Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

very possibly in a book

I don’t know why people think that stories or pictures take you out of the world. My talking was the only route I had into it, like it was Velcro or a hinge. In the end, nothing can be taught: everything has to be learned. And you only can learn anything by letting yourself howl as many words as possible. After all, I considered: I was very used to writing down my own thoughts, or talking very fast. I was a prodigy! Always I did this talking to myself, without anyone there to listen, like some crazy man out in the park in the open-air afternoon. And yet, it now occurs to me, as I finish my endeavour, there is one final somersault that I had not in fact predicted. It’s difficult now to write this all down and still believe that what I say is true, I mean true absolutely. I know some of that might just be laziness but also I do have this fear of betraying my ideal. For the dream is that everything you say will be complete, with absolutely every qualification docketed and allowed for, but of course this is only an ideal and like every ideal also unattainable, so that instead what happens is that you say something and because you have indeed said this you end up losing the thing you intended to say, for it is only replaced by the thing you have said which while inaccurate is also real, and therefore according to the law that what is there will always erase what is not there, that’s all that in the end you can remember. I suppose on the other hand you could see this as a good thing too. For OK, perhaps you have lost the original importance, but when you have that sentence there before you it’s also possible that from that point on it might be able to gain a new importance, that had never been suspected. What you say is never what you think you say. What you really say is said without you knowing. It’s like how no one ever thinks they are of their era, even though everyone of course is of their era, except that it will only be when we are all dead that what is of our era in us will be revealed. Once you realise that, it’s a very difficult problem for creation. For why begin something with any intention in mind, if that intention will in no way be the effect of the finished work? And yet if you do not begin anything, then nothing will be expressed. So that the only way of beginning is to begin with an idea that you know will never be expressed, in the hope that through it something else will be able to be expressed of whose existence or form you are not yet aware. It’s not so much a record as a new experience entirely. I was falling asleep beside Candy, and when I fall asleep my thinking tends to become more frantic. I was trying to find an analogy or image for my ideal. For some reason my only image was a hamburger. My thinking was as vulgar as that — the last time I ever saw Candy, when I finally realised everything I had lost, in the dark metaphysical desert of an apartment whose air con runs through the night and is very loud. For books, like hamburgers, are both just things that are layered in groups. Yes, if I had a picture of my ideal method of talking, it was a hamburger with all its sauces: a multicoloured assemblage, sweet and greasy and delicious. That’s what you need if you want to talk about what happened to you in tropicália, if you want to do all the tricks you might like with that horrible substance called time. And for as long as I could before I fell asleep I lay there contemplating this possibility, like the risk-analysis clerk or med student who for the very first time stands there longingly at the entrance to the hoochie-coochie joint, gazing up at the neon void.

that records our hero’s unbound freedoms

From my future perspective, I guess I was not as in control of events as I believed. And yet it did not seem that way. After two or three bottles of bourbon our choices became freer — whether borrowing my parents’ car to deliver fresh peanut-butter cookies to friends and local stores, or accompanying people to their employment tribunals and addiction treatments after Hiro had befriended them on the street. That’s the beauty of the mind-altering and the world-historical. One minute you’re in a peignoir, the next you’re on the metro with your replica gun in a canvas bag, just one of your many possessions — even if admittedly you’re also enjoying this new accessory, but only the way you might enjoy a new sneaker or mascara. In that way we visited the city’s sights — the parks and avenues, the museums of banking and heavy industry — and felt very gleeful that with us was this object, like our surreptitious pet. Or we simply visited the stores and monuments of our locale and barriada, supplementing beer with various bottles of vodka, sometimes smoking fourteen or so joints while strolling with the dog in a happy small miasma. This really is the beauty of the mind-altering — it alters everything in the picture. For in non-real life you always would have the option of transforming into a zombie or some other animal or superfreak. Whereas in life what happened previously continues to happen, just maybe worse — like watching a movie, where all the fascinating business of getting from scene to scene is the seamless concern of someone else. Elsewhere, the season was at last beginning to disintegrate. Remote-controlled bees were being flown clumsily among the lavenders and other bushes. In the background you could ever so faintly hear the old dialogue continue: Mrs Death! Mrs Death! The sky was heavy and grey, as if the sky had some consciousness of its own farewell, and although I had written back and asked them to stop, sometimes I still received odd messages on my phone. But I insisted on feeling carefree because it’s so easy to delete a message, it’s as if it never happened, and so I did. And if I suddenly had this purchase on the world, I think only the hardest-hearted reader will begrudge me at least a small amount of exhilaration. I would not be downcast, even if among the bird reserves and estuaries the general monsoon murder rate was very high.

beginning in a cafe

The place we were in was one of the cafes beside the ice wharf and the canal. We had ordered blueberry clafoutis with cardamom ice cream on the side, or other delicacies. In my cup there was coffee, and beside us light illuminated the narrow perspective. There was one solitary person writing in a notebook, and I looked indulgently on her, for I had my own small experience of her tribulations, scribbling signs and messages everywhere. But otherwise this place was empty. Peacefulness was everywhere. And for a while this was how I liked it. You could hear the barges and the bicycles drift past with their different noises, and then the sound the general noise made, too, the surrounding noise of the city. There was a waiter who seemed to be loitering, just doing nothing but observing the general scene. But the problem with feelings is how quickly they develop, and I think that at this time a general time pressure and impatience was something I could feel almost every day. We were talking very gently about what we might do next, because as I said, the need for ready money was very present. We had been talking about this recently very much, and in Hiro there was a worry that our criminal mobster antics were no future.

— Is no career, said Hiro.

— What? I said.

— Stealing from people, said Hiro. — As a life.

And while I understood that perhaps we did not have the heart for it, to make the criminal a way of life, since to do that you need to use the most severe aspects of your personality, and also encourage a will to succeed that it was possible we did not quite have, still, I was more in favour of this pursuit and wanted to convince him. Because really — when you’ve done something once, then the possibility just becomes much easier. And so while I was always ready to follow Hiro into whatever endeavour he wanted, I also tried to encourage him into thinking that the street could still be a place for moneymaking. And I was pleased because he was not totally opposed. If I had this passion, he thought, then it was important to respect it. And yet to decide which precise location to apply our energies next was not so easy, for there were many competing options, either repeating the same exploit, or venturing into more recondite territory, like warehouses or factories, and as always we tended to lose ourselves in these reflections, like this lacklustre afternoon, watching the way the light developed on the stagnant metal water.