The moment, the moment: what does Kierkegaard mean by this word? W. knows I am obsessed with finding the answer.
W.'s always been impressed by my obsessions, he says. My obsession to understand Anti-Oedipus, for example. Every summer, I reread Anti-Oedipus with fresh hope that I will grasp both the sweep of its argument and its finer points. Every summer!
W. likes to imagine monkey-boy poring over the pages of Anti-Oedipus, mumbling to himself. He likes the thought of my futile application at this task, day after day in my office, sunlight slanting through the windows, and dust motes in the air. He likes the idea of my walking through the streets in an Anti-Oedipus inspired haze, gaze lost in the distance.
How can I presume I'll ever understand Anti-Oedipus? But I do presume it, and W. finds this magnificent. It's like a hero of tragedy, he says. The hero who, at the highest point of the drama, rises up, freedom clashing against necessity. Rises and then falls all the more dreadfully.
There's no magnificence with me, of course. Tragedy gives way to comedy when you try the impossible too many times. It gives way to farce: What an idiot I am! What a splendid idiot, running up against my own idiocy over and again! How do you forget, with the beginning of a new summer, what happened the previous summer? How, such that I can begin again, in perfect innocence?
The tragic hero, crushed, eyeless, wanders looking only for a place to die. I wander having forgotten both my tragic flaw and the punishment for that flaw. I wander with W. beside me, laughing at me, but charmed, too, and even impressed by me, and my capacity for hope.
The moment, the moment: my new obsession. Ah, but it was my obsession back then, too – back in old Hulme, when I lived among the bohemians. That's what I was obsessed with as I coughed on the spliff that was being passed around clockwise (you passed spliff round clockwise in a time of war, which is to say, in Babylon, and anti-clockwise in a time of peace, which is to say, in Zion – I'd told W. that, he remembers, it was quite moving). That as the real bohemians sent me down, their pet monkey, for beer, chips and tabs, as they kept to their eeries, barely setting foot on solid ground for weeks.
The moment: that's what I was looking for as I wandered among the condemned buildings, through the crescents that were each named after a famous architect (William Kent, John Nash, Robert Adam, Nicholas Hawksmoor …) The moment: and isn't that what I dreamt I found after sniffing popper in PSV, head pounding, face flushed, hearing vocals and melodies drop out as the DJ slid down the faders, hearing only the interlocking rhythms of drum and bass, horns punched in at full volume and then punched out again, snare rolls amplified like detonations, hi hats echoing and exploding and fizzing out into white noise? Isn't that what I dreamed filled me as the blood filled my head, as the lyrics broke up, as full verses were abandoned for enigmatic fragments, as choruses were replaced with snatches of words, as the walls of the nightclub ran with sweat and the electronic ambience in the dub gathered humid and dark like a humming, squalling storm above the music …?
The moment, the moment: but what had I discovered, when I looked at my reflection in the nightclub toilet? A red face, with blood running from one nostril. A flushed face, and blood having already spattered my teeshirt …
And isn't that what will happen now, as I pore through my pages of Kierkegaard as sunlight streams in through my office windows? Won't a drop of blood splash down on the pages I turn in hope and bewilderment at my desk?
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