now playing: dreamer by the blaze
You met me at a very strange time in my life.
Fight Club (1999)
part one: poetry
it’s been a few weeks since i drafted this post. normally i draft, edit and upload by friday of the same week. saturday, if things go to shit. it keeps it fresh. it keeps it short, and fun. it keeps me sane*.
*relatively
this isn’t the post i’d write today. this isn’t it. this is something else. but fuck it – it’s today, and i’m writing it.
i'm writing it really fucking slowly
– It could be worse. A woman could cut off your penis while you’re sleeping and toss it out the window of a moving car.
Fight Club (1999)
– There’s always that.
i first watched david fincher’s 1999 magnum opus fight club at what one might term my ‘impressionable’ age. impressionable, indeed, to whatever brand of late-ninteties pseudo-nietzschean ultraviolent masculinity that palahniuk, fincher, norton, pitt, bonham-carter and co. were oh-so-stylishly fetishising. it was the impression a ww1 era tank might make upon the squashy body of a ww1 era soldier, driving directly over it. nihilism never looked so sexy.
these days it’s not as cool as it used to be to consider fight club a great movie. all that schoolboy philosophising, unrealistic beauty standards, sexualised smoking et cetera. all that pseudo-anti-capitalist capitalism. maybe i’m not as cool as i used to be. but it was the right film at the right time, and it spoke something to me, something important sounding, and subsequently, however much i’ve changed, rejigged and recalibrated my personality, it’s come along with me. it’s become one of my philosophical multitools, my lever for lifting the world, or perhaps, in a pinch, my crowbar for jimmying open the windows and doors of perception.
as i said, it’s been a few weeks since i drafted this post. something about fight club. something about reason and meaning. something about something else.
part two: thursday
why do you do it?
why do you do whatever it is that you do?
It was right in everyone’s face, Tyler and i just made it visible.
Fight Club (1999)
It was on the tip of everyone’s tongue, Tyler and i just gave it a name.
reason and meaning
the world is a vending machine in the late nineties
reason is a pockmarked pound coin, from 1991, you found on the floor underneath
meaning is a mars bar, crispy bacon wheat crunchies and a pack of trebor peppermint softmints
and change
in other words
the world is a machine for converting reason into meaning
and reason is what you bring to the world
reason is the first uncaused cause
the unmoved mover
primum movens
reason is light
is ‘let there be’
is something from nothing
is the act of creation
and creation itself
reason is art
reason is potential difference
reason is a higher concentration of salts on one side of semi-permeable transmundane membrane
reason is the catalyst in the bio-chemical reaction between you and the world
reason is a tab on your tongue
reason reveals that which was already there
all this time
unsuspected
reason is the key to the locked door
separating this side
from the other side
(well, actually, it’s a big jangly set of keys and sometimes it takes a bit of fiddling about till you find the one that fits the lock)
and once you’re on the other side
everything is different
and everything is somehow still the same
We all started seeing things differently. Everywhere we went we were sizing things up.
Fight Club (1999)
meaning and reason
meaning is abstract, nebulous, numinous.
reason is real, tangible, self-sufficient.
now that it’s understood that the search for meaning is futile, the real search can begin – the search for reason.
once you find the reason, the meaning takes care of itself.
once you find the reason, the meaning becomes so manifest
so perceptible, so palpable, so plain to see
so open, undisguised, unconcealed
so self-evident
so axiomatic
so obvious
you’ll laugh out loud
humans are genetically programmed pattern-recognition algorithms.
that means, as a human, it’s much easier to find something if you already know what it looks like.
i know, for example, that this ragged patch of hillside over a popular dogging spot is a psychedelic cornucopia come october
i know, for example, that this dingy backstreet brickwork and dilapidated street furniture is a city-wide art gallery that will provide me with months of inspiration and material
seek, and ye shall find
it’s like setting off into the long grass with a bunch of pokéballs and a shiny new pokédex and just filling that thing up.
it’s the reason to do anything.
it’s the reason to be anywhere, go anywhere.
Fight club became the reason to cut your hair short and trim your fingernails.
Fight Club (1999)
why do you cut your hair short?
why do you trim your fingernails?
once you’ve figured that out, the world is your playground
once you’ve figured that out
the world exudes meaning
oozes it
exhales it
like when you’re tripping
and everything is breathing in and out
the world is cause and effect
colour, form
words, stories
good, evil
entropy
order and chaos
the world is
reason and meaning
and the meaning of life?
there isn’t one.
life, simply, is
life is meaning
life means
life is meaningful
life is full
to the brim
with meaning
so fuck it!
