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    [rant] Arguing with Capitalophiles

    An unrewarding ritual in which both you and your sparring partner unwittingly reveal more of your respective ideologies than your understandings of commerce, history and anthropology. It's a game of strategic double-think. Your adversary ascribes every success and pleasure of the modern world to capitalism - or as partial benefits afforded by even our supposedly crude approximation of true capitalism - but insists every failure and evil is owed instead to our insufficient embrace of unmitigated, truer capitalism. Our 'good' is because we are capitalist, and our 'bad' is because we are not.


    The dialogue is constrained; they will seem unable to conceptualise anything beyond the measure of economics. "That is fundamentally qualitative and cannot be quantified", you'll say, and they'll reply "I have factored that in". Love; holistic happiness; the joy of spoiling a child; the impulse to die to protect one's sibling; all economic quantities supposedly appearing as higher order corrections in a hitherto unobtained grand unified equation. All monetary, all inextricable from a dehumanising cost function, and all given philosophical significance only by the mathematically illiterate.


    Your opponent is insistent. Yet, something hides behind their loyalty to the dogmas of capitalism, and underpins their commitment to the rehearsed rhetoric of MBAs. It is there behind the pride, and the unconvincing guise of having logically derived their position. You will detect something deeply personal, deeper even than the delights of contrarianism, and the self-flattery afforded by the indulgent delusion of meritocracy. 


    Lurking beneath is a terrifying social anxiety. It is no comfort to be a beneficiary of a system if perceived as undeserving by its victims. And it is an existential threat to know that respected peers think lowly of the forces which have enabled your luxuries and cemented your world view. That the calculus with which you measure yourself - the good are rich, and the poor are inadequate - is in jeopardy. That instead, to be elite is to be a bit pathetic. When self-assurance is in short supply, one battles for peer assurance; and to be unable to receive it appears in your interlocutor as an immense frustration.


    The argument will leave you craving a crude honesty. 'I eat because I am hungry, I fuck because I am lonely, and I deny foundational injustices because I am insecure'.

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    [poem] On names

    Oh to hear one's name sung out, carried on a beautiful voice. How I long to hear "it's my Tyson-baby!" cry out from the other room, or a wistful "Oh Mr Jones" flow down a London alleyway. Just once more. Life stalls and atrophies without the nourishment of a "Tybabybich!". Its ceaseless thorns are pruned only by a "hi Tysie-boy", and the wounds soothed with "how's it going Ty-man?". A hole is left unfilled for every "TyTy" and "T-dawg" heard nevermore. 


    Promise me, dear reader, to sing aloud every loved name that happens through your doorway. Of each, permute. Transfigure. And drum it until they feel the stamp on their very soul. Let each take a piece of you away with them to replay in the nighttime when nostalgia collects its dues. But know the gift is bittersweet; the infinite variations of every name echo long beyond the last time each is spoken. They feed an insatiable hunger.


    Oh to hear that voice again speak that name, in its original affection, key and candor. Just once more!

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    [poem] Scenes to remember

    I am on a lakeside bench in a cold night. She drapes her legs over mine. I recite embarassing excerpts from a self-unaware journal, but the story is known to us both. She kisses me, I think, or I her, or perhaps not for one more day. Soon we will wake to trumpets, and soon alone.



    It won't be so, she says. But the poem might be anyway written, if I so wish it. I do, so it is. And it becomes so. She's tearily in my doorway now. It takes some years to throw away her empty perfume bottle, but I manage it.



    I am in a castle, of sorts. She bursts into the room with penned words we had been too afraid to say aloud. Words which had long outgrown their teenage frivolity and matured into paralysis. But I'm even older now. How could I ever say them again?

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    [excerpts] The Picture of Dorian Gray

    Some years ago I read, and became engrossed by, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. The story became glued in my mind, somehow cemented by the entirely different story of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. The decadent and depraved lives of the former's aesthetes were juxtaposed* with the grandiose ambitions of the latter's miserable artists. Where Wilde's hedonists self-indulged and contented themselves with shallow quasi-philosophical rhetoric in unending dinner parties, Kaufman's obsessive playwright self-flagellated and devoted themselves to an overzealous masterpiece. Yet they all sought out terrific ecstasies and terrible suffering, and aspired to romantic, idealised cadences of life. I convinced myself these were in some way the same characters, and the same cautionary tale about self-affirmation and intellectual masturbation**.


    It was once my intention to compare these works in a sprawling, insufferable and likely unreadable essay, enumerating the values commandeered for my own life, and the lessons reappropriated and perverted to enhance my nihilism. Mercifully, I have since lost the necessary energy and wit - if ever I had it. Below are remnant excerpts in vague groups which hint at the abandoned thesis. Some will demonstrate Wilde's beautiful prose and charming digestions of the human condition. And some will be very upsetting.


    * who could use such a term without embarrassment?


    ** It will be clear that consuming these media so soon of one another has irrevocably damaged my person, as have no doubt the relevant ruminations with the likes of Anna Moloney and Luke Luttmann.