When we hear of a thing as stupid as the supposed death drive, it is like seeing a shadow theatre, Eros and Thanatos. We have to ask: could there be an assemblage so warped, so hideous, that the utterance ‘Long live death’ would be an actual part of it and death itself be desired in it? Or isn’t this the opposite of an assemblage, its downfall, its failure? We must describe the assemblage in which such a desire becomes possible, gets moving and declares itself. But never will we point to drives which would refer to structural invariants, or to genetic variables. Oral, anal, genital, etc.: we ask each time into which assemblages these components enter, not to which drives they correspond, nor to which memories or fixations they owe their importance, nor to which incidents they refer, but with which extrinsic elements they combine to create a desire, to create desire.
– Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 72
That old should have seen it coming feeling arrives before you see it coming. Although, imagine a cloud of dust on the horizon, an electrical charge in the air, gyp or a twinge in the previously severed nerve, a rawness, a dry mouth, a dry month or two, the king’s wound weeping, an oracle appearing, a butterfly in the pit of the stomach, an exteriorisation of sensation, an itch, a gut feeling, the feel of cat gut, a visceral apprehension, viscera pre-tensing, stitches withdrawing, subcutaneously or in the surface of the skin, stitches in time, time in the gut, the shit of it loaded, knowing the shit’s going down; imagine the stormy petrel, the precursor, Deleuze’s dark precursor, to revolution, the warning, writing, the wall writing, the eye crying blood: imagine this and all you’ve got to go on is either to affirm or deny what in German you might call ein Ereignis, or, in French, un coup de des or evenement, which, comically, only exists weakly in English, unless it’s stated strongly: the accident. The accident is too readily a cliche. But this might be true of one’s mother tongue in general.
It’s a different sort of perturbation to think that it might be true anyway, a little death. Wilde called the lie a little death, a conscious pistake on the orgasm being a fore-taste of It. It turns out, counter-intuitively, that women at the point of orgasm have less going on in proximity to the brain’s emotional centres than men. Men are gushy sentimentalists in their little deaths and women cold realists. When and how does it turn out thusly? Did you see it coming? We saw them coming in an MRI.
I ought to have known that the work on the RJF project would fall apart, into its constituent parts. Once the attention of the company no longer focussed on it, its gravity left it. And it is a project without the levity to attract us back. It just doesn’t seem fun any more. It can no longer remain aloft.
Since Cafe Brazil fucoffee, 30 September, and then I could throw myself into clearing house and grieving for another month or so, I’d not wanted to think about RJF or any sort of carrying-over of those plans and schemes, those sideline projects that had been so important and that I’d held so dear while Brazil was around. Nor had the grieving been entirely for Brazil’s twelve years, it had also been about twenty-three years of smoking tobacco. I mourned the habit. I’m still having difficulty dealing with the loss. It has changed my chemical, molecular, bodily relation with the world en large in every respect. I can’t think. Yet I can. I go on. For the little it’s now worth.
Feelings of worthlessness. I prefer the grandiosity of outright suicidal tendencies. Croydon feelings. That station will forever in my mind be one of those of the cross of ennui and punk contempt, disgust. The Queen disgusts in Croydon. And I have a Croydon in my very name.
I couldn’t look at the RJF project, scared I couldn’t do it if I had to stage it in my body without the sepia angel nicotine.
Then Young rang from City Art Rooms with his Let’s make it happen sentiment at just the right time. A new work, a revision of the old, as yet unnamed, to open at City Art Rooms 18 March.
– Francis Bacon’s studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington: about which Eggs said that its chaos mirrored that chaos within him.
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