#hurling myself headlong into the abyss

[olddirtybadfic]

speedrunning gay mice insanity any%

I have half a mind to write a silly ass songfic to White Town's "Your Woman" where Pinky and Brain have a rough patch and break up for a while, then Pinky falls into Snowball's clutches and Brain comes to rescue him to Blood on the Dance Floor's "Bewitched," then Pinky and Brain passionately make up to White Town's "Undressed."

[incredulousstare]

“I think about how Grandpa Lou used to spend his days investigating deep-sea collisions between container ships and oil tankers. He once explained to me, using the aid of a fork and knife, how in the open waters a container ship knows it’s about to collide with another container ship about an hour before the collision actually happens, just based on its course. Container ships take so long to turn that, by the time a captain sees another ship appear on the horizon, it’s already too late, all that the crew on board can do is prepare for the collision. He once brought home shortwave radio transcripts from one of the cases he was working on, a chilling conversation between a container ship captain and his mother. The captain called her to tell her that another ship had appeared on the horizon on a collision course with his and that, in an hour’s time, they would hit. His mother was hysterical, but the captain reassured her that he and the crew would survive. He spent a good ten minutes talking to her, speculating on how his career was now over and what hell the next few months of his life would be, as his boat sailed towards certain destruction.

It occurs to me now that our twenty-eight years together has been this phone call between the captain and his mother. A temporary communion as our two bodies glide on their intractable paths towards oblivion.”

–

“At some point, I became aware that I was sitting beside a rather handsome young man who I hadn’t initially noticed because, like everyone else on the train, he was disguised in a suit. He was also burrowed in a thick book, which I would come to discover was his preferred habitat. I was examining the postcard I had just bought from the Tate’s gift shop, with an image of a neon-light sculpture by Martin Creed on the front. I was trying to decide who to send it to. I really did love the image. Creed’s sculpture was a phrase, an equation actually, spelled out in neon: ‘the whole world + the work = the whole world.’ ‘What do you think it means?’ the man asked me, putting down his thick book. I was not startled by his question. In fact, I felt quite ready and receptive to his unexpected entry into my life. ‘I think it means that art, or really any work we do in our lives, is both immensely consequential and inconsequential,” I replied, with somewhat less eloquence than that. ‘The whole world would still be the whole world whether or not it contained all of the work in the Tate Modern. But all the work in the Tate Modern also makes the whole world what it is; it is part of the equation.’ It was a sentiment suffused with humor and nihilism, which, I would come to learn, this man was suffuse with as well.”

–

 “A sob, a heaving gasping thing exploded from you. You always cried harder over acts of kindness. Over love shown rather than withheld.”

 –

“Sometimes, when we slept, one of us would suddenly jolt. It would often happen just as we were drifting off. I did it quite a bit, and if Osama was still awake he’d laugh a little. He told me this reflex was an evolutionary layover from when we were mammals living in trees. If we fell asleep on a limb and began to fall backwards, our body’s instinct was to jolt us back in the direction we were facing. That said, he liked to imagine these sudden jolts were, in fact, our lives starting afresh. Or perhaps our souls being swapped.”

 – 

 “Augustine spent a lifetime asking, ‘What is my body?’ and came up with the answer ‘a vessel of sin.’ He could only reconcile himself with being-body by distancing himself from it, denying it, vilifying his urges, thinking his way out of it, and in so doing shaped the Western body for the next two thousand years. Augustine believed he could free his body through self-denial. And in this moment I realize I’ve arrived at the precise opposite conclusion. Freedom through a total embrace of corporeality. Sensation. Every sensation. Through the loving of countless bodies and the discreet joys of profoundly loving one. In knowing him completely. And in knowing myself through him completely. In hurling myself headlong into the unknown abyss of myself. Headlong into the unknown abyss between being and nothingness, object and subject, thing and nothing. ‘The abject is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the “I” does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence,‘ Kristeva wrote. You show me another way. You show me myself. You fortify me. I refuse Augustine’s shame. His original sin. His denial of body. And I refuse to let my father’s shadow darken mine, and its urges and desires and any pleasure it brings me will be a gift, a corrective, a testament to you, and of course to me, for I celebrate myself and sing myself in Whitmanesque reverie, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs you.”

 –

“As I lay there, feeling our two skeletons side by side, I tried to imagine the Britain that lay in wait for us. Unlike Osama, I still held hope. Like an infatuated lover, I knew I would continue to love the country in spite of itself, even when it lashed out and pushed me away. I would find new compartments in its heart to be delighted and disappointed by, just like I would find new compartments in Osama’s[…]A London where I would live with Osama’s brown eyes that were sometimes green in the morning as we drank our coffee black and listened to the BBC. I thought of him and me living in the world. ‘Just you and me, kid,’ he’d say sometimes, grabbing hold of my hand. And a new variation of the postcard occurred to me...