as if from far away. Periodically, I find myself rocked by destructive updrafts and downdrafts, tornados and hurricanes, hailstones and mesocyclones of debris. Other times, there is only a fog. There is seldom sun.

I feel a disparity between a historical gloom and the brightness of the present. Space-time loses all geometry in a storm. There is a feeling of falling constantly down a hole. But that sensation is not all. It cannot be all. It never is all.

---

Swept away by a storm blowing in from Palestine, we face the past constantly. All eyes on Palestine, it is not always easy to see the wider chain of events that are defining this moment in history. But the effect is not always melancholic; a sense of purpose arises from bearing witness to a catastrophe that the state seeks to ignore for the sake of its arms profiteering, which has led so many to intervene.

Joy and despair face off against each other. The jouissance of exposing horrors, holding power to account, is complicated and guilt-ridden. The sacrifices involved in the endeavour are real and pile up before us and behind us, but a liberated future supports our backs as well. Joy is not an act of resistance in and of itself, but resistance must make some room for some of it.

---

It is ironic that Paul Klee’s Angelus Nova is housed in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. It is an “icon of the left”, according to one historian, but Israel will claim ownership of anything even tangentially related to a messianic Judaism.

What might we suspect the Israelis see when looking at it? The Palestinians no doubt see one single Nakba, unceasingly piling rubble upon rubble. Like so many things the Israelis lay a claim to, in every act of expropriation is an ironic confession.

---

On Monday 3rd August, I returned to Newcastle after a weekend in London. My time down south included a visit to Bronzefield to see Amu, whose infectious laughter still rings in my ears alongside their eloquent investigations of a “material literacy”.

Unable to sleep that night, haunted by the brown monoliths of boxes in the corner of every room, I called Juno. We wandered down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, from tornadoes and hurricanes to the Great Thunderstorm and ball lightning.

I have always wanted to be a storm-chaser, I remind them. My social-media algorithm knows this and shows me pictures of supercells often. The destruction they wreak upon the earth is only one part of their awe-inspiring attraction. What truly fascinates me, beyond their physical might, is the fact that we are still not certain how such storms form.

Never has a book had such staying power in my life, for its sense and nonsense, than Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. I return to two of its short chapters again and again, more so than any other part of any other book I own.

‘The Twenty-First Series on the Event’ has been inscribed indelibly upon my heart. Friends will recognise how often I quote Deleuze whenever talk turns to militancy, responsibility, commitment, resilience, and facing crises with grace. Quoting Joë Bousquet, he writes:

“My wound exist before me, I was born to embody it.” It is a question of attaining this will that the event creates within us; of becoming the quasi-cause of what is produced within us […] It is a question of becoming a citizen of the world. […] Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us.

For ten years, I have been channelling this sentiment whenever life drops its latest crop of lemons. (Sometimes far from successfully, of course, but the intention is always there, as a guiding principle or something to aim for, if nothing else.)

That being said, Deleuze’s phrasing is not ideal. His talk of “worthiness” is certainly not a moral judgement, but it is a value judgement. These values are not received but our own; they are the ‘surplus value’, if you will, of our hardest labours. In this brief nod to the economic, Deleuze alludes to weights, costs, sacrifices, and insists that we place more ‘value’ on ourselves when we might be more inclined to see ourselves as lesser, flawed, or somehow broken by the world.

This was Bousquet’s lesson too; a lesson to be radically affirmed. Bousquet, who embodied his paraplegic fate as a soldier wounded in war to later lift his thought to a higher level. His body may have ‘failed’ him, but his life was certainly not ruined. His wound afforded him new capacities and opportunities, and he seized upon them from his bed. Deleuze’s borrowed mantra, then, is the expression of a sentiment of personal accountability and responsibility, and it is notably one with a Stoic bent. (“Bousquet must be called Stoic”, he says.)

This Stoicism is best summarised elsewhere, through the sagely wisdom of Epictetus:

Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.

I think I treasure this sentiment so much because it is one of the hardest things in the world to accept and actualize. If I repeat it to myself so often, it is for the sake of my own ‘sense’ of orientation when things make little sense at all. I affirm it consciously because I really struggle to believe it. I struggle with acceptance. Don’t we all? Less common, perhaps, is a penchant for philosophy in response. Truly, this response is misguided, and anyway, I’m less a philosopher than a neurotic who can’t shake the belief that understanding alleviates pain. It never does, but this is how I have learned to cope all the same: anxiously.

Deleuze’s Stoicism attracts, then, because it runs contrary to almost every emotion I am likely to feel in a crisis. The Stoics do not teach apathy or indifference; they teach a radical acceptance of the event, even (or especially) when it hurts us. Their credo is best encapsulated, perhaps, in more modern times, by the ‘serenity prayer’:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

If the winds are not blowing in the direction I want, I will resist the temptation to set sail regardless, but I will remain attuned to a change in their direction, which announces that time when we must leap into action. A truism remains, however: you can’t always get what you want. Accepting this may well be the last place we arrive at. Serenity is hard won.

There is also something further to be taken from Deleuze and Bousquet, however, which extends beyond Epictetus’ aphorism. It is a choice.

I also choose to accept the person that I am and have become, shaped by external forces and pockmarked by catastrophes. Alongside this choice, I forcibly reject, against all unfortunate inclinations to the contrary, a tendency that can just as well lead to (self-)destruction. The problem is that the wound, when it arrives, can cut so deep that it is hard not to register the possible emergence of a new self as the violent death of the old one. Is there nothing that can be salvaged? Must all good things go to waste? Why must these apocalypses happen so frequently? We are really expected to will these misfortunes so easily?

We salvage plenty, of course. We must. But for all the fortitude of Deleuze’s ethics of contingency, there is certainly no suggestion that we chant these mantras and be done with it, as if anything were ever so easy. The difficulty is the point, and necessitates that we bear in mind the potential to slump into Stoicism’s opposite (whatever that might be) at all times. Indeed, the dissonance felt in trying to accept what first appears as unacceptable can just as well drive you mad.

---

Yesterday, as I took the train across London to join friends on trial for direct action at Woolwich Crown Court, I brought Logic of Sense along for the ride. This time, however, I skipped over the twenty-first series, and instead found myself in the twenty-second: ‘Porcelain and Volcano’.

Deleuze begins with what might be one of my favourite passages in any work of philosophy, perhaps because it reapplies parts of his conceptual armature to something more closely resembling art. I will resist the temptation to explicate it and let it unfurl with its own meter:

“Of course all life is a process of breaking down…” Few phrases resonate in our heads with such a hammer blow, few texts possess this final character of a masterpiece, or are able to impose silence or force such terrified acquiescence as Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up. The entire work of Fitzgerald is the unique development of this proposition – in particular, of the “of course”. Here is a man and a woman, there is a couple (and why couples, if not because it is already a question of movement, and of a process defined on the basis of the dyad?) who have, as we say, everything it takes to be happy: looks, charm, riches, superficiality, and lots of talent. And then something terrible happens that shatters them like an old plate or glass. There is a terrible tête-à-tête of the schizophrenic and the alcoholic, unless death takes them both. Is this the notorious self-destruction? What has happened exactly? They have not tried anything special beyond their power, and yet they wake up as if from a battle which has been too much for them, their bodies broken, their muscles strained, their souls dead: “a feeling that I was standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down. No problem set – simply a silence with only the sound of my own breathing … My self-immolation was something sodden-dark.” In fact, a lot has happened, outside as well as inside: the war, the financial crash, a certain growing older, the depression, illness, the flight of talent. But all these noisy accidents already have their outright effects; and they would not be sufficient in themselves had they not dug their way down to something of a wholly different nature which, on the contrary, they reveal only at a distance and when it is too late – the silent crack. “Why have we lost peace, love, and health one after the other?” There was a silent, imperceptible crack, at the surface, a unique surface Event.

It is hard not to read these words and think immediately of all that the last year (or even just the last month) of my life has contained. Yes, why must everything be lost all at once? Perhaps not peace – when was the last time this world felt peaceful? – but love and health and money and home. I can accept that it has happened, but I resist just how ridiculous and unnecessary this constellation of blows has been. Still, there remains much to gain in accepting them – if acceptance can ever be wrangled from the shock of grief, disbelief, and disappointment – but how radically different and even impoverished all gains appear when placed next to everything that I previously hoped for.

Because of course there is always much to gain after loss. It is a poor consolation. And how utterly unwanted these losses are anyway. Speculative gains serve no purpose in my desire to make the world I wanted whole. I still long for it, although not without difference of course. Indeed,it is impossible to imagine a world-to-come where the crack is no longer felt. But must it be that there is “no way, before total disintegration sets in, of at least saving the severed parts?” It is all so undeniably maddening, to the extent that even acceptance of so much ridiculousness feels mad.

Here, the twenty-second series pushes back against the twenty-first: yes, affirm your wounds, be reborn in them, but how is the crack to be affirmed when the new world created has lost its sense? Deleuze follows up with a question that feels hyperbolic: how to avoid, in the immediate aftermath of a wounding, suicide or alcoholism (as if these are the only two options)? But we know these outcomes are all too common for the many who are cracked by the event that squanders all sense. A world already destroyed, we partake in our own processes of demolition. But must we?

For me personally, life is very different to what it once was, when this question of “to be or not to be” carried a real and unwell grandeur. Old thought patterns return with most extreme overwhelms, whenever they do occur, but they are also resisted with far more strength than a few years ago – even if this resistance is itself conscious and exhausting. There are always strategies, always ways to rebuild. Certainly, nothing has happened recently that can’t be remedied. That is partly why the blows feels so nonsensical, just as the intrusive thoughts of cracking up lack sense as well.

Ultimately, there is no quibbling with the truth: death or self-injury achieve nothing and certainly make everything worse. Death especially may bring an absolute relief to the individual who ceases to exist, but the knowledge of its impact on others is harder to bear. Alcohol and drugs similarly have no benefits outside of a brief reprieve from cracked time, as tempting as these reprieves may be. If not a permanent ending, then they at least provide a temporary evacuation of an inner world where hurt has lodged itself, before everything comes crashing back down again. More than anything, these destructions hurt those who love us, which is always to be avoided if we can help it. So, with both options fully removed from the table, what is left over? Must it be the infernal interrogation of life as it now appears to be, unmedicated and raw? Must we replace oblivion with interrogation always?

The philosopher’s questions that Deleuze drags out of the resulting turmoil are humbling, because he knows that they are as essential as they are useless:

If there is a crack at the surface, how can we prevent deep life from becoming a demolition job and prevent it from becoming it as a matter “of course”? Is it possible to maintain the inherence of the incorporeal crack while taking care not to bring it into existence, and not to incarnate it in the depth of the body? More precisely, it is possible to limit ourselves to the counter-actualization of the event – while taking care to prevent the full actualisation which characterizes the victim or the true patient?

To raise these questions suggests some attempt at reconciliation through the intellect, whether for oneself or for the cleft world we are struggling to understand. But they remain forms of bargaining and denial regarding what afflicts us, and may just as well be tossed aside. What good comes from studying the crack, after all? What use is there in solving its questions with academic proofs and logical formulas? These are so many attempts to reinstitute sense whenever nonsense floods the crack. Hubris abounds, and it depresses me, not least because I have so often been guilty of incurring an academic nonsense when things get hard.

For Deleuze, the most pathetic set of options can be framed as follows:

Are we to become professionals who give talks on these topics? Are we to wish only that those who have been struck down do not abuse themselves too much? Are we to take up collections and special journal issues? Or should we go a short way further to see for ourselves, be a little alcoholic, a little crazy, a little suicidal, a little of a guerrilla – just enough to extend the crack, but not enough to deepen it irremedially? Wherever we turn, everything seems dismal.

It is hard to escape the spiral. That is why the ways in which we respond are all the more important. If we remember that reason is a feeling, then art and philosophy soon joust for position here, as in Deleuze’s prose, curdling and curtailing each other. Both art and philosophy can be pursued irresponsibly. How, then, do we respond responsibly?

---

I talk to friends about issues with pain management. For me, once pain is felt and noticed, whether mental or physical, it can quickly take over. It is analysed obsessively, as if a full understanding of the cause will neutralise the effect, and so the pain only gets worse. To intellectualise mental anguish creates safety through a false distance, but also feels like a betrayal of those feelings that must be felt. Reason and feeling are split irresponsibly. There is also a fear that the act of interrogation or analysis might be a betrayal of another who is afflicted by this pain in their own way – because no pain is ever as solitary as it seems. For this reason, to affirm and make oneself worthy are different from any claim of ownership, but a pain shared needn’t go unexpressed just because it is not mine alone. This is why we are often better deferring to the mythological to explain our traumas; sometimes what is most useful to counter our self-victimisation is to tell a tale without origin or author – a folk tale, held and disseminated collectively.

Friends recognise this in their own ways and announce that distraction is the best way for them to help and offer comfort as I struggle with my litany of recent losses. It doesn’t last for long, of course. Returning home from my first night out in well over a year, I find that I remain utterly alienated. After everything, I wallow in a sense of injustice, more personal than before but no less familiar. Circumstances have changed, but the oblivion of others to suffering, even when it is most personal and hidden, can be hard to overcome. I try to make the best of things regardless and let myself be guided by the hospitality of others, making myself worthy of their company if I am able. As evening turns to night, I slip back into circular conversations, grasping desperately for some sort of sense that might mend the crack I feel in my chest. Despite my fears, I am assured this does not make me bad company. Often, these conversation meander wildly and we all feel better for what we have learned about each other. New friendships have been solidified quickly as a result.

These conversations are essential for me. I need to know what others think, if only so I can feel assured that my many racing thoughts are not wholly cleft from reality. I am assured that they are not, but that doesn’t mean I understand them any better. And if I cannot understand my own feelings, maybe I can better understand someone else’s. “Stop making excuses for others,” they say, as I defer constantly to a compassion I am reluctant to extend to myself. “Stop trying to understand and hold together all sides. What do you feel?” I don’t feel great. I mostly feel hurt. But forgiveness is my first instinct, for better or worse. Still, this does not change the fact that you cannot reason with the crack.

Deleuze quotes a passage about a rock split in two from Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano:

she moved herself nearer it, poured out her pleas, her passionate tears, told all her forgiveness: the rock stood unmoved. “That’s all very well,” it said, “but it happens to be your fault, and as for myself, I propose to disintegrate as I please!”

I imagine myself picking up two halves of split rock, trying to find whatever angle is needed to put the pieces back together seamlessly, so that the crack disappears. At the same time, I am aware that the resulting friction grinds and gnaws further at the edges of two surfaces, so that the crack is only more assured. I find the process of watching this disintegration take its course to be unbearable (“of course”). Must the event unfold like this? Can it not unfold another way? Please? Accepting the crack is painful because it starts to make it true. I do not want it to be true, but resisting that truth makes the crack just as final. You cannot argue with rocks.

There are still ways to accept cracks that also help us mend them. I imagine a kintsugi bowl: broken pottery repaired with golden lacquer, all the more beautiful for its scars. Repair is always possible. It is a case of waiting for the right moment and the right materials. This delicate work can never be rushed. Porcelain is formed in heat but not repair by it.

This is the only way I can imagine the crack to be affirmed. Other analogies come to mind. The crack cannot be affirmed by thrusting one’s fingers into it with a repugnant curiosity, for example, although I know I have a tendency to do this as well. Doubting Thomas might be a parabolic figure of wonder, but I’m sure he was still left with blood on his hands. As my friend reminds me constantly, an awareness of these flaws might have some value, “but it doesn’t mean you deserve to be taken out back and shot.”

---

Ten years ago, when Mark Fisher died, I first came across Deleuze’s series on sense and nonsense and was led, via his footnotes, to the work of Maurice Blanchot. I had already been reading Georges Bataille, and found their proximity to one another enthralling – friendly opposites, you might say.

Bataille was attractive to me then for his transgressions. (Youthful ‘edgelord’ eras are an embarrassment, but an unfortunate rite of passage for many students of philosophy.) The ways in which Bataille thrust himself deeply into wounds was a tactic for immersing oneself in truth that I admired and did not yet find messy and naive. That is because I was also wounded then, and picking at my wounds as well. Like Bataille (I would tell myself), I sought to “go a short way further … just enough to extend the crack” – as if there is any virtue in extending the crack all the way through yourself, splitting yourself in two to mimic the broken world; as if there is ever any truth in mere mimicry.

Deleuze acknowledges this attraction to masochistic self-destruction himself when he writes:

If one asks why health does not suffice, why the crack is desirable, it is perhaps because only by means of the crack and at its edges that thought occurs, that anything that is good and great in humanity enters and exits through it, in people ready to destroy themselves – better death than the health which we are given.

This idea has a disastrously undeniable sense when you are going through a reckoning – most often, a reckoning with another’s choice to end a world, whatever form that end takes. To affirm it is to find a way to end a world for oneself; to reclaim autonomy and purpose in the widening of the rupture; to identify with one’s symptom and wilfully go mad. But this is not the Stoic’s choice; better something else, a Joycean sort of symptomaticity perhaps. Deleuze attests to this alternative as well, when he suggests that the real test of strength is:

to give to the crack the chance of flying over its own incorporeal surface area, without stopping at the bursting within each body; it is, finally, to give us the chance to go farther than we would have believed possible.

It is always possible to reform, go further, keep moving. It may well require a change in direction, but which path do we choose? Kintsugi. For myself, I am less interested in the going-farther of my individual shard these days. I have done the work of striding out jagged on my own without any notion of rootedness; friends aplenty, but no ‘family’ to speak of. I found a new version of myself by travelling inwards, that much is true, but this self was too lonely. I had to kill it. I have had to kill it again and again. I killed it recently in moving to London. I found myself cleft again in other ways regardless.

I will continue to reaffirm just how integral other people are to the self that I am. I want to go farther than I would have believed possible with them, but also, more specifically, with another. I love the movement of the dyad. That was the path I was on, before the event, the crack, disrupted the journey. Embattled and exhausted, the movement came to an abrupt and disorienting end.

The quest(ion) is unchanged: how to restart the line of flight that tacks alongside the cracks at the surface? Can the same line be restarted? Is it necessary to start another? A lover-girl at heart, these questions are more profound to me than mere romanticism. As it was for Deleuze in his reading of Proust, there is a growing inclination to leave philosophy and its analyses behind, or at least deepen them so that they might be transformed into something else:

Proust sets in opposition to the traditional pairing of friendship and philosophy a more obscure pairing formed by love and art. A mediocre love is worth more than a great friendship because love is rich in signs and is fed by silent interpretation. A work of art is worth more than a philosophical work; for what is enveloped in the sign is more profound than all the explicit significations. What does violence to us is richer than all the fruits of our goodwill or of our conscious work, and more important than thought is ‘what is food for thought’.

Reason flees from all attempts at reasoning. Thought differs from what is food for thought. Agony differs from discomfort. It is strange that we prefer the former in each coupling, but so we do. Deleuze knows this because he knows Hume well, who famously wrote that: “It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” In heartbreak, perhaps this is felt all the more profoundly because what is being mourned is a world that was once at one’s fingertips. Only art allows us to process that most harrowing feeling in the world, which comes after the crack, when what I once touched and what once touched me is now no longer there. It is thoughts of another person’s skin no longer at my fingertips that hurts most deeply. Take away my fingers, then, because it is already after the end of the world.

The cracking of the dyad is nonetheless resisted in two directions. Let it be felt, but not embodied. Save yourself from going too far in either direction. False ascetism or melodrama are all that await us there. Still, there is no right or wrong way to respond when the crack is felt. “Feel your feelings!” I try, but too often messiness follows, and if I am to weather this mess and tidy it, I still have to write my feelings down to make them legible – to myself, if no one else. There is no glee or glamour taken from this task. I hate everything about it and give myself the ick constantly. Indeed, it feels like a sickness to enter so wilfully into one’s vulnerabilities and twist them up in language. Then why bother at all? It is one way of not going so far in either direction, I suppose.

This is not an attempt to philosophize, nor an attempt at art; the difference between lover and friend is what remains so potently obscured here. It exists. It is vital. It is also paradoxical in its entanglements. The responsible lover is a responsible friend, and vice versa; the irresponsible lover is an irresponsible friend, and vice versa. One is not so easily replaced by the other when feelings are trampled. There must be the right amount of continuity and difference between them. Identifying these continuities and differences is, quite literally, not for the faint of heart, because who is to say which is which anyway, or what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. There can be no moral judgements in love; only values shared and built upon. Sadly, the work of construction is never assured, but I do not expect to stop trying any time soon.

It is all to be played for. The game is fraught. But no one knows the score. It seldom even matters.

---

Over a late cup of tea, brewed for me as I felt all my feelings, one of my new flatmates recalled a parable about an old man and his horse. It went something like this:

The old man’s horse runs away. The villagers say, “I’m so sorry! That was your livelihood! Everything must be terrible right now!”

“Maybe,” he says.

A few days later, the horse returns with three others in tow. The man now has four horses. “Amazing!” the villagers say. “Your luck has turned!”

“Maybe,” he says.

Wrangling his four horses, the man struggles to look after them. He is knocked over and breaks his leg. “How terrible!” the villagers say.

“Maybe.”

The army comes through town to conscript new soldiers. They pass over the man with his broken leg. “What a relief!” the villagers say.

“Maybe.”

They take his son instead…

---

We never know how life will turn out. What feels like the best thing in the world might eventually ruin us. What ruins us for a moment might lead to a change in fortune. Maybe.

I am reminded, in hearing this story, of Deleuze’s opening interest in Alice in Wonderland. After drinking the potion, she is bigger than she was before, when she was smaller. There is no clarity regarding what size Alice actually “is”. The paradox of a pure becoming, a pure difference, eludes the present. Deleuze’s series, which follow this opening gambit, are neither wholly sensical nor nonsensical. They are not commensurate. They contradict each other. They hang together, but they do not cohere. This is where their movement comes from: the paradoxes.

My world suddenly feels a lot bigger than it did a few weeks ago. It also feels painfully smaller and shallower and emptier. The paradox is nauseating. It cracks me. There is no denying either the nausea or the crack. The comfort once taken from Deleuze’s twenty-first series vanishes when placed next to the twenty-second. Sense chips off as each section rubs together. That’s life, I suppose. My heart gets simultaneously bigger and smaller all the time. I resent it, but nonetheless try to keep my heart open to whatever comes next, when the dust settles and the clay resets.

I look to mending and remaining worthy.

Entering the Rothko Room at Tate Modern, I have the strangest feeling that everyone here is waiting for a bus.

I keep my headphones on but turn off the music. Everything is overwhelming today. I elected to come here for the sake of some tranquillity; maybe that’s what everyone else is waiting for as well. It does not arrive. People linger here with nowhere to go.

There are nine Seagram murals. They sit against the walls like radiators. It is uncomfortably warm.

The room empties and I press play on Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel. The radiators become spectrograms of the bodies of bowed violins, distorting under the energy of their own vibrations. Or portals into fog. Or x-rays into crypts. Or splayed heart valves, postmortem. Or WTC 1 and 2.

A man in gym clothes with a North Face rucksack gets as close as possible to the brightest of the nine. Every few seconds, he vigorously and yet subtly shakes his head in a micromovement. After a minute of this, he turns his back on Rothko to check his phone with a look of concern that suggests a private disaster is unfolding for him. Maybe I am projecting.

Projection interrupted. Celluloid bridges between frames rushing past. Zoetrope slits. Autopsy tables. Peep holes. Cinder blocks. The aftermath of a withered floral arrangement. Silent Hill Georgia O’Keefes.

Two women get as close as possible to the brightest of the nine and gesticulate, tracing phantoms in the brush strokes. The proximity alarm sounds three times.

Dread and overwhelm and a bootlegged propranolol. Name five things you can see. I’m trying…

The horizontal paintings at the far end of the room are dead letterboxes. More tables of dissection. Mouths chewed out from within. Bit lips. Gingivitis. All gum, no teeth. Royal Mail red. Bloody Valentines.

Balistraria. Loophole. Crenel. Embrasure.

The walls themselves are off-white and almost green. Floorboards overbuffed, underpolished, and dull. Each corner of the room strikes me as the loneliest place in London.

Rothko Chapel 4 begins with falsetto cooing in my ear. My eye is drawn repeatedly back to the brightest of the nine. Deep red vocal cords in full vibrato flutter in front of city mists. There is a Turner here somewhere. Not an old warship, but a modernist abstraction tugged to her last berth to be broken up.

A security camera stares blankly into the room via two strips of red LED lights. The illusion fades as the murals stare back. I head for the exit.

A year ago today, I received an email from a friend. Wanting some sort of far-flung connection in the midst of an acute crisis that had made the world feel small, I had reached out to explain that my partner and I were listening to a lot of music together down prison phone lines – some of which he’d made – in order to ground ourselves, process emotions, and navigate a nightmare.

He wrote back with an anecdote. He had recently been talking to a friend, he said:

who confessed to me that he will often listen to one thing until its burned into his memory as a sort of “save point”… I asked him why that is — and he said, he’s not sure, but just in case he needs to go back and have another “look around”, it’s there for him. It occurs to me that a lot of listening may be this way. Music as a testament. Just keep listening together and praying together in any way prayer comes to you – I’ve found it to be a huge solace in my life.

I have thought about this often over the year since.

---

We listened and prayed together for months on end. Music remained a testament as we revisited various “save points” together that were not only markers for lives lived but lives to come again. It was cathartic, helping to channel joy and unleash pain. I later wrote about it, wanting to provide my own testament to the hope music was continuing to provide us with. It helped.

One year on, I still listen to my “save point” occasionally. Twikipedia’s “room for one” was a song I turned to automatically on my many cross-country train rides, during which hope was precious and love a powerful motor. They were one of many bands my partner had introduced me to, and the songs melancholic propulsion kept me moving forwards whenever I thought I might be better off keeling over and staying still.

I listened to a lot of other music at that time, but “room for one” is the song that transports me back to last September effortlessly. It is less a testament, however, and more a marker of distance. I don’t play it to take another look around a place unchanged, but to feel its new neutrality. Within it, I sense the edges of an emotional state no longer familiar. I smell last year’s winter air. I feel the exhaustion that became a false friend. I hear it all as if from a great distance. I sense that the ears now listening are not the same as those that listened before. There is still a sense of return, but to a house I have not lived in for some time. The song is not inhabited as it once was.

---

This week, I have been listening to “Tombstone Poetry” by Field Medic a lot. He is new to me – we were introduced via a playlist selected by one of my new flatmates as we ate dinner together over the weekend. It snagged something in me.

I think the guitar part is beautiful. Discarding the lyrics, I set about learning to play it for myself. It is tricky and I have yet to master it, but I practice it compulsively, driven by an irrational belief that it will provide some much-needed release, if only I could play it perfectly.

The song is not a save point – not yet. It is a vessel. I pour everything I have into it and hope that it might contain a discomfort and despair that I never have to come back to when the task is completed. As someone who has written about grief and change for a decade, I know this is a fool’s errand, but I do it anyway. It is the only way I know how to deal with grief.

The neurosis of writing, crafting, creating – for me at least – arises from the illusion that completing ‘the thing’ will put all turbulent emotion to rest. It is not only a creative motor but a self-flagellating one. I talk incessantly, circling the same confusions, driving my friends up the wall for thinking that the right words in the right order will turn the world back right side up. But it never does. More often than not, I end up talking too much but saying nothing.

I externalise my inner turmoil. I get outside of it. It looks back at me. It is ugly.

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Life tastes most bitter when it is teaching you a lesson. I come to appreciate that pouring everything you have into something is no recipe for reward or longevity. Sometimes, over-watering something leaves you in a drought and the thing watered is too drowned to grow.

I do not regret this way of living – a life lived by half measures would be far less interesting – but the familiar pain of disappointment hits every time as if for the first time. I wish it was not felt so sharply, but the pain is also a testament to the enormity of a love freely given. Unrequited, it frays the soul. If only life’s loose ends were so easily knotted by the right narrative.

What hurts is the patience required for the pain to pass. I cannot bear to delete the save points, and the vessels and vases start to make life crowded. Heartbreak enters like a bull in a china shop. A love lived through music is all the more complicated. Whole back catalogues become irradiated zones. Is it best to quarantine everything? Or allow oneself to mutate whilst living alongside their atomic hum?

I pick up my guitar again, but it doesn’t help. Neither does this deposit on the web – there are twenty years of cracked and dusted vessels here already. Sleep might bring relief, but dreams are vessels of their own and there is no predicting those. I resign myself to the fact that there is nothing to put down that might lighten the load. Only time brings difference, and sad songs bring too slow a tempo.

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