An Absurd Death
Moments are all that unite us – time and space is but chaos that we cannot, and never will comprehend. Our own existence is only measured on how those around us receive us – Camus’ “I Rebel, therefore we are” should be “Others see, feel and hear evidence of my presence therefore I am” somewhat similar to “If a tree falls…” Political systems constantly fight to be the ‘one’ that works. Though concepts of control are nothing but illusionary and therefore the idea of being able to put a framework to the chaos through a system of control or Is it not that very little actually matters to us? To be sheltered, to be fed and to have water are the only basic human necessities whereas we have attached so much more to life: families, love, wealth and then we also tell the stories of others as if a secondary narrative – as if empathy – is really something the fairly noncomplex human brain is actually capable of. How much of our sheer existence is now dictated by what is a social norm and therefore is us living not an independent life but reflecting the society around us in ourselves. People are outspoken to be outspoken: they calculate the reaction that they will get; people say agreeable things: they also calculate the reaction they will get. In the age of absolute mass communication then there is little we say or do which is not reacted to. This reaction therefore, is proof of existing. Absurdism pivots around one key question: why not commit suicide?
i. THE ONLY BEAUTY IN NATURE IS THE ABSENCE OF MAN ii. LIFE IS FOR DEBT; DEBT IS FOR LIFE iii. EXPRESSION IS BULLSHIT iv. LIT KEROSENE v. NOTHING BUT CHEMISTRY vi. NO FACE FOR THE LOVELIEST vii. THE WHITEWASH CEILING viii. THE ONLY ABSENCE IN NATURE IS THE BEAUTY OF MAN
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THE ONLY BEAUTY IN NATURE IS THE ABSENCE OF MAN
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An Absurd Death
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The Only Beauty in Nature is the Absence of Man
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An Absurd Death
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The Only Beauty in Nature is the Absence of Man
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An Absurd Death
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The Only Beauty in Nature is the Absence of Man
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An Absurd Death
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The Only Beauty in Nature is the Absence of Man
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An Absurd Death
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ii.
LIFE IS FOR DEBT; DEBT IS FOR LIFE
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An Absurd Death
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Life is for Debt; Debt is for Life
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An Absurd Death
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Life is for Debt; Debt is for Life
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An Absurd Death
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Life is for Debt; Debt is for Life
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An Absurd Death
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Life is for Debt; Debt is for Life
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An Absurd Death
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iii.
EXPRESSION IS BULLSHIT
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An Absurd Death
Days were always too long and too short at the same time. They spiralled out of control at the first sight of laziness in an epidemic of daytime TV whilst crying internally, “I will after this episode”. Getting out of the house was always a struggle. The anchor of comfort and warmth in laziness dragged upon rocks and weeds until dusk. By the time it got dark, was there any point moving anyway; it hardly seemed worthwhile. Around the time of this admission of failure the whiskey came out; gold shimmering because of shaky hands. There was a satisfaction in drinking from a dirty glass that couldn’t be gained from the lip of the bottle, a romance that made the act acceptable. As the stupor gained traction the glass became less used, the bottle becoming favoured. Colour and light blurred the room, a haze emanating from a small television. The channel hadn’t been changed in hours, people were talking but they didn’t seem to be saying anything. They never did. Nobody ever did. The world span. But not in a drunken way. The benign just continued.
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Expression is Bullshit
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An Absurd Death
Blackness filled the room, stifling the air of oxygen. It was a sinking ship - trapping life in the sickly waters. The room was getting smaller, the walls were closing in. The bottle was warm as light broke through the barely drawn blinds. Squares of light hit the room in an abstract way, spontaneously giving life to certain areas. The hand of chance or the hand of an infinite being, no one could say. Objects before unseen littered an unclean floor. Her dressing gown barely covered her chest as her head slumped mouth open across the sofa arm. Rays of light invading the room lit areas of her supple pale skin. Her toes curled in the cold of the crisp morning. A delicate mess, she slowly lifted her head.
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Expression is Bullshit
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An Absurd Death
A new day, but one to only sleep off the last one in. For roughly an hour of each day, she tried to create. The room around her lay in a state of fallout and hindered any want to create or ability to write freely. The urge, the want to create was always there but it never manifested to movement – it never quite got so far as to actually put words upon paper, or on the screen. Sometimes they ran so freely out of the head mounted above, a streaming river that could just about me crowbarred into a text with some careful plotting and without a care for the finer tuning of English into a sloppy prose, but at least it was something. Though she would mean to, she never did go back to re-read it 32.
Expression is Bullshit
Half of the time she just thought about what it meant – to create. To make things. A majority of what she did would never be read, never be seen. A minority may be read by a few. What was the point of this - a cycle of efforts to create something so personal that it may never apply to someone else.
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An Absurd Death
Expression is Bullshit. An idea, one concept strewn out and diluted as if it could ever apply to others in such an equal way as it did to her. What gave her the right to express what she was feeling or thinking in any more of a valid way than the steelworker, the bus driver or the lolly-pop man. In the vast realm of emotion and feeling and experience, how could one person ever create something which truly applies to a single other? Then of course there was the other thing. The stark reality of ever being published, of ever being given work in this capacity – for now she trundled along taking odd jobs when she could but just getting by. Would she ever be able to pay her way with words? The world of publishing was unknown to her, and seemed to be a set of the same people saying the same words because they were in that group. With no such thing as talent existing, it was simply luck of the draw as to who would ever be picked up to have a chance here. Who they got on with, what mood they were in when they read a manuscript, what someone else had said about it. So many factors to create this unanswerable formula for getting by. A roulette wheel - one in which anyone could be chosen at any time, for any reason. A trend, a fad, a fortunate critic, a charitable publisher. There was no formula, no answer.
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Expression is Bullshit
She stubbed out her cigarette, into an empty bottle. Decided to go for a walk. Perhaps it would at least clear her head. The bitter air hurt her head as she left but she pressed on. A red orange hue of brick work towered alongside dark skies.
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An Absurd Death
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v. NOTHING BUT CHEMISTY
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An Absurd Death
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Nothing But Chemisty
It starts with a piece of glass on the floor – stabbing, twisting, crunching, into the soft sole of your foot. A tiny insignificant piece sending pain rushing through the body of a comparatively gigantic entity. Searing heat. And then nothing. A slight sting and a trail of blood but nothing too uncomfortable. That moment has asked enough questions though: you reassess your own frailty and for a time become much more cautious - slightly afraid of the world. Blood and sweat and other substances escape from our bodies on a regular basis. More regularly than we would like. They act as a reminder of our own fragility compared to the world around us that is made up of concrete and glass and steel – all things that can break our bones and bring forth rivers of dark red blood. To protect ourselves from this fragility, we form a shield – we have differentiated ourselves from just animals, yet we are no more than animals who can build. We build prophets, and reasoning. We build ourselves into a machine. We entertain ourselves, and dive fully into it as being more than entertainment. We give ourselves reason to exist. But then even after all that, we are nothing but chemistry.
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An Absurd Death
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iv.
LIT KEROSENE
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An Absurd Death
A grey city with no one left, a lonely place to try and find some hope. Going out he hoped to find someone, well something. Something to cling on to, something to keep him going. Something good, something bad, just something to happen. The boredom makes everyone feel they’re sinking. To fall would imply some speed, some excitement but you also know how and why it’s happening; to sink is to be dragged under as you wonder why. And you wonder what could have been done to stop it.
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Lit Kerosene
Despite all the warnings, he still smoked. There was no real reason. Though most would never kill themselves we all want an end. Poverty means getting hold of more cigarettes and alcohol than anyone else, to cope but also to encourage an early end passively. Baccy pouches littered tables wherever he went, picking out the scraps from the various wrappers he seemed to accidentally collect.
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An Absurd Death
Nights out would always start in the pub. Pints first, spirits later. Food forgotten giving way to the night and a building hunger that doesn’t manifest itself until it’s all over.
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Lit Kerosene
There were girls, every week. It was always the same, dance and drink and snog a little. Try to be interesting, try to be funny, try to be something to entice someone into his arms. Trying to be everything without knowing what was actually wanted. He wasn’t after anyone in particular; he just wanted someone.
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An Absurd Death
She was there tonight, they’d spoken before and their lips had probably touched at some point. Neither really wanted anything more but they still drawn to each other. Magnetic in close proximity. The room span around them as the night was whittled away, expensive drinks half spilt and shots taken through gritted teeth in to a futile forced drunkenness that never can satisfy.
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Lit Kerosene
They danced, not closely, but together. Their hips moving in time with their own rhythm and their arms loosely beside them, flailing. They drew close and then far, coming in waves of it looking, even feeling, like something may happen. That night though, it never came. In the gloom of a hazy smoking area they became distant, untouched by one another and with eyes avoiding.
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An Absurd Death
It was just another night out. Something to do. Something to drink. Someone to do. Boredom becomes suffocating; may as well light some kerosene.
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Lit Kerosene
Pale light, wandering through empty spaces as the crispness of the morning came about. The long walk home – the stubborn nature of not wanting to pay for a taxi. Becoming lost in the large city, but not lost on the roads, lost in his own head. There was no where to go, no where to be. Unneeded, though not necessarily unwanted. He occupied a space in limbo, the purgatory that we all do. We in that time are the unknown, unknown to ourselves as much as others. Nothing but an entity gliding along through the world, touching nothing but the floor which holds us. Here the world is ever expansive, and we are just lost amongst it.
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An Absurd Death
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vi.
NO FACE FOR THE LOVELISET
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An Absurd Death
Cold stark air clings to the face and ears, acting as a sobering feat of endurance as the hours build up: the walk home, grueling pavement with a beauty that only exists at 4am in the flicker of dim street lights as drivers pass in solitude, indifferent. An unvaried colour palette exists at this time, green and orange piercing an otherwise grey existence.
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No Face for the Loveliest
Through the haze in his mind was her – there was no clarity even to that and the memories that existed provided an image only of him outside himself, an imagined image of what it would look like to others. Flashes of them dancing were still within his grasp but there was no real assurance that this was real – nothing that night felt substantial.
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An Absurd Death
They had sat on a wall outside, not smoking, barely even sitting close, maybe hand upon hand but somehow the air had ensured that the bravado allowed in claustrophobic dance floors is not repeated in the coldness amongst bright streetlamps.
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No Face for the Loveliest
In the entirety the clearest thing was a feeling – a feeling that there was something there. Words seemed to flow regardless of their inability to function, and yet nothing was said. Nothing that made sense anyway. Cold surrounded them and yet it wasn’t somewhere they wanted to be away from. Time froze and amalgamated itself into just being, unexplainable and unrepeatable.
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An Absurd Death
And then she was gone; friends whisking her away into a silver taxi bearing down into the dark chasm ahead, swallowing her up into the night and the past.
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No Face for the Loveliest
But then after all of that he couldn’t even remember her name, let alone her face.
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An Absurd Death
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vii.
THE WHITEWASH CEILING
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An Absurd Death
A whitewash ceiling sits above the room, characterless. Dust creeps up the mirror. A cheap empty wine bottle lies horizontal on carpet. Paper wrappings and pizza boxes are thrown to the end of the bed, littering the floor with an odour of grease and bad taste. The sheets were strewn across one side of the pokey bed and a mattress that sits on an awkward angle from the bed frame, black sheets riddled with strains ranging from red to white to yellow.
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The Whitewash Ceiling
Crushed beer cans formed the sharp topping of a makeshift bedside table, their unmistakable green and silver shine reflecting light around the room. Irrelevant light oozes from the corner, a light left on overnight but beaten back by the day that crept in through barely closed curtains.
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An Absurd Death
Clothes hang lifelessly in front of the wardrobe but on the floor, in an act of attempted tidiness. Underwear dangles unceremoniously from the end of the bed, pushed there in excitement. Bad breath penetrates the air with pepperoni and salt. Alcohol hangs in the sheets, in the clothes, in the litter trapping loose memories from the night before into consciousness.
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The Whitewash Ceiling
A condom wrapper sits on the side, the wrapper having being hurled loftily towards the bin though not into it. The thought was there, but not the effort.
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An Absurd Death
Two naked bodies lay there, untouching.
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The Whitewash Ceiling
This world seems so dismal. This was surely as close as anyone got to love but it was still far away from happiness.
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An Absurd Death
It was forced content. It was a fear of being alone. It was a fear of never having anyone like this again.
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The Whitewash Ceiling
Or is that just what love is? Is love actually happiness or is it just comforting to know we might have someone? Is love just something we perceive to have even if we don’t actually know what it is?
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An Absurd Death
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viii.
THE ONLY ABSENCE IN NATURE IS THE BEAUTY OF MAN
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An Absurd Death
He scratched his head as he rose from the site of stupor. Nothing else in the room moved, he was independent of it all. He floated to the door without having to think about it, and found himself trying to aim but being unable to. Urine ricocheted around the seat and bowl, eventually most dribbling down to the bottom. He wrestled with clothes to get them on, grappling with whether or not he though love was relevant in this day and age. He stumbled across his shoes and pushed himself out into the cold daylight. The small terraced houses lining the street guided him along rough pavement towards nothing. He walked in a hurried daze as his feet pounded the rough stone heavily, bearing no true sense of direction, still with drink in his veins. Hopelessness seemed to be tattooed in people’s eyes.
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The Only Absence in Nature is the Beauty of Man
The dismal effort of simply being had left no joy for them, they ferried prams or transported shopping. They were vessels, vessels for survival either of just themselves or of the race. At the bus stop people queue, their hands bitter from labour and a cold wind – life and nature conspiring against them. The unflinching movements of monotonous routine called life scared him, he turned and walked down a side street. A man lay in the gutter, his woolen garments splitting open with holes the size of a fist.
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An Absurd Death
His stubbled face told of greyed pain; this is what existing does to you. He was spat out of the side street onto the main drag of the town, a street that was filled with shops and boarded up shops. People crawled into Poundland and people strode into the House of Fraser on the corner.
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The Only Absence in Nature is the Beauty of Man
Men in suits and women in pencil skirts carried coffees whilst walking as if they had somewhere to be. They looked hollow from the outside though, their suits a faรงade for the dilemmas of the inner sanctum, disguised from the public and one another, gripping their files or briefcases with a fear of not wanting to let the mask slip.
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An Absurd Death
Lost and invisible to others in the city his feet carried him slowly through the outer pathways and along the parameters, gliding past. More building work continued around these streets: the constant want for improvement of what we have yet only for profit not simply for betterment. The amount of new properties, high rise flats and luxury homes was staggering.
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The Only Absence in Nature is the Beauty of Man
Estates in every corner, land left empty made him think of the homeless man once again. Out in the cold, without. Yet he still had a hope of improvement, of things getting better even with only the promise of a few coppers. This was never going to buy shelter, or enough food and yet it gave him the solace to keep going regardless. He began to realise then, that those at the bottom are all still banded together with only the hope of improvement.
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An Absurd Death
He realised that all there was, was to continue existing.
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The Only Absence in Nature is the Beauty of Man
Was there any need for anything more?
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An Absurd Death
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