By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Let this all man tell you one thing: being a fossil fuel like me has its advantages. Very little can still surprise you. And that matters, because to be surprised, to be astonished, is in fact humiliating. Wherever there’s room for surprise, there hasn’t been enough thinking. Wherever disappointment has managed to take root, not all illusions have yet been burned away.
Once you become fossil fuel, there’s no longer any hope left burning. No: the only thing burning is you. You have seen more or less everything a human being is given to see – and what you’ve seen is not good. But sometimes you can’t suppress the hope that things might still be otherwise – a hope flaring up like wildfire and, in the end, scorching even the few illusions you had left. And whatever little love and goodness we manage to find within ourselves will be trampled underfoot. In order to find that nugget of goodness, to find that luminous crystal of love for which no one would pay a penny more than they would for some worthless trinket at a seaside stall, you had to dig. And dig. And dig.
And then, carrying what you had hauled up from the abyss, you emerged into the light, happy and proud, convinced that someone actually wanted what you were holding out in your hand.
Given the choice between your love and the most banal pleasure, the one you love will choose the latter.
Fuck: love means giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.
That’s the point: not that there’s nothing good in us, but that, as I said, no one wants it. Just as we didn’t want the goodness others laid out before us, the way poor people at flea markets spread old blankets on the ground and arrange all the little things they’ve gathered from around the house, hoping that someone might take an interest in those rusty spoons, cracked socks and chipped porcelain figurines. Just as we spat on the love of those who loved us despite everything, the ones we love will spit on ours. And that’s how it should be.
Besides… that’s how the left collapsed, the politics of love and hope. It collapsed because those it loved never wanted that love. Which is why the right, the politics of fear and hatred, can’t be laid to rest any more than a vampire can: because people love to hate, people take an almost orgasmic pleasure in hatred.
There was once a great band called 16 Horsepower. Their frontman, David Eugene Edwards, later recorded many beautiful songs, but never anything quite as frenzied and brutal as, say, ‘Black Soul Choir’. It goes like this:
“Every man is evil, yes
And every man’s a liar
Unashamed with the wicked tongue
Sing in the black soul choir”.
And yet, despite everything, goodness exists. No one knows how to handle it and no one truly loves it. It is an excessive surplus. As such, it represents the aesthetic pinnacle of this world. Yes: no good deed will go unpunished. And that’s precisely why one must strive toward goodness; precisely why, like love scrawled over and spat upon, it must be defended at any cost, to the bitter end. Every small act of goodness you managed to force yourself into was your Mona Lisa, your Toccata and Fugue.
Goodness and love do not exist because of something, but solely in spite of everything.
As Auden says of goodness: “It has a name like Billy and is almost perfect, / But wears a stammer like an ornament.” Goodness has ordinary names, like Pavle or Petar, and it alone, with its stammer, can still disturb the perfect order and peace of this tyranny of vileness stretching as far as the eye can see; it alone, with its stammer, can still disrupt the intoxicating, seductive song of the black choir.
(The opinions and views of our columnists aren’t necessarily the opinions or views of the CdM news team)
