Confessions of a Misanthrope — Part 2
Entering through the glass door, you were faced with a somewhat upright contraption that housed a vertically placed monitor and a square, whitish platform to scan your ID. The function of these machines was to keep tabs on your entry and exit to and from the campus. Next to it, a rather grumpy guard was standing, who gave me a rather cold gaze. Inside, you were immediately confronted with feelings of confusion and anxiety. Already approaching it from the outside, the building gave the impression of being a corporate office. It would have convinced anyone that it was a corporate office if the name of the university hadn't been there. Inside, from an outsider's perspective, it was even more confusing. The desk in the middle of the lobby looked like a typical, nondescript, yet overly in-your-face kind of reception desk. It makes sense since this building was used in the past as the main headquarters of RCBC (a bank owned by the Yuchengco Group of companies that owns the university itself). Walking around the ground floor, you catch a glimpse of the mass of seemingly busy students chatting, working on their respective laptops (or merely pretending to work), taking a nap, or blankly staring at nothing in particular. The juxtaposition of the corporate design with the shoddy attempt at turning the lobby into a space for student accommodation gave off an unsettling atmosphere as if the two didn't belong with each other.
Confusing as that view was, it would be compounded by the fact that when you went up the floors and wandered the hallways, the place looked even less like a school or a corporate hall than a hospital. The first time I went to this campus, at the dead of noon in June or July on a Saturday years ago, the hallways on the second floor, with half of its fluorescent lights turned off, gave off an uncanny atmosphere. Ever since I was a kid, I had disliked hospitals. To me, a hospital was a place where the sick, the mad, and the dead were segregated from society. All the awful things that I repressed and avoided were gathered up in the hospital. It was a madhouse of sickness, even as they purport to save and cure people. The smell that emanated from a hospital I had especially grown to hate. But the hallways didn't go that far. All in all, the coalescence of these ideas—university, corporation, hospital—was what produced the confusion and uncanny that greeted you as you came in.
Looking at my phone, I was late. For it was far past the time my class started. Standing before the stairway that led upstairs, trying to avoid bumping into others, I was contemplating whether I should still go to class despite being late. In the end, I decided against it and went inside the canteen to wait for the next one. Moving from the lobby, passing by the elevators as a group of students hurriedly rushed to get in, I found myself in another area for students. It was an extension of the other hall that was near the lobby. Standing here, one could see chairs, benches, and tables where students were busily chatting away. Further in the back, there were bleachers where students sat with their laptops plugged into the walls. As I was taking in the environment, I realized I was in the center, in the thick of it, and immediately, I felt a sort of nausea once more well up. It was as if everyone was staring at me, waiting eagerly for my next move. In truth, no one was really looking, nor cared to look, in my general direction, that much I knew. Rather, I felt that everyone was looking. It's probably related to the notion of seeing through not seeing, as if you knew that someone entered your periphery and are certain of who they may be without directly looking at them. In that sense, all eyes were on me.
Having felt nauseous, I went straight to the canteen, whose entrance was right next to this student area on the left. Inside, there were more students, all noisily chatting away, but then suddenly a pungent smell hit me. The admixture of the smell of foods, the scents of people's bodies, and the smell of the sun heightened my nausea. Again, I attribute this to my confusion, but this may probably have something to do with an empty stomach. After hurriedly searching for an empty table near the wall, I sat on the plastic chair, placed my bag on an adjacent chair, and looked around—front, right, and back. I made no eye contact with anyone. Pockets of students were seated around me. I forgot for a moment that it was during class hours, so not a lot of students were occupying the canteen at the moment. "The mass of students has yet to come", I told myself despairingly.
As I waited for my current class to end, I pulled a book from inside my backpack and started to read at random. It was the Complete Stories of Franz Kafka. I opened to a page and read An Imperial Message. A very short story, or parable, one might say, it describes the futility of a messenger's effort to deliver a message told to him by the dying emperor. He goes through room after room, stair after stair, and finally palace after palace, only to reach the main gate. He has yet to leave the inner sanctum, and beyond that, he must move through the city. He will never get to his destination, or by the time he does, the sender (and perhaps the recipient) of the message will have been deceased and the message purposeless. My impression upon reading the story several times now was that there is a certain futility and restlessness to all human action, as well as the sense of the ambiguity of the machinations of power and authority. Kafka eerily detailed and quite playfully danced around the mystery at the heart of bureaucracy, questioning the legitimacy of all authority, as well as questioning the actions and purposes of human subjects in modernity.
As I was mulling this thought, more and more students came into the canteen. I looked at my phone and realized that my class was about to end, while my next class began at 8:45. I gathered my things in my bag and inconspicuously stood up and walked towards the exit. Thereafter, I took the stairs to the sixth floor, detesting the sheer awkwardness that exists within the elevator, and because I was impatient to wait for it. As I reached the sixth floor, I went and stood outside the classroom for the next class. A section was still inside, finishing up their class. As I waited, several students loitered through this waiting area, presumably my classmates. Those pockets of cliques moved along like herds of sheep move around a narrow pasture. They all had no permanent fixed place, and would move to and fro, giggle amongst themselves, and shout banal and incoherent phrases that mean nothing and that serve merely to express their heightened emotional states.
Suddenly, the doors opened, and a mass of students exited the classroom. When the classroom was empty, all the waiting students outside came in and chose their seats near the back. I sat in the middle row, towards the left side. Seats were scarcely occupied, expecting more students to occupy them. Over time, more students poured into the classroom, and one of them called to me and sat next to me. This student—whose name I fail to remember—is someone whom I often interact with, in the same way as I interact with a tree, or a plant, or a violent pet, always at a distance, always suspicious of their intent, always on guard. As I came to know him, I realized that I shared a lot of interests with this particular student. What greatly attracted me to him in particular was his strange eccentricity, as well as the extraordinary store of energy he has, eager to pounce at every moment, at every opportunity, to invest himself in a reality that demands of him his utmost devotion. Another fact that attracted me to him was his faith. He was the first Muslim I ever interacted with in a most intimate way, and I was intrigued enough to ask him some trivial questions about his faith that are not worth recounting here. Suffice it to say that, for me, he represented a non-Christian Other, who subscribes to a tradition and culture that is different (and yet shares the same source) from my own (Atheists are basically Christians for me in all but name). As for interests, he apparently confessed that he was a great hoarder of books, including the aforementioned Franz Kafka, as well as an avid viewer of films. Our conversations often, excluding discussion pertaining to school affairs, began either about books or films.
"Do you have a copy of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men?" I asked as he sat.
"No, but I have a copy of The Crossing, which you might like. Haven't you already bought the last of The Border Trilogy?" he replied.
"Yes. Cities of the Plain. I'm looking for the first two in the trilogy. Sell them to me later."
"Sure. Do drop by the dorm later. Perhaps I might also be able to sell you some more books, hehe."
He was solidly built, talked and dressed in a very straightforward manner, but one that was amicable to contemporary tastes. With this, he wore a green backpack, and as he sat, he never took it off, always in preparation for an immediate escape. He had prominent facial hair, as all the males of the Muslim faith do, and black rimmed glasses with a strictly rectangular-shaped lens. As I was talking to him, I no longer perceived the shine that was once in his eyes, as I had in earlier days. When I used to interact with him just even a year ago, his eyes would shine in the wonder that we shared in our love of books and films. We would jump from topic to topic: from discussing poststructuralist philosophy to the Nietzschean Übermensch to talking about Fellini's films, or perhaps the great Korean directors of recent memory. All this was obsessively talked about, as if we were religious fanatics discussing core theological doctrines of our faith. His eyes glittered as he spoke, his gestures betrayed the simple fact of his love for these things of ours, and his voice would, as characteristic of his personality, gradually turn high-pitched as he spoke with increasing interest. Even his laugh sounded different as of late. I had the suspicion that he looked at me with suspicion.
As our conversation was ending, our professor came in almost imperceptibly, as if he was intentionally reducing the impact of his presence. The professor was a stick-thin man, of average height, nearing retirement age. A man from a time that had long passed by, he embodied the stereotypical resentful man who, having lived all his life in the backseat, struggled to gain a sense of agency and control, built up an immense accumulation of resentment even unto his old age, of which he vented not infrequently on his students. He wore a very simple, casual, one might say offensively casual, outfit. He wore an oversized old shirt, with whitened jeans, perhaps due to constant washing over the years, and with a black backpack that had white stains on it. He struck me as looking more like an applicant to work at a construction site than an instructor or professor of mathematics. As he came in, he stared at each of us through his glasses, the lens reflecting the fluorescent light of the room.
After such time, he sat on his desk, configuring his laptop, that is, connecting it to the television, and sat silently for some 10 to 15 minutes, during which time we mumbled amongst ourselves, while some at the back giggled.
"Have you done it?" The acquaintance next to me asked.
"Done what?" I asked back.
"You know, the thing you told me about, about having an urge to do something. What was that all about, and what did you do with it?"
I was immediately dumbfounded by his question. All throughout the past, and perhaps for most of our history, I was always the one who would ask the personal questions, or perhaps any question at all. He was the kind of man who would not take an interest in you and would only actively engage in a conversation when it dabbled on topics that aligned with his interests. But this time, he asked me a personal question. And not just any personal question. He asked me a question about something I said in the past. He remembered something I said, which was something out of character for him. I don't remember any time when he remembered a side remark I made. But that remark, he quite remembered. As I was searching for words to reply to him, the professor spoke up, stood up, and, condescendingly, began his tirade against what he perceived as "lazy" and "unmotivated" students of our generation.
"So, do you guys know what a Tangent 45° is, as we discussed in our last meeting? Well, if you know, good! If you know it, even without a calculator. But if you don't, then you have to learn, you have to solve! Your generation is lagging behind, spoiled by all these technologies. You have to solve! I mean, the answer is staring right at you. I'm showing it to you all as a matter of course. That's why you all are often touted as 'visual learners'. You!" he pointed to one of the barely awake students sitting at the front.
"You have to look! You can't not be looking. Otherwise, you're going to miss everything!"
He continued along those lines, more on chastising his students than teaching the actual material, and eventually the class ended. The only thing I remember from his lectures, besides his reiterative sermons about our lack of motivation ad nauseam, is his frequent catchphrases. When coming up to a climax in solving a given problem, he would often utter, much to our embarrassment, "This is it, pancit!" I have no idea what the innocent food had to do with his incoherent and unnecessary exclamations. Perhaps he found it necessary to amuse his students as a way to make us feel interested. He did the opposite, confirming for us that he was merely an old man stuck in old ways. Either that, or maybe it's because I didn't have a knack for math in the first place, and found all discussions of it boring and non-consequential. As I exited the classroom, I became conscious of the fact that I was melting into a wave of students exiting, heading in the same direction. For a moment, the Leviathan had reared its head to me. I walked a bit faster towards the stairs to escape the indifferent mob when, suddenly, the acquaintance ran up to me.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"I don't know yet. Perhaps the library, or the canteen, or the lobby." I said. I truly didn't know where to go next, for my next class was at 1:30 in the afternoon. I had been caught in the midst of my aimless daydreams, and I lacked a destination to take refuge in.
"Well. Do you—" but he broke off. He was about to ask me something of seeming significance, but he stopped. This confirms it. He was suspicious of something. Throughout the past few months, I have been caught in a network of social links with acquaintances of similar dispositions. These so-called "relations for mutual benefit" or "friendships," as the masses called them, I entered into for convenience and benefit. However, recently, being in these networks began to do more harm than good. Complex occurrences, events, happenings—to put it simply, petty drama ensued by virtue of not just my actions but the actions of the other nodes in the network in which I was enmeshed. It came to a point that I would stick by myself throughout most of my days, in order to avoid the extremely futile interactions and petty reactions of all the parties involved. I was sick to the point of nausea by these things, towards which I feel little responsibility, and I wanted to get out. I wanted to leave these shitbugs and stand on my own two feet again, to retreat to my island beyond the petty concerns of these people.
The acquaintance who stared me face-to-face as of this moment knew that I knew all these. He approached me not out of consolation but to sound me out and see where I stand, for he too became conscious of my distance and the situations I was thrown into. I am not sure, however, if he speaks to me now either from a point of sympathy or of nefarious reconnaissance for the core nodes of the network. Whichever he stands on, I am indifferent to the matter. I just wanted to leave his presence.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing. Come to my dorm later for the books. What time is your next class?"
"1:30"
"Come by the dorm after".
As I finally got away from that conversation, I made my way downstairs on the third floor. I intended to go to the library when, suddenly, I was assailed by a 6-foot-tall student, standing almost as if a brick wall impeded my walk. I was lost in one of those aimless daydreams when he suddenly came in front of me, with his usual greetings, shouts, and incoherent gestures. He was an assuming figure, and yet his gait and facial expression betrayed a subtle weakness that was intentionally suppressed. On this occasion, as in all others, he wore an oversized cotton white shirt and khaki shorts, carrying a black Jansport backpack. A pair of glasses was hanging on his shirt, but he didn't seem to be the type of person to need glasses in the first place. His eyes stared down at me from a height, malicious in their intent. He always had these eyes that seemed about to pounce at you, that seemed to attack and condemn you, though his gait contradicts this impression.
"Hey, you!" He shouted as he came in front. "What classes do you have?
"I just got off my second class," I replied.
"Oh, alright. So it's your vacant right now?" He asked. I hesitated to say yes, only because I knew where all this was going to go. This person—whose name eludes me—was, at least in this school, quite lonely. All of his friends had left him before for his extremely rash and unpredictable personality. He was, to put it bluntly, a womanizer of the second class. He had an extremely charming personality (at least towards women), was relatively good-looking, was solidly built (he goes to the gym every week and gloats about it to everyone ad nauseam), and was shrewd in academic matters, though in an exploitative sense which I need not describe in detail. Only that he knew how to take advantage of other people's meekness and their inability to say "no." Recently, I was one of his principal victims.
"You wanna hang?" He asked. My reluctance to reply to his previous question confirmed his intuition about me being free for the moment, from which he took the initiative and made explicit the intent that had been in his mind all along. This was the shrewdness that was earlier alluded to, a crude example of that shrewdness, but a shrewdness nonetheless, a cunning of someone who is quite experienced in the art of social manipulation. I said yes, abhorring the inconvenience that may come as a result of refusing, and there I was led to wherever his desires directed him. He had a habit of being unbearable whenever he didn't get what he wanted. And so, to avoid that, I gave in.
We walked downstairs towards the lobby, and were about to leave when suddenly he stopped me.
"Hold on. There's a baddie here. Wonder if I could get her Instagram." He surreptitiously pointed out a student who was wearing a college lanyard standing outside the elevator. She wore a white fitted tank top under her light brown cardigan, along with a short black skirt. She had bleached, shoulder-length hair, wore a thick amount of makeup, and carried in her right arm a pink tote bag with a ridiculous assortment of keychains. While she was waiting for the elevator, she tried to catch a few glimpses in our general direction, mostly looking at him, which she attempted to hide by obsessively fiddling with her glasses, the entire frame a sheer, crystal acetate, the kind of which is in vogue these days. To me, she, at first glance, seemed fashionable, and one might say "cute", but ultimately uninteresting. But to him, she was a potential recruit for his "roster," as he later put it. He proceeded to approach this girl, pretending to be waiting for the elevator, and went inside the elevator without anyone else being there but him and the girl. He then told me afterwards that he proceeded to compliment her on her outfit, and then asked her for her Instagram, which she apparently gave. He then came back from the elevator five minutes later, with a look of almost grotesque triumph. He made a facial expression with his tongue out, violently swaying his head from side to side, implicitly hinting at the act of cunnilingus. Or perhaps he was merely imitating Michael Jordan. In any case, I was extremely disgusted and made uncomfortable by this expression, as well as the whole situation overall. But all the while I didn't say anything. Earlier on, he told me that this was often one of the techniques he employed as a way to discreetly ask for the socials of girls he was interested in. I told him that these actions are dangerous, but he brushed it off, justifying it by saying, "No risk, no reward. Game is game!"
We went outside the school, crossed the street, and made our way to the nearby mall. As I was walking along, we passed by the dorm of that earlier acquaintance. Walking, I noted the strangeness in the actions of this tall, quite imposing figure walking along next to me, but in a strange way. He explained that he had a disability from an earlier injury, and even showed his disability card, which explains the way he walked with a slight limp. As he was limping, I was dumbfounded: why was I hanging out with this subhuman waste of oxygen? This rhetoric is justified if I divulge the further fact that all his exploits with women (this earlier instance that I related is one of many that were, too, in my opinion, formulaically prosaic to be mentioned here) were done with the complete knowledge of him already being in a relationship with someone from a separate school. The disgusting aspect about this, especially, is not the mere fact of his infidelity, but that he boasts about it to no end, and justifies it by virtue of his "rizz", making an argument almost verbatim reminiscent of Andrew Tate. Of course, he didn't exactly believe him, and surprisingly, owing to certain influences, had adopted certain feminist positions in various matters. Of course, his self-justifications were a matter of pure egoistic considerations (or lack thereof) and were not made in principle.
"Don't you feel guilty about what you're doing?" I asked.
"About what? What are you going on about?"
"I mean the everyday womanizing. Don't you get tired of that? Don't you feel guilty?
"Of course I do. This hurts my girl, and this hurts me as well, knowing that I cheat on her constantly."
"If you do feel guilty, then why do you do it? I don't understand?"
"It's hard to explain. I feel like it's over between my current girl and me. I feel like whatever I do, I make mistakes. You know. Yeah, it feels good talking to them, approaching them, liaising with them secretly, but I know and feel it's wrong."
"You're being so contradictory. What is it then? You're overcome by your lust? Is that why you do these things?" I reply. I say this not out of concern or brotherly sympathy for this man, but for the mere curiosity of the whole thing. I approach this in the same way I approach a curious philosophical quibble. It's all rather curious, but I don't perhaps care much about the fate of the object of my curiosity.
"Well, yes and no . . . well, I don't know! It's complicated."
"Everything's always complicated with you when your life could be much simpler."
"Look. Don't take this the wrong way. You probably don't understand me as much as you think, as smart as I know you are. Relationships are never that simple, ok? I get that what I'm doing is wrong, but perhaps she's cheating on me, too. Our relationship is going downhill. Perhaps I think it's better this way. I see a dead end at the end of our path. I'm just accelerating the ending, that's all," he replied.
I still couldn't grasp his logic. It made my head hurt to no end, so I stopped this line of inquiry before he could divulge any more unnecessary details. To me, he is a mere pretender, a man with no faith, the last man incarnate! He is like Gatsby without the wealth, Nagasawa without the talent. He's pure mediocrity at its best. And yet, there's a certain sense of tragedy with him. His unceasing desire for women is something of a certain intellectual interest among his friend groups. This is not, make no mistake, an unjust interest that attempts to invade upon his privacy. No. He himself relates his exploits in detail. He's the one offering to boast on his encounters, and thereby invites and encourages speculation about his desires. I remember a conversation I had with one of his "friends," wherein I asked him about why he is like this.
"Why do you think he chases women after women, but seems to never be satisfied? In fact, he makes it even harder for himself when he gets caught. He ruins everything, and no one ends up being happy." I asked.
"I don't know. Perhaps it may be because of his parental situation. I don't think his parents care much about him. As long as he doesn't do something big and troublesome, and as long as he gets a passing grade in university, these small things tend to be overlooked. Perhaps it may be the lack of affection and attention from his parents," he said, almost indifferently, in a voice reminiscent of a doctor talking about his patient's symptoms.
"I don't want to be the Freudian here, but don't you think that chasing women his whole young adult life, one after the other, is a mere repetitive way to try and capture the affection and love that he didn't get from his mother? It's a crude way of putting it, but I feel like lots of people have experienced something like that." I said, feeling insistently and oddly sentimental.
"Perhaps. It may also be due to a certain heartbreak he experienced when one of the girls he was seriously in love with left to go abroad. But I don't know. Honestly, he's a wild one, and he knows it. He's also very plastic, as you very well know. He's an honest one, though. I know it sounds contradictory. He's quite honest about his two-facedness." he remarked. I happen to agree with him. One time when he was talking to his clique, he said that the only reason he hangs out with them was because he "benefits" from his association with them, and that if there was a useless prick in the clique who happen to not be useful for his assignments or tasks, would be tossed "in the garbage" and disowned by the clique. This happened to a few people I knew.
"I feel like I can compare him to Nagasawa, you know, one of the characters in Murakami's Norwegian Wood. I know it's not the same, Nagasawa being bright academically and being affluent, but I find his infidelity comparable, as well as his justifications for it. Having read it (I lent him a copy of Norwegian Wood prior to that conversation), what do you think?" I asked.
"Ultimately, he's as close to Nagasawa as the sun is to the next solar system. But you're perhaps right on the infidelity. Hatsumi, despite knowing Nagasawa's infidelity, clings to him ever more because she knows no other soul that she can love but him. Here's a true love, and while Nagasawa proclaims his love for Hatsumi too, he is plagued by an inner sense of futility. He cannot believe in the success of their relationship. Added to the fact that he has issues of trusting not just others but himself, and so to retreat from the ensuing pain, he hides away from others, all the while deadening the pain he does experience as a result of his guilt for leaving them through alcohol and sex. And yet he is all too self-aware to get easily lost in these escapisms, and so he's unable to truly deaden the pain he feels. I find him to be similar in this respect to Nagasawa."
I was amazed at the way he put exactly my thoughts into words. Afterwards, I forgot what came after the conversation, but I remember being struck by this comparison. During this reflection, I was again pulled out of my daydreams when he pulled a device out from his pocket as we were walking.
"Wanna smoke?" He asked. He was holding in his right hand a vape of sorts, a rechargeable one. He explained to me that this vape was an improvement on the old cotton vapes with the ceramic coils and the cotton. He thinks it's "healthier" because now it's less powerful and produces less smoke, unlike the older models. The pod, which holds the flavor, is disposable, and he changes them every few weeks. I was reluctant to smoke this vape this time around, but having done it a few times, with his innumerable insistences, I gave in once again and filled my lungs with smoke. The flavor this time around was a blend of certain fruits, ranging from strawberries to grapes to, oddly enough, peaches. As I was exhaling the smoke through my mouth and nose, I was struck again by the sheer uncanny feeling of doing something I should not be doing. This was not the call of some superego inside of me, no. It was not a moral urge. It was more like I was telling myself that what I was doing was "out of character." I felt lost. As the smoke eventually exited my lungs, I took another hit of the vape and this time inhaled much more smoke, coughing in the process.
As I was smoking his vape, he immediately pulled out a carton of Marlboro Red cigarettes and lit one with his cherry colored lighter. He noticed that I stared while he was lighting and smoking his cigarette, and from there, he asked me again if I wanted to try, which I reluctantly assented to. It was the first time that I had inhaled cigarette smoke, but smoking a cigarette was a rather different experience from inhaling vapor. Where one inhaled a vast array of scented flavors, here one inhaled the gasified version of tar. It was simply disgusting, and I coughed multiple times afterwards. He laughed and took the vape and cigarette back. And we continued walking. The cigarette, meanwhile, left a taste and a smell in my mouth, which I was impatient to remove. Nearing the mall, I was suddenly struck again by the "out of character" way in which I had recently been conducting myself. I, who felt as alien to myself as ever, was descending to an increasingly self-destructive course of actions, by which my aim was to eliminate myself (or at least the consciousness of myself). It seems so pretentious and melodramatic to put it in this way, but that was exactly my aim. I was self-aware enough to know that what I was doing was simply not in alignment with, up until now, who I am, or at least who I believed I was. That's why I felt it was out of character.
I believe I was trapped in the midst of this mass, in the seductions of mere appearances, of the mist of delusion, and of the pettiness of everyday talk. I am driven by what they say, a kiss ass to my peer group, a weakling, a sucker for peer pressure. They say you lose yourself in these places, places where nothing worthwhile happens, where hope is not to be found, where everything meaningful has been substituted by mere pleasurable delights that aim at nothing other than their fulfillment. Pure utilitarian pleasures. And yet I enjoyed the orders of this they, cultivating a they self, a self completely composed by the desires, expectations, and the events of the they. Where they are, I am. I wanted to escape. This was all very confusing. On the one hand, I assert my own pure individuality, my separatedness, my "alienation", for lack of a better term, from the all-encompassing Leviathan. On the other hand, I assert my own inseparability from this mass; my self being constituted and ordered by the mass will, by my peer group, by the university discourse, by the world of which I am not a part, and is independent of my will. What is it then? Am I they or am I me? Who am I? Where shall I go? Where—
He abruptly stopped writing, the text cursor blinking before him as he stared blankly at his monitor. The longer he stared at the blinking cursor, the less he could perceive that it was an actual cursor. He gradually came to believe that the cursor was a blinking star somewhere in the vast regions of space, always taunting him to no end. The cursor, this star, seduces him to write, and whenever he pauses his writing, this cursor blinks, awaiting what will come, what must come as a result of the cogitations of the author before it, as a necessary piece of fate that must write and cannot do otherwise. No, at this moment, he was stuck at an impasse, struggling to decide what scene to paint (the scenes he's thought of are mutually exclusive) after the one he described just now. This is just one of innumerable instances wherein this author has suspended the act of writing and proceeded to what appears to be a staring contest with the blinking cursor. What goes on in his head is all rather chaotic, out of joint, and almost always contradictory.
Zooming out beyond him and the monitor, we get to see his whole desk. On his desk, three monitors are mounted so that they look as if they are floating from the table (only the center monitor is turned on at the moment). He is seated on a black, ergonomic chair, his posture strangely straight and tense, while his hands are positioned near his white mechanical keyboard. Under the desk, next to his feet, is his black PC case, housing his computer (which, presumably, in earlier times was used for playing games). On the left side of his desk stood two mugs, one for holding an assortment of stationery, and the other for the dregs of the remains of a coffee that was finished hours ago. He began writing at 7:00 the night before. It is now 2:30 in the morning on the day after. On the right side of his desk stood a stack of books from which he would occasionally select one and peruse select passages. Right now, next to his keyboard, Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human was opened, and therein he highlighted with his pencil Aphorism 348 of the section "Assorted Opinions and Maxims" which went as follows:
From the land of the cannibals. — In solitude the solitary man consumes himself, in the crowd the crowd consumes him. Now choose.
It is plain that he took inspiration from this passage in the most recent stretch of writing he undertook. Indeed, he was mulling over the central (or what he believed to be central) contradiction of his character, namely the tension between mass and individual, between "I" and "They." His character, on the one hand, longed to be individual and to remain in his individuality. On the other hand, his actions betray the simple fact of his desire for connection, to be dissolved within others, to eliminate his individuality. For individuality and the ego is but the prison of the soul. There he both wants to get lost in the They and yet to remain an I. He wants to "have his cake and eat it too" by not choosing either the one or the other, and this is principally one of the things that's making his character suffer. This is the intended effect that he wanted to achieve. Now what remains is how to proceed. The author before us is struggling to come up with a successful conclusion to this episode in the story, and further, struggling to think of the overall conclusion at the end of the story, about what to do with this character who has dug his own grave!
Before we go any further, let us zoom out again and see the whole room, wrapped in total darkness except for the light offered by the monitor screen. Here and there, we can discern certain elements. We see, for instance, the bed, and above the right side of the bed is the window, with the blinds down. Behind the author is a bookshelf full of books, but beyond that, we cannot discern the particular spine or title of each and every book. Next to the bookshelf is a simple white closet, and in front of the closet (that is, next to the author on the left) is an electric fan that's humming alongside the barely audible hums of the computer. The hum produced is one reminiscent of the hum in Lain that is heard everywhere whenever she walks down the street, along the power lines. Taken together, his abode would seem a most desperate and pathetic one, and yet a most clean and ordered one too. Save for the desk, all of his objects and bedding are in order. Everything was clean and organized. Only the books on the desk and he himself, with his black and ragged hoodie and his oversized grey sweatpants, with his black-rimmed, cracked glasses, seemed in chaos.
Now he was no longer mulling over the story. No. He was ruminating on the possibility of actually expressing what he wanted to say through writing. "Can I", he asks himself, "truly get across what I want to say? Is there not a gap between the author and the reader, me and the world, I and they? Is there not a gap between what is said and unsaid, between what is written and omitted? And most importantly, is there not a gap between my inner and outer world, such that each time I attempt to express myself, each time I try to open myself up, I am misunderstood? But this misapprehension is perhaps built into the very structure of our art and Language. That to talk is to miss the point, to write to engage in the quintessential activity of dissimulation. Was it not Wittgenstein who rightly said that the most important things are those we cannot articulate, what lies outside Language, and what poetry cannot fully capture in its totality? Who am I but a bard that listens to the song of the muses and puts to writing my mortal misapprehension, my erroneous interpretation of the divine song? How much injury do I do to poetry when I, a pretentious dilettante, at the height of my megalomania and ecstatic exhiliration, put aside for a time my intense self-loathing, pick up my metaphorical pen, and write not, mind you, for an indifferent audience, but all for the sake of an abstract 'art,' a tradition which I trace from the very improvisations done by the supposed rhapsodes that constituted the homeric tradition. What right do I have to write so crudely?"
He stopped ruminating for a moment, stared again at the blinking cursor, and then gazed over at his copy of the Iliad. He continued thus: "Language is a closed system, a chain of words that refers to nothing outside itself. It's an 'Ouroboros', a snake eating its own tail. Meaning cannot be found outside Language. Nor is there a deeper signified in Language. Language is simply the surface, and on the surface is where meaning lies. Take a word, say, an apple. An apple means something only because it is not an orange. We form part of the definition for our apple by defining it in terms of what it is 'not,' namely, it is neither an orange, a pear, a watermelon, nor a dragonfruit, etc. Similarly, haven't you noticed that when we read about the definitions of words, say, the word 'language', we use other 'words' in order to define it? Language is the 'structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary.' To define a word, we use other words. Is this not tautological? But in Language, tautology is precisely how we express meaning. That is why meaning is neither outside Language nor deep inside, but on the surface, sustained in the relations between words, in the chain of signifiers itself. Outside this chain, we can neither make heads nor tails. And yet, as Wittgenstein boldly says, the most important things, indeed the most meaningful things, lie outside Language. It is because it lies outside Language that it remains incomprehensible and, therefore, meaningless for us. But in fact, it is precisely because it is incomprehensible that we cannot be sure of its meaninglessness. Just as we cannot be sure of its meaningfulness. This truth we know to be certain. This feeling, sentiment, and poetic quality inherent in us nudges us towards the unsaid, towards the truth, towards the region that lies outside Language. It is in its very nature that we cannot speak of it, and it is precisely by leaving it unsaid, by omitting it, that we have done justice to it, by being silent. 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.'"
He ended his long rumination with a quote from Wittgenstein's Tractatus. But even in his thoughts, he could not express what he really wanted to think and say, since thoughts, after all, occur in Language. Language does not mean here (if we, as the omniscient viewers, view from afar in an objective plane) merely what is said and written. No. Even thinking itself is linguistic. Though our thoughts are not immediately social, we think in Language, in words. Our thoughts, thereby, are not nearer to this region of the unsaid more than our spoken and written words. To truly be silent is to not even think anymore. To elude Language completely. Neither thoughts nor words can ever express what we want to say. "There is a gap between what I think I want to say or write and what I actually say or write. Moreover, there is an even more fundamental gap between what I 'want' and what I 'think.' To think is to think in words, but what I want to express is not understood in words, but in feelings that I can never completely get a hold of. Therefore, these 'scribblings' are doomed to fail. By the end of it, I would have misled the reader and misunderstood myself."
All the while he was ruminating, the cursor maintained its steady pace of blinking, always taunting him. He knows for certain that he will be misunderstood. He knows he cannot express what he wants to say. He knows there's a gap between his inner and outer worlds. And yet he is compelled to write. He cannot do otherwise. He is moved by something, an urge of some kind, something that urges him to write, for in writing he forgets himself: "During the act of writing, I feel a sense of urgency, a virile drive to describe, critique, and declare by means of the written word. The whole time I write, I am ruled by a Necessity, which I can barely understand, except for the fact that it insists on the importance of its task. I feel as if I am committing myself to a project that transcends my very individuality, to purposes and motivations beyond my egoistic ambitions. Necessity drives me like a slave until I have nothing further to write. Afterward, when reflecting on what I've written in a calm, almost trance-like state, I feel the accusations thrown at me, and I am forced to shoulder guilt for the crime of writing."
"Moreover, when I write, I forget myself, and I feel really good, as if I'm being pushed by the waves of the vast ocean of Being, merging with the world-consciousness. In writing, I erase myself, my ego, and the distinction between self and others. In writing, I grasp the essential truth of the nothingness of the self and the oneness of all things. In writing, I efface my individuality and affirm the Being of the world", he thought thus. After these long, drawn-out compound thought sentences, he was finally returning to his senses. He went back and stared at the blinking cursor, and thought earnestly about his character. "What does my character want? I know I wrote him not as a reflection of 'me' per se, but rather I took elements from myself and abstracted a type of person living in our society. So then what does he want? Well, that's just it. Like me, he doesn't know what he wants, only the fact that there is a 'want', that there is an 'urge' that pushes him ever more viciously to action, despite not knowing the nature of the action and for what cause. The character I wrote lies between being consumed by the 'they' and by his own self. He longs to be rid of himself as much as he wants to be rid of everyone else. His desires are contradictory, but they might as well be contradictory, for in contradiction, in paradox, we gain a certain knowledge of the truth that transcends mere logical syllogisms. My character wants to be liberated from acting, but he will have to realize that liberation is action, that there is no world beyond appearance, that appearance is what is real, what appears 'is'. He thinks that annihilation is true liberation, sure, but liberation in what sense? In the sense of nothingness? Such a thing is a dead end. That is not a choice. If he wants to truly be liberated, he will have to endure the suffering of phenomena, and to abolish within himself the artificial gap he erected between inside and out, between I and they, between appearance and 'thing in itself', between acting and non-acting. It is in suffering through the world that he can truly be saved."
Our author now muses, with great and ridiculous sincerity, upon the motivations of his character. He would like to construct his character in such a way as to be liberated precisely by suffering through the world, not imagining, like a hermit, an ideal world beyond the material. Such lofty ideas are but the errors of an alien past. The author recognizes the very nature of acting as something that ought not to be disavowed, but must be channelled in something creative, something he himself is already privy to by the very act of writing. He will have to chart the progress of his character through the realization of suffering as salvation, and enter into a real tête-à-tête, to recognize that essence emerges precisely through the fall to appearance. But here we are perplexed as omniscient viewers: what is the author even writing about? Is this a story? It seems like it. It could just as well be a memoir, a diary entry, or a fictionalized account of his biographical details, which amounts to the same thing. Anyhow, regardless of what he is writing, something is being done and accomplished, and we are the intimate witnesses to the activity in which the author, this dilettante, has confined himself.
I think I know now why I'm always misunderstood, why people mistake my statements and character for their complete opposite. Everywhere I go, every word I utter, every gesture I perform, every intention I aim to express, is met with a radical and oppressive form of irony. In this age, nothing is sincere; everything is false, ironic, at a distance. Every act of sincerity, every intention to convey the honest truth, is met with a certain measure of incredulity, apprehended at a lofty distance, hoisted up by the twin angels of rationality and cynicism. And yet, funny as it is paradoxical, every time I utter something ironic, something quite extreme and edgy, that makes light of the situation I am in, that tries to commune with the irony of the world, I am shunned. It's as if when I turn to irony, the world meets me with an equal measure of sincerity. It is a double standard that has irritated me for a while, as if only they can be ironic in relation to my sincerity, but not vice versa. I am mistaken for irony when I express my sincerity, and sincerity when I express my irony. Such is the disease of our time.
As I was daydreaming once more, we made it to the mall, and he made it his first order of business to survey the new environment for his "recruitment" efforts. After surveying for a while and remarking here and there about a particular girl who stood out to him, we left and went inside the mall. While loitering about, we went inside a Lawson in order to get some lunch. As I was ordering my lunch, he asked me:
"You wanna drink?"
"Drink what?"
"Let's do some daydrinking at the park again like last time. Just a quick one. This week's been fucking rough, my dude."
I ruminated on how sound this idea was. I was, of course, feeling sick for the day, so to drink would be to essentially heighten my sickness. And yet, like earlier, I felt a sense of delight, a perverse pleasure, at the idea of this arrangement. Not only did I feel that indulging in such pleasures would "beat me outta me," as Kurt says, but I felt a thrill in doing these minor transgressions. I had previously never done any of this, but owing to certain seductions, as well as a desire to rebel against my earlier upbringing, I renounced my nature and sank my teeth into the many things that life has yet to offer. And so, I bought four cans of Jack and Coke and then proceeded to eat my lunch inside Lawson before going out to the park to drink. When I was done with my meal, we were getting up to leave when he suddenly stopped me.
"You want something?"
"What something? I just ate?"
"This"
He showed me two bars of Cadbury Milk Chocolate, which he then proceeded to surreptitiously load inside his backpack. He then cautiously made hand signs to me that seemed to communicate that we should go out immediately from the Lawson. Later on, I realized that he wasn't seen since he was standing at a blind spot in the store, out of sight of the mirrors or the CCTV cameras, which he had perceived already as we first entered the store. I was a bit too dumbfounded to respond or reply to anything he said afterwards. On the one hand, there was a thrill to the act and a sense of camaraderie as I was an accessory after the fact at his petty theft. On the other hand, I was repulsed, disgusted, and desired nothing more than to remove myself from his presence and this situation more broadly. This act of theft, which is made even more ridiculous since I know he had money to pay, I later realized came as the mere logical consequence of his nature, as already detailed in earlier parts.
"Why do it, though?"
"Why not? You see, everything is all about strategy and power. If I can do it, it's not my fault that it happened, but it's their fault that they let it happen. If they didn't want people to steal, they should've been more well prepared and perceptive of their customers. Their oversight is what caused the theft, not my act alone."
"Do you honestly believe any of this?"
"Partly yes. I mean, at some level, if you don't want things to happen, then you should take effective measures to prevent it."
I was dumbfounded. I knew he was being tongue-in-cheek, but clearly, he sees some truth in this sentiment. He believes in his own capacity for transgression and asserts it when he perceives an opportunity arises for him. And he clearly practices it in his everyday dealings with other people. He picks out an unassertive and meek kid, milk him for all his worth, and then dispose of him when the kid has nothing left to give. Here I am, this kid, the latest "victim", and in the end, I know I will be disposed of. There's nothing stopping him from expressing influence over me, just as seemingly no one is stopping me from leaving him and this whole convoluted series of situations. Why long for exit when it is within arm's reach? To cross it is not very hard. One only has to take the first step, and everything will be over, as if one were waking up from a fever dream. But I didn't wake up. Instead, we were nearing the park next to this mall, and sat under a tree next to the dog park. There was no one in the park at the dead of noon, the heat was quite intense. No dogs either, just insects and the humming of distant ferries. Taken together, we looked like some community trash heap left to rot at the side of the park.
As we sat, I cracked open one of the cans and handed it over to him. Meanwhile, I opened a can for myself, and we both took a sip and went on to shoot the shit. Talking about nothing in particular, we went from topic to topic, from one mind-numbing banality to another, just to get through the lunch period. I hesitated to raise anything myself, because I knew whatever response I'd get would just add to the nausea and the whole incoherence of this day thus far. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, I was struck by another epiphany similar to the one that occurred this morning. I realized how futile everything was, how now at this moment I was holding on to this second can, how I was to open it, how I'm sitting at this moment with a stranger that I don't even know anything about, nor care to know. I wanted to commit suicide by drowning myself in the nearby Pasig River. I don't know what else to think. It just seems as if everywhere I go and every choice I make leads to the same conclusion as far as my existence is concerned. I therefore asked him.
"Don't you ever think of just killing yourself?"
"Whoa. Where did that come from? Are you alright?"
"I'm fine, but I assumed you had thought of killing yourself?"
"Yeah, of course. Everyone has. I had actually thought about it when I had one of my breakups. It's hard, but you get over it."
"No, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about committing suicide because there's no point to it. Like, not because of unhappiness, but because of pointlessness, because it doesn't matter either way, whether you continue to live or not."
"Look at you. Talking about some deep philosophical shit. That stuff doesn't matter to me. Unlike you, I don't really think about the grand meaning of the universe or whatever. Not that I think there is a meaning, but whether there is a meaning or not, it's not important. What's important is the present, that we're enjoying life, that we're happy, and yesterday belongs to yesterday, and tomorrow belongs to tomorrow, and that neither concerns us in the present."
"Are you happy?"
"Haha. I can't say I am. Though I'm not extremely unhappy. I guess I can say I'm content. But if I said that, you'd think I was lying."
"Right. I mean, your lust is precisely the thing that pulls you from multiple directions. You can't be content. It's part of your nature to ceaselessly be divided and torn apart by the vicissitudes of instincts, and yet your desire remains to be satiated. The thing is, only death can abolish this desire. Put in another way, only death can make us content, can complete us."
"That sounds a bit harsh, but I guess you're right. Look, I'm not a saint, but I'm not an evil person from my own estimation. We are all part of the same hypocrisy after all. You shouldn't try to wash your hands and assume a moral high ground. You're pretty nasty yourself."
I was beginning to grow increasingly annoyed and angry. And yet, I realize he's right. Who am I to judge? I'm the one who's sitting right next to him at a park, daydrinking before a class at 1:30. What the fuck am I doing? Honestly, it doesn't really click. When I first entered college, I had expectations that I, of course, knew would be disappointed. However, I didn't expect that this was where everything was going to go. My grades are down, my friends deserted me, and now, because of it, I am frequently hanging out with lowlifes such as him. However, I'm not made better than him just because I can recognize him as scum. He is also very much aware of his own wretchedness. But he's doing nothing about it. He's doing the same thing I am doing. I am immersing myself in scum, in the they, even as I criticize it. I have done this self-reflection innumerable times, but now it is starting to dawn on me that it should eventually lead to action. I was getting sick as well. I felt like I was going to throw up. My sense of reality was breaking apart. What do I have left when all these are gone? When I subtract myself and they, when I subtract my interests, my desires, my dislikes, my aspirations, and my failures. What remains when I have removed everything, every layer, that constitutes my Being? Is there an essence to me? An essential and stable core on which my whole existence hinges? If there is a core, is it where the seat of consciousness is located? Is it perhaps the very thing that desires? I was so confused at all these abstractions that I couldn't take it any longer.
"There is nothing inside me, and there is nothing on the surface. I am what I appear to be. I am nothing. I am nothing. This world is but a terrible dream that I long to wake from. After that (and before that), there is nothing. As for morality, I'm not standing on a moral high ground. I am a hypocrite, sure, but I am much more willing to face hypocrisy. Fuck you for even suggesting that we are similar. We're very fucking different. We're both scum, but produced in different ways. We're both rotting flowers, but facing the opposite direction, one facing the twilight, the other facing the mountains. Although we share the same essential nature, of being nothing, we both have different attitudes towards it. You choose to be blind to it. I choose to pose it as the fundamental question. And here's my conclusion: nothing matters, for I am nothing. Therefore, I should just leave this place and return to a time before I was born. Why do I have to put up with this? There's no rule that says I should remain here. I should just get up and leave. Taking the first step is the hardest. But once I start, all the rest will follow."
I hastily got up, threw my can in the trash, grabbed my backpack, and ran from him. He shouted phrases I can't remember now, and initially tried to follow, limping towards me, but I overtook him. Sweat was pouring throughout my whole body as the sun christened my very being. As I ran, I made my way back to school, trying to avoid eye contact with passersby