A strange girl asked me where everyone had gone.

The inability to make new memories: a succinct formulation of the postmodern impasse…

Night’s black; morning, red. There’s nothing else. 

Superstition and religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate. 

It’s the end of the world. There are no more eyes. It’s as if the head has fallen away. 

All that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.

In this arena between timelessness and time, the most dangerous thing or being that can come into being is time. 

The focus shifts from the Next Big Thing to the last big thing - how long ago did it happen and just how big was it? 

(Those who live in graveyards don’t know time.)

This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course. 

Some odors never go away, for they are never forgotten. 

The old disciplinary segmentation of time is breaking down. 

All I wanted to do was escape what had once felt like home... 

...the ‘sad passions’ that intoxicate and entrance us. 

“If we’re not falling madly in love, then what are we doing?”

(The centre is missing, but we cannot stop searching for it or positing it.) 

In a dream, I told you I loved you. Like this: i luv u.

There is a sense that ‘something is missing’ - but no appreciation that this mysterious, missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle. 

The Easy Life is the one right in front of you. Your current cage of crimson and, moreover, madness. 

The response is nihilistic hedonism: ‘I try not to think about it.’ 

I realized that I’d escaped my death because I no longer knew who I was. 

A detached spectatorialism replaces engagement and involvement. 

This is how we name the terror of our primordial dawn. 

All we have to do is buy the right products. 

“The lamps are especially beautiful this time of year.”

On the one hand, this is a culture that privileges only the present and the immediate...on the other hand, it is a culture that is excessively nostalgic, given over to retrospection, incapable of generating any authentic novelty. 

I could take anything I wanted. For it was the world of the visual. 

This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled by this excess of (self) awareness. 

Everyone’s penetrating and coming. 

You constantly act as if you are always about to be observed. 

As if I myself were in a film. 

In the ‘empire of the self’ everyone ‘feels the same’ without ever escaping a condition of solipsism. 

Despite all the openness and vulnerability, everywhere was dark. 

There is no longer an identifiable external enemy. 

I saw snakes. I couldn’t tell one from the other. 

Those who do not allow themselves to be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction, who continue to believe their eyes, are the ones who err most. 

I’m not a sick one. I’m not one of the monsters. I thought: I’m passing for normal; I’m as normal as any moral person. 

Forgetting becomes an adaptive strategy. 

How can I bear to be conscious? 

Certainty wavers, but it’s warm here. 

“I will turn again to dreams.” 

The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. 

I was beginning to know fear. 

And yet…

There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart. 

They would have to go down now, there, there where it was brown, go, go into space as space expanded and action burned. 

Morality has been replaced by feeling. 

When we found it, it was shivering like a dying animal behind iron bars. 

Did I forget my happy pill, or this place unfit to sustain life? 

The animal awakes, shivering. 

The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. 

XXX

CUT-UP SOURCES:

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

Pussy, King of the Pirates by Kathy Acker

Originally published by Sticky Fingers Publishing in FDBNHLLLTTFPlagiarism.