Declan Tan
[Below is an excerpt from Declan Tan’s debut novel. As much a work of philosophy as a work of literature, it takes the reader in and out of abstract spaces, and exists somewhere between 1984 and Infinite Jest. It’s a small book that packs a big punch. Enjoy!]
~
In this life we have everything backward. Born into death. Politeness before truth. The suicidal earth sets itself alight. And just as how death comes before life for some of us, man does not work because he has something to offer the world. Instead he is forced to work because he is told something can be offered to him. Forced to cultivate a personality beneficial to the slow suicide of the Earth. And where do we find acceptance? Always in another, always external. Rarely in these conditions could we hope to find it within. And we are taught many things out of blindness. We are told some are born for Greatness. We are told some have Greatness thrust upon them. This too is backward. Most, if not all, have idiocy thrust upon them. And then, again, som are born to it. And one day there will be no bone left to grind Some speckled wind will blow its heavy breath across our vision and over our trees and leave us all in the hollow.
Or is it not us but simply the murderous sun that has forsaken us? I lit a rotten cigarette and watched its burning ember glow, the ash over-running its edge until the small orange hum of heat was lost in the gray-black. I blink and wash my eyes with sparse tears.
The foreign body sensation.
We create problem solvers to problems we ourselves have created. Is man just a cancer on this earth? It cannot be. By its nature it has given birth to the footprint of man. So is it the Sun and the Universe and all its trappings that have laid this mighty circle of beginning-end? I watch a man unfold six-foot-high boxes from a truck and wheel them through the door of a high-street clothing store. Every step I watch closely. And I see the wheel turn. I see him heaving and huffing out breath. I wonder if the earth is killing itself. Every move he makes unravels a little further the trail for our final neutrality. The Earth is set alight, by what, by itself or by all the spontaneously combined conditions of all nature? Of physics and science? The conditions of its existence determine its fate. Death. And the same is graphed for mankind. Does the Earth feel us as some foreign body sensation? Or as a part of its own skin? Its own loose flesh. He wheels out the next set of boxes.
As I watch the small wheels turn I’m reminded of her repetition theory. This design, filling this box, now fashionable, now modern, would have be behind it the same idea one hundred years from now. Slogans would tell us, by living vicariously through the shining and straightened hairs on our society’s head, that we were succeeding if they were succeeding. The people walk by, looking in through windows of shops not yet open. Having desire fed to them and feeding back their own with some secret poison laid inside to boot. Write the future, we are told. Taught to live in emptiness, and happily, as the future is written for us. Besieged by manufactured perversity. Depending where you looked, something meaningless took prominence over something potentially meaningful. Sport reached the front pages. Showbiz and gossip clawing across and through it all. Paranoia that these things were happening. No. Not paranoia. Awareness. The awareness reduced to the simplistic label of paranoia. The state could close in on us, but to notice it would be paranoia. Or was it awareness of the possibility?
We had clicked on to the last suffering cycle of change. From now on it would be all neo-this neo-that, all regurgitated and repeated, re-combined to form something simultaneously old and new: new-old.
I clenched my fist and looked at the lost ink on the knuckles. Every writer is part of a movement, regardless of whether they accept it or are aware of it. The so-called Great Novels of every century, it is a fact, were not written hundreds of years before, no. The process is an evolution, a movement. A mass of writers makes up the flood. How much we put down to individual writers is up to the reader. Even the novels or the work supposedly revolutionary merely reverses or turns on its head the form, the meaning and the structure, the content. Merely reversed and therefore still made of the same basic ingredients. In the same way fashion had clicked, in the same way design had clicked, in the same way art had clicked, the old repeating as the new, writing was making the clicking sound in my ear as it dripped out.
Subjective without message other than that created by the viewer, the consumer, as we lock ourselves in, closing all the doors and sealing them shut. Producing our own mirrors and being mirrors simultaneously. Projecting our Selves onto it, into it. The reflection more thrilling than the reality. Reflecting ego and self, bringing it all back to the cracked mirror of our own image which echoed off and repeated as far as we let it.
To infinity.
Divided sunlight shone in the kaleidoscope where creativity had been distilled into the holy moment of creator, rather than any focus on the creation itself, refracting back the sorry and turgid intellectuals all specialised in their locked offices, where we have been left with homilies of ideologising from the top of the class down. Yes we were all individual, yes we were all unique. But eventually we’re all put through the sieve, and then we pour out as easily classifiable characters.
So then what are you? I said.
Mute. She laughed.
It was just a theory.
In another hundred years modern art will not have changed. The evolution has ended. The only remaining morsel of popular art will be self-referential masturbation from here on in. Stuck on repeat, no progress. Where paint and canvas used to say something unspeakable, it now only reflects back to the dark room. Showing us only what we wanted or were capable of seeing. So-called poets of matter would be like al the unsuccessfuls, and like me. Trying it through failing. It would just go over and over like fashionable clothing, like women’s magazines printing doctrines on ‘real-life’ stories, health, food, home, gardens, interiors: dead beasts but somehow breathing. The same things in new combinations. Nothing fresh. Nothing original. But what ever was? Try to create something new and with a little scratching around you realise it’s most likely already been done. LEave it too long and it expires quickly. Thought what was being sold didn’t need to be original or fresh, just the next rung on an endless ladder down to the shit.
~
Droning insentient thousands had been gathering there, through word of mouth and by the abject power of mass telecommunication. They marched heads-up through the once-buzzing banking district. Now the tall monuments of ice stood desolate and hummed not with glory or the transient feeling of success, but with a misery that permeated the entire city. Metro Polis lined the road. Standing behind improvised metal barriers with whistles and batons in hand, riot gear cloaking their bodies and faces from any recognition or attack. The day brought the promise of ironing out some of the undesirables. The chance to crack the skull of the Dangerous Class. Spill the brains. Plunge a fist into an already shattered cranium. The Metro Polis were the protectors of what was already a baneful society sick with the fer and in constant reform toward disaster and against its own people, against civilisation. And against any notion of enlightenment. The news screens dotted on walls and offices, newsstands and coffee houses showed them moving toward the meeting point. Humble figures all of the same ominous ilk. Masked, blacked out eyes, angry young hoodlums or focused provocateurs. An image so distant from the reality of actual discontent, which in actuality was more like masses of spectacle-wearing middle classes, that even setting out on the march they felt justified. Egged on by the teasing news corporations. They felt an affirming reassurance at being so closely knitted together. One set of enemies on one side and another set of enemies on the inside. But today they would not be competing as they did in the working hours, forcefully setting one family against another. They would unlock possibility. Today their brains connected on a frequency that resonated with the other. They were there for the same reason and their minds pulsated with mutual understanding. The same was true with the militarized music in the ears of the Metro Polis. The rhythm bringing with it ideas, memories. Known functions. Repeaters. Like shotguns. And it echoed the truth. That the twenty percent of somnambulists in any given population watched them both with fear? Or was it admiration? It was surely neither; they were watched with disgust by the news-chomping twenties, the ones fed so easily and happily by the Metropolis newswire and the O Press and the rest of them.
What if the common frequencies could be shifted toward a more agreeable pitch? Agreeable to whom? Without the communicators under their shirtsleeves it would be a discordant impossibility. The electricity of the mind had to be harnessed before that of the earth. It began with understanding. What use was this mass of communication to the everyday man if it was put to the use they saw that day. The old adage of dividing and conquering. Surely this was useless to mankind in its present state. But it was useful to those wanting to ignore, wanting to sell something. News was like Burroughs’ heroin. The user was sold to it, not the product sold to the user. They thought they were benefiting from the onset of electrical means flowing through the everyman on every dy. But what was really gained? Distraction from thought. Distraction from freedom. Convergence toward uniformity and conformity. But what was conformity if one didn’t believe in the concept? Conformity was set up through and by the mass communicators. There was no avoiding it. The message was clear: Conformity means direction. And it was the same as ever, but that doesn’t mean the common goal is a good one. But if you can guide the people into understanding differently, then there’s hope for salvation. But not for the ones at the bottom of the pyramid. Was it conspiracy? Of course not, that was the easy answer. It was simply good business. Sound and strong. And it was their greatest goal in fashioning solid managers out of the buried and the lost. Reliable managers for a system without questions or questioners. In answer to a question never posed. They do think it’s funny, turning rebellion into money. And what good did it do him to ask these questions? If he simply went along with them, life would become easy, smooth. He would be respectable. If he had that, then maybe he would have happiness. The temptations never ceased.
~
The marchers piled on through derelict streets accompanied by their armoured escort, both itching for a fight but only half of them armed for it. Every now and then a rumbling came from outside the procession, a baton flashing through constricted vision into the body of some quivering protestor. Volatile authorities circled in choppers above; journalists were sire to stay on the outside of the marching boundaries, but through repeating the citizens’ footage back they could make out as if they were amongst them. Rather than merely on the outskirts of reason. They were fighting for justice too, but it was the reverse. They were just spectators, refusing to get too close.
He was stuck in the middle, the sounds of the polis and the people mingling into a crescendo of noise that jarred his innards. Their bellies roared for revolution, a revolution that would end the oligarchy, create social conditions capable of change. Their dissatisfaction bubbled through each and every set of shuddering entrails screaming for an end to economical barbarism. But it was misplaced, they wanted to replace one domination with another, seeing to it that there was an end to the metal rain of authority only to be replaced with a new bureaucracy, something they chose not to foresee.
Symbiotic or separate. Forgotten, broken. And it was peaceful, non-violent, it should be said.
That was at least until they arrived on the final stretch.
We settled in and gathered around, planting ourselves defiantly on the ground, as one by one a crop of ringleaders took turns directing the ears of our homemade circus. They were the self-importants. The ones that did it for the status. They did it for the moral superiority they thought came with it. I don’t think it ever occurred to them they were just as puerile as the last man. Nietzsche’s last man. But the feeling of self-confidence, even arrogance, that oozed from them was nonetheless contagious. What would it be like having a piece of that? The answer came wit hthe first: a member of this young anti-capitalist party, from the university that everybody had heard of but no one had gone to. He settled everyone down with his high-pitched whistle that he blew louder and longer, directly into the ears of us closely surrounding him. We quieted down, turning to look him in the face as he stepped up onto a blue milk crate he carried in his black-gloved hands. We gave him his moment in the rain.
He urged us to silence, gesturing with his arms and waiting patiently for the last blood-screams of die fascist scum die to wretch out of a last man’s mouth before he began his personal rally. His curly hair spread across to the side of his face from sweat after small, calculated scuffles with the authorities. He mopped his brow with his glove, taking it off as he began to shout to the gathered, speaking out to us as if he was some beat poet: My name is Breker and I want to tell you something. The hallucination of truth that we believed in, the suggestibility of our society, touched by the far-reaching technology of the modern age, is being witnessed here all around us today. But it is dying. The spectators on one side believe one thing, (he pointed across to the side where tourists snapped digital photographs) and the protestors here on the inside believe another thing (he opened his arms as if to embrace us). The kettle is beginning to steam. The rain beginning to fall. The onslaught of developing technology has never been questioned, but we must put our backs up to the machinery and ask: are these advances good for us, for mankind, good for the average human?
He cleared his throat.
They never thought to consider what was happening, just as long as we slide across the cash and the cut plastic. Gaining in confidence, his arm reached out and spread over the crowd.
And they put it to us like a fist inserted in the mouth. He formed a fist. The constant slow death of the inner man that held each of us down, the refusal to denounce the flag, the state, the government, and announce our freedom, putting us out of reach, out of contact.
Make no mistake (the fist raised high). We are not Luddites.
Education is our answer. I started to think maybe he had a point.
But even when the government gives it to us, for those god-awful years of New Terror, nothing changes. In fact it gets worse. Much worse. (His throat began to scrape from his shouting. He held on clenching his fist trying to keep his voice loud above the restless crowd.)
The technology on the outside provides too much distraction, an easy door that leads to some kingdom of the mind untouchable by any education or learning.
They offered us new tools: It’ll make your life easier.
It’ll change your life.
It’ll change the way you live.
Your life will never be the same again.
And they offer us add-ons and plug-ins and applications and peripherals and downloads and Easter eggs and updates until we don’t know what to do with our selves any more apart from clamber for it. (He began to go off on a tangent, as if he had harboured some concealed but longstanding hatred for these things.) And all the whilte the super-rich get richer and the poor simply die. (He returned to the tried and tested material.)
But we sat cosily insulated from the ewolrd, insulated from reality, hidden and cushioned from the real problem.
And so our minds began to eat themselves and each other.
He stood down trailing off on his words.
Some cheered, they nodded Yes, of course, as if to say there could be no discussion of this obvious truth, without analysis, just acceptance. Some just wanted to be on the inside, with some secret knowledge, but in the end it was for the purpose of making themselves feel exceptional. At the root of all of the rhetoric there were hidden motives kept unspoken. And just as every man deludes himself constantly, they thought that they might be immune from this labrynth of denial. But they weren’t. None of us were.
They were glad, some of them , to be on the unpopular side, to be going against the wave, for the thrill of it or for the feeling that they were somehow better. Superiority rather than kinship. It was good to have something to complain about, they seemed to think. It took the pressure off. And it was the gift that the middle class wanted to give to the poor. But the poor didn’t care. They were already too ritually obsessed with riches. And the middle classes deluded themselves too, that they weren’t obsessed with the power or the freedom for instruction that came with money. Silent columns that tower over mere men, pillars that crumble and favour ethereal time. They thought they couldn’t be polluted by it. They were pure and for the people. Not for the self. Only some were forever trapped.
As the poor geared up for another in the pub, a cache of pulls in the club and a wrap of powder up the sub, the middlers blurted impotent slogans and shouted for the freedom of the people. They walked among the forest of cathedrals and churches, remnants of dust and fabric masked everywhere. But the people didn’t seem to notice or want to notice. The activists were hippies, crazies, as they had been taught. They didn’t have real problems. So apathy was handed out like bread to the hungry and it filled the stomachs. Sometimes satisfied. Here take this, all of you. And eat it. This is your body. Given up, for me.
Alive and peaceful. The impoverished wanted escape, complete transcendence from the bitter melancholy that translated into complete bliss and enslavement to the machinery. Little engines powering the shit box. The working class that participated at the march wore uniforms and carried weapons. They had titles and masks. They had numbers on their shoulders they removed before the ruckus ensued. They would soon take much joy in the violence. But later they might have wished they were there independently. They would wish they had turned up with harder weapons.
A small surprise had been planned.
The Old Man withdrew from the gang to press on the perimeters of the march, and as the camera shutters went with all flashbulbs popping, he entered the revolving door. He made his way up the stairway. He knew she would be waiitng. The door was locked. He knocked. She turned the key.
Hello.
Greetings.
I see you have the bag.
Of course.
Let them have what they want.
Walking over to the window, the crowd amassed below. The glass buildings reflected the sun down into their eyes. The view of them seemed to him like a colony of ants, but he ignored the obviousness of this observation. He started throwing out the notes a handful at a time until the bag got empty enough and he could flip it under and shake out all the paper. Teeming insects all of them together rustling under the dried leaves. He sa them as people. The King’s head flipped and spun as it caught the breeze. He watched it tumbling, she behind him watching the door for broken entries. He mumbled laughter to himself as he saw the first ones reaching out their hands and clutching.
Back down on the ground Beker continued his speech. He stepped back onto his homemade podium. We will not stand idly by while the innocent are raped and pillaged. We will not work ourselves so deep into the ground and into the machine that…
A five note slipped itself onto his cheek. He swiped at it with his glove. He stared at it. Always his head down on the note, he wiped the sweat again, slowly comprehending what he had caught in his open mouth.
The notes kept tumbling down, the crowd cut silent and watched for a moment as the paper drifted in the breeze. A scream from the back. A woman in disbelief:
It’s cash it’s cash.
The mass slowly began to jump, arms innocently outstretched, not trusting their eyes, not believing the fortune being squandered and not understanding. Their lives shrunk down to the concentrated moment. The Now.
They leapt and grabbed at the air, using bodies as ladders, jumping over each other and trampling backs and hands and arms and faces with their feet. They pardoned and smiled. It was new. The slow frenzy had begun and the Old Man tumbled out more notes: a fresh black sack of tens. He threw them out in a haste, pausing for a moment to watch, then grabbing the next sack. He emptied the twenties. The scene was more paper than people as they hurried around pushing and barging toward the drop zone.
It’s happening.
Of course it is, she said.
The Polis now looked up and the journalists, not knowing whether to grab or to herd control, reached out their arms. Waves of truncheons beat down on the crowd, as if they had been given an excuse to pound blissful violence into the dispersed rioters.
FUCKING GRAB IT people yelled FUCKING GET IT.
The swelling swept in and surrounded, like thumping feet on porcelain tiles. A release as forgiving as it was forsaken. Rubber treads beating for blood.
The Old Man picked up the last two sacks and held them tight at the window ledge.
You should watch this, he said, looking at them like people.
I’ve seen it before.
He turned out the bags, watching down on the eager faces pelting about and looking up still not noticing the source of the cash flow. OI YOU. He hummed a tune to himself as he dropped out the first sack, the whole thing. Full of fifties. Two spotted it immediately on its plummet past the building and before it struck the young man on the head, the bag had been seized and then ripped to shreds between the two hands. FUCKING MOVE. Breker held it from one end as a faceless Metro Polis-man yanked at it, stretching it from the other. Their survival instincts kicking in. The horses sent wild. In their eyes they recognized themselves. The man in black began to swing his staff at Breker as he held on, ducking his head to protect himself from the blows. He struck at the fingers holding on, turning red beneath the gloves as they were beaten into shattered submission. Yet Breker refused to let go. His fingers were smashed into useless dangling flesh inside his gloves. He fell to the ground, more Metro Polis running in with kicks and fresh rubber treads. Beating at his face with fists and weapons alike. He still held on. The Old Man watched from above. He knew this would happen. They both did. The Metro Polis-man pulled the sack out of the mash of fingers and held it aloft signaling victory to his comrades. There was a small cheer audible amongst the roars of voices going hoarse from quick opportunism. Bodies lay almost still, strewn in a mess as livelier ones bounded over them to pick up the loose and still-falling bills scattering on the pavement. The young man lay next to Breker, both knocked out temporarily. The Old Man briefly looked down at them both and saw dead ants.
