Adam Thirlwell - Lurid & Cute

in a small delirium of language

Then I heard a noise and felt something on the inside of my body that was a pain more than I had ever known. I guess I knew what must have happened but also still I was hoping that I did not. I did not want to think I had been shot. So many images of dismemberment and maiming were inside me. Still, it was undeniable. It felt like all my legs were gone except they were also still both there, and one of them was frantic, as if in panic. I was thinking things through as belatedly and slowly as the people on the sidewalks whose umbrellas are still up although there isn’t any more rain. There was a crumpled liquid soft implosion in my thigh, like a starfish. I felt like I was not precisely here but everywhere else, which was complicated, so I closed my eyes to concentrate.

— Yeah it’s done, said someone above me.

I thought she was talking to me before I realised she was talking on a phone.

— No it’s sorted, she said. — It was nothing at all.

Then they walked away, leaving us to our sad devices. Everything was over and empty, the kind of emptiness the station boulevard has, at night, when all the minicabs are gone. And I was trying to hold together this conversation I was trying to continue with myself, since no one else was trying, and I was saying that of course I couldn’t be sure that this wasn’t dying. I might be wrong that I was going to live. It was my old Madama Morte fear, but this time perhaps more rational. For presumably, I thought, in fact I would never know if this was dying, because if in the next four minutes, or twelve minutes, I find that I have died, this will be a pure delirium of grammar, unless it turns out that in fact I will be able to just leak out of this body and observe the scene, and only then I suppose will it turn out that grammar was not delirious at all. Hiro was moving very slowly and I hoped that he was smiling, because I did think we had reached some resolution, and that was definitely a relief. It was like finally all the pirates had arrived at once to claim their merited revenge. And perhaps, I suppose, they had.

from which our hero surveys his recent history

One thing I had been considering a lot in these nightmare times was that story from the classical era about the famous sadhu and the flute — that as the poison was being brought to him in a bronze cup to effect his immediate execution he was learning a melody on the flute. And when people asked him what the fuck he was up to he said: At least I’ll have learned this melody before I die . And while I know that this legend is meant to be a legend proving how noble the sadhu was in his adherence to an ideal, I think it also helps to make something clear that is usually very difficult to think about — because I don’t see why the fact that this sadhu is about to be executed should make any real difference to the degree of his nobility. Every child who ever learns a banjo or piano scale in suburbia is being as noble and as grand — since after all proximity to death is just an effect of proportion: and in the scale of the vast long shadowed centuries we are all just as close to death as that pre-executed sadhu, or almost. But whenever I had thought like this, it had left me very anxious, since while one interpretation of the story of the sadhu was that this represented a noble adherence to the value of things that cannot be priced, there was also the possibility that in fact this just represented a total pointlessness, that this story was in fact not a parable but a black and gargantuan joke on all human endeavour. What I mean is: if it seems pointless for the sadhu then, why not for all of us now? Why do anything at all? That’s a difficulty that seems to me far easier to dismiss than ever solve but also, I was suddenly thinking, among the lianas and ivies and streamers, it was liberating, too. I mean, it really is impossible to know what’s truly real, or at least I sometimes think so. If you were to ask the prince which state was real, the slumming or the palace, I think he’d find it difficult to answer. All of which must mean that it’s not impossible to change one’s life, as in any Technicolor sequel in the tropics — or that if the world you believe in was lost before you ever entered it, and is only an illusion, that’s no reason not to preserve that lovely illusion. To have lost everything, I just mean, may be a disaster but not all disasters are catastrophes. And when I thought about it like that, it made me very hopeful for the future.