Imagined Day
Mathieu lives in a house that is a connected set of repeated blocks. They are connected, insofar as the pillars, beams, cement, steel, structural supports remain linked beside, across, on top of one another; a set, insofar as there is a set that is the house, and its constituent elements are the floors, units, families, and their individuals; repeated, so long as the blocks of elements are continuously perpetuated. The house is comprised of blocks, because between each two floors or units or families or individuals is a wall separating them. The walls run along grids; some concrete, others immaterial; some narrow, others flexible; some perpendicular, others parallel. The grids are everywhere, pointing upwards, reaching downwards, top left, bottom right, sky-high, earth-bound; rigid, as rigid as grids, which define the walls both material and immaterial, can be.
Then there are flows. They cross the grids like border-crossers do borders, regardless of origin and destination. They trickle; they transgress. They contest, overturn the rigidity of the block-structure that precedes them. They struggle with no ultimate aim, except for the immediate satisfaction of their spontaneous triumph against oppression. They melt the oppressive solids; immerse them in their forms of fluctuation, forces ever-dispersed. Walls define blocks; these flows antagonize them. They form what, simplistically, is known by its antithesis, the anti-block, the anti-n, inasmuch as n is any entity, metaphysically categorized, either material or ideal, that can be negated. The flows and blocks do not negate; they contradict, yet live in grudging harmony. There are flows that echo within walls. Entity A engages in coitus with his partner entity B, when reaching the climax of sexual exchange he withdraws, interruptus, to trigger a cathexis of sexual flows upon said entity B, anal and phallic and oral and vaginal fluids all mixed and interspersed, each not knowing each. There are flows that echo across walls. Entity C from next door rings the doorbell, is invited in by home-bound entity D, who is received with pomposity and a housewarming cake, from which melted butter and the primordial chemicals of a new exchange between entities C and D flow. Then there are flows beyond walls. Such is the circulating air, the omniscience of nature surrounding the house that makes up the centre of a ring of concentric circles, the freedom of apartment thoughts, the routine gestures of daybreak, cooking breakfast, suit off to work, coming back, cooking dinner, suit off – to bed, day-breaking, the flows of ideas, as in whether Marx was a capitalist or could be read as such, the flowing of conversations, mostly pleasantries and entity E hearing from entity F that entity G is having sex with entity H who is the sister of entity B who (rightfully) engages in coitus with the rightful husband entity A, even the literal water flows, from unit X of floor n to unit X of floor n-1, upon which entity I of floor n-1 looks up, stares discontentedly at the smoking wet laundry hanging on floor n, and grunts, to an equally displeased entity J (of unit X of floor n), to be more [retracted] considerate and not ruin the [retracted] out of his concentration as he embarks on a few pastoral poems bent on transgressing, qua Romance, aka the being of flows, the rigidity of the blocks and walls, but the dripping of water flows and flows and flows…
The floor occupied by Mathieu is of the number N, denoting a certain transcendental arrogance over all the numbers in the house. For N is the floor of the penthouse, and in the penthouse Mathieu resides. It is huge, double the height of an average unit and quadruple an average unit's area. Yet apart from such technicality, the structure remains. Blocks; and where there are blocks there are flows. "Flocks… blows" Mathieu once muttered absent-mindedly to himself, one afternoon in a bout of sexual tension, he having consumed half an hour before some food akin to an aphrodisiac, and was consequently imagining a flock of imaginary women/girls really doing it, blowing him. The flows coalesce, briefly, as honey does on toast, before being wildly dispersed into the organs and connectors of organs in the human body. Likewise, the blocks behave in a similar fashion; they attempt dispersal, as is the case in fantasy or fatalism when an engineer, say a heartbroken, depressed one, preferably a structural engineer, decides that nothing has meaning, not even the world, not even the building he is designing and depends on for his salary, and so formulates a dream sequence to ensnare the very physics of the building's design in an apocalyptic scene, but are ineluctably reined in, in the nick of time, upon the said engineer's waking into reality – one which demands salary – and therefore are coalesced.
The penthouse is Capital. Capital, in the large capitalized sense of the word, as Mathieu remains above the bourgeois leading their incredibly fulfilling lives below. The bourgeois eat, shit, scream, screw, buy suits, get pay-per-view, [retracted], and so on. The penthouse scorns this; it is the territory, after all, of the ones designing the system, the ones outside the system. Mathieu's father is a nameless bureaucrat. (Redundant, seeing that bureaucrats by definition have to be nameless.) He supports the system, only if he gets to play with things and strings, and only if he gets the better end of whatever deal the system may make. He spends the greater of his time at work doing things, pulling strings, attending endless meetings with endless incessant paperwork and body-lugging – not unusual; you have to settle for a bit of brute violence if that relieves the sheer inorganicity of all, the artifice of the job, the clockwork ticking hours – shouting at sub-colleagues by way of a formally-phrased letter detailing threats of detainment and expulsion, eventually returning home, suit unfazed, into the arms of a lovely wife (who cooks!) and the nucleus of the sacred holy family. What contrast! The higher cogs of the Ultimate Machine receive treatment – adequate care, treatment – by virtue of their constant oiling, their oiled existence, comfortably nestled high up town, watching the lesser cogs slowly turn about their humdrum axes beneath, as they sip champagne (luxury-in-itself), play vinyl (luxury-second-order), and have the kinkiest of sex (luxury-simulated).
The nameless bureaucrat – whose name not even Mathieu knows, because he has no name – is husband to his loving cooking wife and father to their four children. It must first be disclaimed that the children are, collectively, theirs; to preserve the shady presence of bureaucracy, what is needed is pungent, nauseous normalcy. No gay sex. No drugs, booze, the gross realities of liberal [retracted], living the Californication dream. No single parent. No divorce widowhood murder. Preferably Papa Mama Me. Though somewhat paradoxically, they now demand more offspring – fewer birth controls, more of that kinkiest but equally (productively) effective sex. That's why there are four children. One Oedipus, three Elektra. (Elektra, Elektras? For sure the singular isn't Elektrum.) One castration, three castrated. Though Freud and his gang of gang-bangers are really getting old now. Old, sick, perverted, useless. They now refer to maybe Jung for all that structuralist hodge-podge, although mostly they don't refer to anything at all.
Having disclosed the collectivity of the children, we may now proclaim their coordinates. Alas they conform more to blocks than to flows. Sure, their blood flows, their bile too, maybe even the squirting (are they squirters?). But larger cogs they essentially are, and as cogs they, even if they within the hierarchy get to rule over the smaller ones, the sillier, lower-intelligence creatures, are obliged to spin in order. So they do. The three Elektras (unnamed, since their father and maybe mother are unnamed; Mathieu's nomenclature can be seen as part accident, part subtle transgression) go to Sunday school. It is not confirmed if they are Christian, or believe in anything, but they still do, as an efficient measure against inefficiency. The nameless bureaucrat father we shall call, for simplicity and symbolic purpose, the big O. Big other. Big gaping void. Big O spins in his orbit too, even on Sundays. Work is never complete. Paperwork abounds. Mathieu once mentioned, meekly, to the consternation of his pro-safe-space parents, some vague idea by some vague French guy on the subject of deferral, interplay, ad infinitums. That deferral, interplay, ad infinitums constrain the bureaucrat's job, his work, and his work ethic. It's looking at papers that look at papers that look at other papers that at some faraway point dissolve into action. Action is never the bureaucrat's; faraway removed from his jurisdiction, action only gets the get-go once certain papers are signed that authorise the signing of other papers that mandate the reading of others and so on.
The bureaucrat's housewife, or Mathieu's mother, orbits the bureaucrat and his son, Mathieu. How else have we defined her, save for her referential definition relative to the two stars, two galactic bodies described above? That she also cooks. A luxury these days. But likewise, luxury or not, she's a small Big O, fulfilling the roles of assistant, subordinate, housekeeper. She assists Mathieu in issues of general homework, timetabling, bag-packing, idiomatic consultation, even counselling (sometimes). She subjugates herself, willingly, to Big O, keeping him fat, feeding him age-old and thus trustable recipes, keeping him happy and stress-free, through the use of happy endings (right, fairy-tales). She house-keeps, keeps the house. It is spick-and-span, rid of all physical flows of blood, mucus, porridge, honey, semen, and equivalently clear of most mental and emotional flows, i.e. flows that can be bleached by nonchalance, lip-hardening, chin tucked up, and have been accordingly. Mathieu sometimes entertains the idea of having her play an additional role, the MILF, but hastily swallows and stops himself.
The coordinates of the day is Sunday. The three Elektras at Sunday school. The nameless bureaucrat naming papers and signing them. His wife of a filial, devoted orbit, preparing omelettes in the kitchen (she's preparing them independently, so she's independent, mind you!). Mathieu rises from his bed.
A whole body, an organic completion, muscles and veins clearly articulated to some teleological end. The gaze. The clarity! Mathieu stares down upon himself, his naval-gazing habit an encomium to his abs, those muscles along the stomach, the torso, the chest, arms, hands, feet, back, neck, everything that can be muscularized. Even the bones. Their hardness, stiffness, those n-packs you could almost purchase anywhere, for a hefty price, for the sake of saying that you had purchased those n-packs so that you could say that you did; once more the infinity loop of causes. Not the body itself, though. He tentatively strokes his abs. Rubs biceps together, a holy union caressing, some form of alpha-male regeneration. Rising from the dead, just as he rises from his bed, rubbing parts together, rubbing the thought of rubbing, such that his unconscious morning boner floats once more into consciousness (it having been previously the subject of some dream), like an arc of morning wood, waiting for its inhabitants to be discharged. No more gazing, has to get up, otherwise it'll just… explode; that's one too many flows, won't do. So he gets up, shuffles to the toilet, nimbly, stealthily, and discharges all in a smoke of sour smell (was the asparagus the other night).
The discharge complete, now the ordeal. To maintain the wholeness of his body, its strength, its vigour, its organicity, he uses only cold water, as cold as it gets. The shivering is almost funny. Like when the interrogator tortures the captive (devoid of Stockholm syndrome) and in the captive's penultimate moment of absolute pain he shrieks and the interrogator mimics the shrieking in a deeper, more prolonged voice, farcical, enabling the captive to once more defer (defer!) his pain and share that one smile, one giggle, one laugh with his oppressor, concurring that, had they not been entangled in this supernatural hierarchy constructed outside their means and against their wills, they could have been buddies, best buddies even, sharing laughter and love and authentic-hood in this universe of commodities and materiality and inauthentic-hood. He shivers even before the water gets to him, when he pisses. Some uncontrollable reflex action. A sudden disruption of flow, but never a halt. The discharge merely aims its projected coordinates differently, elsewhere, unluckily for Mathieu spurting all over the top (away from the tip where his ark nests when he shits) of the basin. Has to clean up. The unrolling and flowing of toilet paper, more toilet paper. After a whole messy lot of work, and wrinkling his nose in sheer disgust, Mathieu is wide awake, risen far from bed, not to go back till nighttime, and suddenly the shower doesn't seem so bad after all.
The view does make it all worth it. In the shower he was immersed in the cold, and did not look out of the expanse, those windows, those cold glass windows. Now, robed and cleaned, teeth brushed and boner softened, he stands, in awe of the rising sun. A gaze, once again. It shifts from body to view, back again, back once more. This back-and-forth; he reminds himself of the pendulum's oscillation, then shudders at the absurdity of the analogy – too mechanical, and he doesn't even like physics anyway. It's too stiff, too brutal. What makes the view all worth it – worth the trouble of landlords' haggling, of acquiring the penthouse, of standing in the lift a little longer each day, of having to account for his affording it whilst protecting the anonymity of his nameless bureaucrat father – is the view itself, its natural scenery, its return to nature. The view from N floors is that of a park, of sheer organicity, of sheer grandiose, inexpressible beauty. The blocks are built next to a park. The park is trees, birds, rivers, stones, suns, fish, rocks, roads, pavements, butterflies and caterpillars, wriggly worms, fruit from the trees, detritus from the birds and fish, formal hunks of impression from the rocks, stones, roads, pavements, suns, food from the river for the fish, food from the fish for the mountain next door, "Mcs", actually a joint quick-bite chain of carbs and early cancer. No way in hell he was going there. But it was breakfast, and hunger is a bitch that kicks. Oops… careful not to think that thought aloud, thought Mathieu, in case his MILF mother hears it and questions the use of certain words belonging to that obscure grey patch of language, to retract them or to not, where the acts of shitting and screwing are mostly fine (their Christian affinities haven't been confirmed, remember?) when said out loud, whereas those of [retracted] and calling someone a [retracted] have to be retracted, since they live in a penthouse and their father is a bureaucrat.
"Mcs" is just a picturesque addition to the horizon. On the logic of additions and supplements, see Mathieu's ruminations on Derrida. It is breakfast time now, and his mother is calling. Hunger is a growl; his stomach a clockwork. The clockwork sees the mother as a machine of transference, translating breast-milk and cooking to nipples and eating; production-consumption in an Oedipal nutshell. Thus Mathieu desires his mother, to screw her like he screws breakfast, to feel her nipples as she, flowy curly hair and red nails and all, goes down on him, and "Mcs" is just a place for all the other N-R floors beneath him.
R is every integer from 1 to N-1. For the sake of bureaucracy, once again, we shall not know if N is an exact number, but only treat it as something that stands for itself, revere it.
The table is ready. The exordium of a Breakfast Treatise has been pronounced. Just Mathieu and his mother are present, Mathieu's mother and Mathieu. The breast-milk-machine – good old suburban soccer mom – is already seated, waiting for the morning star to take its place.
"Good-morning, Mathieu."
"Good-morning, Mum."
There is a dialogue, or a monologue, in which case one speaks and the other nods mutely in assent, followed by flows and more flows: the melting of toast, the splashing of coffee, tea, and orange juice, the machinations of saliva, the churning of organs, the stomach, liver, blood, plasma, cells, atoms, strings, vibrations, and so on. Mathieu would very much like to swallow his food all in one pouch, one instant, one sweeping movement, instead of going through each fine process of mastication, churning, and the arduous process of swallowing while speaking and while sporting a parched tongue and throat. Mathieu's mother would very much like to know if Mathieu has his timetable all set, his routines all in order?
"S'all good, Mum."
"Are we sure here?" with an enquiring, almost motherly smile.
"Yes, Mum (MILF)."
Shit that was too loud a set of parenthesis had she heard it seen it, traced it? He had to be more cautious with his thoughts, not to even let slip the brackets of his desire, the fringe thoughts, the deepest margins of some pseudo-complexes he didn't even feel he had until he read about them. The complex is fake; it is constructed and presented otherwise. Yes, tell yourself that. Desire per Lacan is for desire, a sort of meta-desire. No I mustn't, I mustn't… she's my mum, I mustn't, she isn't even the idealized bourgeois myth they show on computer screens. I must not desire… I must desire to not desire…
The flows have come to an ooze. Yolk dripping from the omelette plate, Mathieu stoops to wipe the floor, bending down to sneak a peek at desire's legs. What was the Oedipal account for fetishes? Has to read; so long as my bureaucrat father isn't home to make me read his records, his bureaucracy, I have all the spare time and will to read everything else. The legs shimmer. Feet twinkle. Enough; Mathieu closes his eyes, sick, disgusted, some kind of masochistic loner unable to fulfil any sexual/social contract except that with his mother (and maybe his half-sister(s)). Opens eyes to look up. Mother appears to stare, concerned, but in reality is just checking her phone as all bimbos do. (Don't blame the patriarchy; blame the misandry that women love, these sick bastards that defer all emotion, sick [retracted] that huddle in pairs or trios closely and physically deny their slave-man his rightful due. Blame them.) She then shuffles away, very absent-minded. Mathieu heaves breaths. Huge ones. He does not want to screw his mother after all. Look elsewhere; and looks out of those windows, facing the same park he saw earlier with its trees, birds, rivers, stones, suns, fish, rocks, roads, pavements, all forms of matter and all matters of form. He sees these forms flow. They flow all around, backwards, in between, sideways, but they never choke, halt impede – when the river's bifurcation swallows the water into its lungs nothing ever happens. Just a continuous existence. No, not even a struggle.
What is this desire?
Then he basks in the morning air and the morning wind, windows wide open, tempting suicide, sunlight wholesome rushing in. He breathes this rush. This youthful vigour; eyes closed; skin forever radiant, beautiful; pimples absent, simply because the mind's eye is closed and they cannot be seen; the muscles and veins and bones coordinating in one grand pursuit of something worldly, sublunary, yet supreme. At floor N, penthouse floor, of the house, we all feel like kings.
Mathieu wants to escape the flow. They're too aggressive, too mixed, too messed up, he says – they don't feel proper, like a harmony built for eternity. It's like sleeping around… Mathieu idolizes his father the nameless bureaucrat: big O, we call him, is allowed to, as a large cog, manipulate the system as he sees fit, control walls, restructure them. Every letter that is signed goes through another intermediary, and so on. The chain of letters is self-replicating, and it is fixed, clear about its goal. Has a start line and a finish line. Production and consumption built separately, so we know our buyers and sellers. Big O does trading, trades shares in his spare time. They fluctuate and flow, but Mister Large-Cog understands their eternal commodification, that cyclical status of exchange, and buys, sells, always at some profit. They aren't as turbulent as the river's bifurcation that sends shock ripples, shock waves, floating through eternal space in a transient time. Nature has her waves done volatile; they flow almost unrestricted, uncontrolled, unshackled; all her nasty hairy husbands that could use some upkeep. Only place to spot these hairy apes is the safe-space, of floor N of house-by-the-park, atop a balcony or indoors, within the confinement of glass walls.
So the windows are shut; the house is confined. Mother-machine lounges elsewhere, either in the common territories or in her own room. How does big Other like it done? Fast, or slow? No more flows from now on. The player switched on. Music springs.
Alas like the legend of the phoenix all ends were beginnings a buzz a stop transmission stop. Why? Too uplifting, almost exultant of sin, the flows, the biological love chemistry. It does not work to glorify sin. We must shun it. Moving on… start transmission start a buzz a – interlude – Shadows falling baby, we stand alone a buzz a stop transmission stop. Why? Too nostalgic, false, essential – he never knew Barbra Streisand; his bureaucrat progenitor was acquainted only with the Orient and its music. Jean Baudrillard said that films during the sixties wrote about the thirties in the light of the sixties. Or something like that. It is guilty start transmission start a buzz a silver screen, All its sad goodbyes Never gonna dance aga- a buzz a stop transmission stop. Why? Well, he just died, last Christmas (there, a pun, don't you see? It was he, George Michael, who while working with Wham! sang that song, God it's a big reference ha-ha-ha), so too soon, maybe, yeah? Too tragic and start transmission start a buzz a – wait, wait, Robin sounds like Robbie, and Williams a common ground, so since the former killed himself and was funny it's too soon, yeah? Forget it, NO ONE's calling you on, she's NOT, start transmission start a buzz a I know your eyes in the morning sun a buzz a stop transmission stop Why Because it's too melancholic brings back faded and dead memories those that should stay dead start transmission start a buzz a We'll laugh until our ribs get tough/ how can I [retracted] with the fun again/ Explosions on TV/ (Send the call out) a buzz a stop transmission stop enough with the samples already, you need something to invigorate you try Mamma Mia! no start-stop its too recorded too canned Ellie Goulding? no that's for sleepless nights start-stop Tame Impala? likewise start-stop and Mike & The Mechanics and Tears for Fears and Bowie and Jackson and Queen and Joel and Presley and the whole Carpenters mixtape playlist all its sad, sad songs and Alan Parsons but that's just tear-eyed stuff – if your eye's in the sky the clouds are moist and will make you cry – so start-stop it is now Mamas & Papas and the motif they kept having in Chungking Forest you know the preacher liking the cold on such a winter's day but like ABBA it is too canned too old too soft so Spears, maybe?, but it really is too fad too new like some toxic endeavour by Sacher-Masoch yes Toxic it is so start-stop once more to Ballet ha-ha-ha I know it's – true – t-t-r-r-u-u-e-e can't bear the elongation like the elongation of fears so once again the old start-stop and it was on the Flower Duet that Mathieu landed, the French soprano duet whose lyrics Mathieu could only vaguely discern, as undiscernible as German was to him, French being his area of foreign study, and the music did calm him down from all the buzzing and transmitting start-stops and yes it was bliss comparable to Clockwork with "Ludwig van" and the forever imprinted image of association of "Ludwig van" with rather unpleasant sexual intercourse, rape fantasies, gangbangs of 1 girl and n guys oh it was too much the seeming contradiction between what he so abhorred it's disgusting isn't it non-consensual sex and what he was thrilled by exhilarated the idea of forcing your seed upon another entity (see entities A and B in the precedent) too much the seeming contradiction and he wasn't to masturbate to this seeming contradiction with mother-machine in the house on the loose could be watching herself touch herself through a peephole to him deliberating on touching himself and that, so it had to be done my thousand greatest apologies START-STOP it was back Punk again but this time real back about two Olympic spans away just a repetition of a word that was recurring, emotion, emotion, Emotion, Emotion, EMOTION – Mathieu always thought it sounded like emulsion, the way androids' lips contort, but that interlude – that primordial chaos, bitter, seething, nothing but pain – preceding those words; it felt to him like the closest he was to get to reality, the clearest of pictures, the Real, of Lacan and all that, sheer materiality, nothing, just chaos, soup, a twisted, diluted squelched face, eyes squinted in pain, horror, suffering, the seemingly-forever repeating cadence B-C-D-B-C and so on till the End of Time was nigh and here right here those six, seven minutes of pure chaos descending ascending into normalcy, rhythm, order, boxed neatness – like bentos – swinging, circulating pendulums, some theistic figure governing creation, smelling the pain, smell, pure Nature…
Mathieu is now seated at his desk, reading. Emotion has left him. He sits, examining words and their playful, extrinsic relations to one another. What does it mean? The playing of music has subsided, brought to a screech which is a metaphor for the suddenness, the horror at this suddenness, the silence. It is easier to trace individual words without noise. Yes, so it is. One word says something about its location in itself and its relative dimensions with its neighbours. Its morphemes its form. Constituents the whole. Man the human. Reading does prove a challenge for Mathieu. He stutters – can't get each pronunciation in its proper place, safe space of non-contradiction, insubordination. Chrysanthemum becomes kirsanthum. Transcendental becomes tresantal. Interpellation infellation. [retracted] [retracted]. And so on. Yes, reading for him is reading semi-aloud, mouthing the words as his real and/or imaginary fingertips trace the mostly imaginary line that words submit to, in their grid-ontologies and block-materialities. They stick; he flows. Right – how can it not? What a mistake to have ever said the id. How can it not? The reading does not need music; it is music. Formally music, structurally music, poetically music: they say "read on and on", "read word for word" where the preposition insistently demands procession, continuation; even though our latter idiom isn't exactly the preferred reading way for Mathieu's reading passages. And so the structures flow. Mathieu cannot mouth. He has to use his imagination. Not the id; his ego's imagination. Imagination suggesting it's not there for the need's perusal. Imagine, think…
Process is painful. Attention span. Always lacking. Quick jump from sentence to sentence. Quick jump from sentence to block. Quicker jump from block to flipping pages, to pinging on his music screen, which he cannot ignore (for reasons disclosed later). Quickest jump from N floors down; that was a fatalistic symptom, depressed, has to be gone, out, thrown, repressed. One moment at said block ("What a mistake to have said the id."). Next moment another, from some pages printed from the platform digital, on desire, and desire's desire, and desire's lack, very Jacques Lacan. Can't focus, always tension, on edge, thrilled, waiting. Anticipates the arrival of some document. Some victuals. A person. A symbol. Something. But as his desire for these things, his anticipation, its outcome is entertained, he is at a loss. Can't speak, can't… bloody… speak… food will eat me, toilets will shit me, papers will read me and tear me apart, oh the gruesome disjoining of robes and skeletons, of tendons and ligament strained, sprained, and separated, the organs ripped apart by God is a verb his metaphysical holiness, all out, all out. Rein them in. Rein them in. [retracted] D&G. Always ever so convoluted. When will they try being more accessible? "Always already" something. Yeah, dead that is. The block talks about flows. Impossible, it itself is a block, condensed, consolidated. So why the frenzy, its ejaculations? Must be what they like to call prefix-irony nowadays, all their post- and meta- and neo- and quasi-transcendental-. Too confusing. Too many relations. Are they even intrinsic? Or is the act of reading some sick intrinsic inside joke? Mathieu for the next two hours moves back and forth from D&G to Lacan, wondering to himself how his bureaucratic big-Other father would hang, draw, and quarter these loose (diarrhea) dissidents.
Now a literal blockhead, after two excruciating hours that would be considered relatively long for an average person, a sub-average reader, a stranger to D&G or Lacan, Mathieu sits down to lunch. Oedipus is at his climax. Penultimate episode; family disintegrates – literally in the midday sun. Three Elektras gagging the sunbeams that shine from the sky out of Judge Schreber's anus (god-damn-it D&G! keep it down.). Bureaucracy its own bureaucracy. Just mommy and him. Mommy and Me. Mommy and Lunch. Lunch. I'll eat you wide open if you spread your legs, wiggle your toes. The camera always goes down, then up. And that phantasmagoric porno music. (Did Sade ever fantasize about masturbating in the faces of seven year old girls while listening to opera, to some augmented fourth performance?) The sunlight. Sixties – no, eighties kitchenette. White marble table always friendly for a session's screwing. I want to know what Love is. The open concept. Yuppie bourgeois. And it was all his–
"Mathieu, are you going out today?"
So cruel: the forbidden fruit eaten, denied by the forbidden fruit itself. The scene relapses, but is shut out. Completely, out. Has to grapple with its innate nausea, its disgust-in-itself, this whole complex. Oedipus was now begging for release, to be released, not onto her, but unto death, destruction, non-being. He was not to. It desires, it desires not. It wants to not desire. It desires to not. It works. By all logic, if the "not desire" isn't successful, then the overarching desire for that objectified quantity, material, now works. The meta-desire perpetuates, keeps on desiring, and so is successful. O his days!
"Mathieu?"
"Yes, mum?"
"I asked if you are going out today?"
"No, mum."
To this, Mother-machine, having just laboured an hour to produce his favourite viand for his favourite – the favourite – occasion, his pasta, the kind identified at certain outlets of franchises opened but just at a higher, infinitely higher cost (since the labour of the Mother-machine is free), finds herself rather displeased.
"What do you mean? No one does this. Everyone goes out. Your father is busy, and so are your sisters. Otherwise we would have it here."
"But, mum, I, I… I do not want it."
"Oh, for goodness' sake, Mathieu! It's your birthday!"
The meal was finished through silence and with silence. Menstrual flows, reckoned Mathieu, must be flowing again. Or it could be love. Love; love? LOVE? No, too skull-numbing, would cave in, implode, shatter, disintegrate (O the horror!). Must not think. Thinking is not. Must not not.
Quick question: what is love? No, absolutely not; you mean to ask what is the tripartite? The tripartite is that which glues, that which gives order. It orders. It isn't that of a structure constructed; it is natural structure, teleological structure. (D&G beg to differ.) The ego is part of one. Then the id, what a mistake! Then the superego, whom you pay your respects to, your vows, your duty, your humble servile nature, for he shall dominate you and control you like all the bigs out there, big cogs, big cocks, big strangers, big Others, big and so on. Or on the other end you have the famous triangle, the – guess it! that's it, you're right! – Oedipal triangle, Oedipus everywhere, Oedipus the slave of masters, the burdened thief, the Platonic criminal! Oedipus every reason for you to screw your mommy, kill, lynch your papa big Other. Oedipus a big tissue web of shadow. Oedipus a perfect excuse, motive, alibi. Oedipus! And then, formulates Mathieu, we have a complex, more complex, yet more fundamental triangle, structure, trinity – the central dogma of reason, the formal and final desire. See – even desire can be reined in! Now a triangular pattern, a pencil carved in ink on the unforgiving white – of rat poison – of paper, the ego with his superego suitor, competitor, obstruction, impediment in his (the ego's) search and acquiring of its formal and final desire, the object of desire, the object (cause) of desire, the finality, the deferred finality, the love-object, the dear, the passions, the efficient sin, the material forbidden apple, the non-existent being, the objet petit a, the climax of the tension, the ends of means…
The pimp is full. Having pimped his mother, his imagination, and his pasta, Mathieu subverts the quick question and returns to his desk. There he thinks of masturbating but is stopped by no reason whatsoever. Then, there, he entertains the thought of cross-dressing, but realizes it's only a trick by the establishment to allocate subversion in a way that respects and champions the status quo. Afterwards, still there, he toys with – fantasizes – the notion of killing himself, not with a razor-blade or a rope – for the razor-blade would torment his insides inside-out and the rope would choke him like it did the auto-erotic asphyxiates and how he hates being associated, by even being placed in the same sentence, same clause as them, heart-broken wankers – but with a fall, rather non-metaphorically, that is, a literal fall off N floors to the first, literally N-1 distances. But killing himself opens him up to the chance of receiving hand jobs (or in a more disturbing light, [retracted]) from his Necro MILF mother. Or his three companion Elektras. Or big bureaucratic Other. That is, after their tears are long gone and they long dead, somewhere being into ashes in a pot, vapours in an urn. So he sits back down, grounds himself, to read.
Mathieu flips through more pages; lifts, handles more blocks. He reckons he has read them all. He sits down, does it again, reads some more. But confidence is a game changer. There wasn't it. No it. No key, clear understanding of the blocks and their constituents. No greasing of machinery within. What are equities, assets, liabilities, bonds, interest rates, deflation, peak demand, fiscal years, quantitative easing? What is these trading that commodities do? What is Foucault's madness? It's all a fish-tank block, energies swimming non-stop, at random, at total free will, within structures omnipresent. No use… he has to freeze them, see them stopped in time, cold, polar, frozen, a gasp of air condensed into a memorial for air, never receding, sharp in its icy form, concentrated not convoluted. To tease out something. A thing. Anything. Some reference, perhaps, erudite, esoteric. Some connection of logical points, straightforward, exoteric. Flipping halts. It must be paused. Eyes shut. To think. He thinks of his temptation, flows. His grand formulation of a lifetime, reversal of Lacan's lifetime, the desire to NOT desire – isn't that too a cyclical thing? Puts down current weekly issue of The Economist, having read past the contents till only its letters. At its low point, desire's desire – meta-desire – is unquenched, unrequited, during which his endeavour to not desire, to struggle, still expands, still lives. Then gradually we see its impossibility, its large, inevitable limitations. But hope, somewhere, out there, in some form or even an anti-form or what not, just something – hope still remains, or at least its image, its idea. The sine wave moves up, traces its destiny on graph paper. Slowly, the lack of desire fulfilled transcends, overtakes; meta-desire gleefully gloats, comes into relevance, enjoys its five minutes of your humble narrator's spotlight. Then he too, per destiny, is brought down like every single time something reaches its peak (which by definition has to fall) like the economy, the financial markets, peak oil, peak stocks, then the downturn, recession, depression, and a couple suicides later what is realized is that the only way is up and fanatics who were once men but turned into such with their fervour and their nation-building passion light up the city the country the stock market and trace their inevitable path.
It is same with nature, identical actually, Mathieu concedes, stammering even in his head. They do not think, no waves do not, they just flow and propagate. On and on. Onwards. Like a fanatical without the Allahu Akbar. Incessant, indiscriminate, indiscreet: such are the endless loops of signification, of water run over dry land and of dry land territorialising, reterritorialising, colonising, really in the clearest sense of not giving a [retracted], only for the human, conscious mind to excogitate and decide for himself where to stop. Where, at which word, idea, thing, will I stop my interrogation? Where will I rest my beliefs and suspend all disbelief? Where is that leap of faith taken?
If only we could know. Your humble narrator – whom I believe hasn't really been formally introduced, so he shall do so here – requests that his audience, his interviewers, his auditors, assessors (of performance) turn to the mask and character of poor Mathieu here, and – sympathise. Read his mind; imagine! Imagine all that he was going through. From lip-quivering to the overload, cognitive dissonance, Cogito rape, the [retracted]-eries of mind, Mathieu is a torn-apart, a grieving, a dying. How do we ever face them? Our minds, our reflections, our masterful parents and manipulative equals? Honourable Gentleman of the Committee – rest assured, your humble narrator isn't about to make a parody – or pastiche – of Charles Dickens – imagine! The cruel horrors that shape Mathieu's peaceful bureaucrat life, slowly dissolving him from the inside! How was he to read, to think, to "go out today"?
He wasn't. Simply put, it was denied him, deferred, deflected. Washed away, leaving behind crystals of salts to foment their eternal lives, eternal grids, under some universal sunlight. Like some dead beach of some alien world. Always romantic. Apocalyptic transfer. Transferred epithet. Epithet, transferred. Deliberation of movement. Movement.
He moves. Has to. I can't go on; I must go on. I can't go on; I'll go on. Pain. The truth will set you free. But only after it is finished with you. Pleasure. Shivering; everybody was shivering. Pain-pleasure synthesis. Madness has a language; it is the language of delirium, of things beyond falsity and truth. Truth is irrelevant; the madman sees the image, the erroneous image, and accepts it as premises, from which conclusions follow, his own syllogisms, syllogistic vocabulary. An overturned, new language. Synthesis.
Moving back to the blocks that comprise of flows; Mathieu reads, resolves to. He writes down words he does not understand, whose definitions he can't quite register of comprehend. He formulates their sequences. He utilises his music screen, now his definition screen. He writes down their definitions. First the word. Then the mode, i.e. verb, noun, adjective. Then the definitions. If singular, write one. If plural, one two, n. Then any and all notes. Then any and all derivatives. Then their origins, some long-winded, others obscure. On a jotter notebook he calls "On the Practice of Reading & Inculcating New Words into One's Vocabulary, or, in Other Words, IMPROVING YOUR VOCABULARY". He pigeonholes, defines, answers. They help reduce the quiver on his lips, the load of garbled words, muttered nonsense. They restore sense from non-sense. They stimulate, restructure, rebrand. Mathieu Inc., new words, new machine. It's a new world.
But… today, this day, was, is, Sunday, whatever that was or wherever that came from; it was his birth-day. A day of birth. Birth the prefix to something larger. Day, perhaps? On one hand, reasoned Mathieu, it was a selfish day – weren't you to celebrate the sacrifice your mother-machine made by pushing you out of her tight little [retracted] where several months before (several) men entered? But no… you glorify yourself, thought Mathieu. One year more I have lived; one less year to go, but who cares? Today I am by virtue of the day the most important. I eat. I shit. I read. I screw. I [retracted]. Mathieu opines, is of the opinion that it all is a plot, involving none other than his bourgeois bureaucrat big-Other father Mister Large-Cog, spinning the superego wheels, doing his superego duty to make the individual to feel good about himself, feel his self-importance resonate, want to want more of this. It's a plot; it's a trap! cried out Mathieu, aloud, in his head, at its very subversive core. The element was a symptom; its production the root of all evil. It's society's way of mobilising action, collective pro status quo action for the self, community, environment. For good. For something of use. Positive use. Value. Positive value.
So, the very thought of his birth-day grounded Mathieu from his perceived reality to his real unreality, a cosmic splash of splashes, rain of rains. Now he is angsty. Now he is on edge. Now he is existential, absurd, qualified solipsist-nihilist. Now he may rant and repent and above all, write. But about what? about what? about what? About what the qualifications entail, entitle him to. He is entitled to hate. He shall write about hate. He is entitled to self-pitying, chronic, crippling depression. He shall write about self-pitying, chronic, crippling depression. He is entitled to love/Love. He shall write about love/Love.
Once upon a time there was a tripartite complex called the [we do not say it], ego, and superego. The ego was a rather messed-up fellow who could reason, but also loved sex and taboo. His rival-fellow, the superego, drew the lines, made the rules, wrote the law, and policed it. He made sure we all stuck to our scripts, which were, in some ways, understanding of the need to be selectively flexible and henceforth were selectively flexible.
The two of them, having done the unspeakable to the unspeakable, were now officially that one pair who had the playing field to themselves. They were less competitors than brothers-in-arms. Each made sure the other was exerting sufficient strength against him; each held on to the other, encouraging not stasis but flux, a flux that ensured both were swirling, alternating, flowing. Each lived off and gave life to the other. Inseparable, conjoined twins – clones with a difference.
The playing field could be visualised as a huge geometric shape, a boundless, tangible triangle. The ego is the centre. Centre of its own circle; a corner of the playing field. Mathieu is the ego. Or so he reckons; given that he is the storyteller and his view has to – he thinks – originate from somewhere part of him, somewhere deep within. The stemming of the narrative succeeds conception; man is first born, then he becomes.
The concentric circles layered outside the centre pave the way to the external world. Therein lies the paradox of the superego. He is outside, yet depends on the inside, the core, the essence, to essentialise himself. The superego is many "he"s; he is schizophrenic. You have I-he and she-he and me-he and you-he and They-he and He-he, and very possibly meta-I-he and meta-she-he and meta-me-he and meta-you-he and meta-They-he and meta-He-he. Mathieu, the ego, is scared. He hates it, he hates the "he". At certain points "he" is Maurice, a fellow conspirator against totalitarianism and the sinful flows. Maurice, too, has Oedipal membership, with the bonus of negating three Elektras. Perfect premium Oedipal relationship. And Maurice, like him, has a single "r" corresponding to his (Mathieu's) single "t". They both have seven letters in their name. All unique, intra-name. Now, Maurice, while able to be read as a fellow or a conspirator, is also Mathieu's worst enemy. Why? Because Maurice is a rival, a rival suitor, a possessor who drives himself with superiority and who tauntingly drives Mathieu on with jealousy. For one, Maurice does not need bureaucracy to excel. While he was in Sunday school, he transcended (quite literally) all of Mathieu's scores. He beat him in Latin, grammar, running, counting, even eating – the five domains of bureaucratic excellence that are the heart, the hand, body, mind, and soul have all been fulfilled, surpassed, even, by Maurice the superego. In the superego sense, too, Maurice is better at negotiating, at pulling false faces, grinning false smiles, posing for photos and cordially sending festive messages every time (no matter how automated it looks, it's still effort! and each time he does try something new) via his festive gadget that has a festive screen. To him, Maurice represents all that could be learned, but does not want to, because it's too like him, too smarmy, too… calculated. Maurice can read without stammering. Maurice can write at a regular pace of N words per minute, or N words per unit time. Maurice isn't a pimp, but he is a ladies' boy, insofar as he gets the lady/ladies he wants. Maurice has bigger abs. Maurice has bigger biceps; a bigger, better body. Maurice's organs function better than his – his heart pumps slower, beats slower, more of loss than vigour; his brain thinks slower, receives and outputs slower, is heavily retarded (as in locomotion); his framework is less sturdy, wimpier, softer – more liquid than anything. Ah! an agonizing scream. Maurice is faster, livelier, harder. It is indeed bitter, to think, of him, of him, in relation to him.
So Mathieu tries to shift the story. But he cannot. Inextricably, the day binds him to it. It is his birth-day. Why does he not go out? Not going out on your birthday is deviant behaviour. Is he a deviant? Formally, yes. The form is X, and if your form corresponds to X, is X, then logically the conclusion follows from the premise. But is he? Why isn't he going out? The rule of deviancy states that going out alone on your birthday makes you equally deviant. If Mathieu goes out, he goes out alone. And what premise, what rules dictate that? The simple premise that there is no one to go out with him. Not a single soul. No friends, no benefits, not one single stranger. And why was that? We now look back to our geometric playing field. A playing field denotes a game, a competition to achieve something, a goal. What is this goal? Mathieu's goal is the objet petit a of his playing discourse. He wants it really badly. And that is why, per desire as discussed by Lacan and him, he requires the assistance of superego Maurice to moderate, tilt in favour of moderation the balance of the scales. Maurice is always already better, bigger, brighter. Maurice is wonder. Maurice controls the object petit a; Maurice has it; Maurice is it. Maurice experiences no desire, except the desire to see Mathieu succeed. When that desire falls flat, Maurice's meta-desire succeeds, renewing the circle of life.
The date of Mathieu's life is present yet absent. It, in the words once uttered, is, and it is not. There is no birth-day date. What is this objet petit a? Who is it? Do we know? All we know is per the machinations of desire, Mathieu's living perorations have to end with spasms and tragedy. Desire is endless. Mathieu's hallucinations (are they mad? is he?) are of a pasta-place (no! Maurice has infected it with his superego virus already), rather, a steakhouse, with casual (but semi-formal) dining and maybe cheap, underage wine. And a cinematic experience, that which typically involves Late Capitalist comedy, which is at once ironic, at once meta-ironic, at once always funny. And a thank-you, a holding of hands, a kiss (whew! that is a deep dream!), a hand job (whew! that is a deep wet dream!), and a goodnight that ensures a see-you-again and a propagation, a renewal. Contract renewal was his thing, but the hallucinations remain so fixated, so temporally fractured – into N coordinates of a Z (not i) space – that they appear almost symbolic. Symbolic, thus inauthentic. But Mathieu knows that inauthenticity is just one part of it. It is a necessary formula, a mandatory setting, universe for first dates. It would then be the onus of him – this "flawed", "human", leap-of-faith him, this broken character – to give the date a whole, an authentic whole.
But we know this never works. Your humble narrator, reaching into the abyss of consciousness in Mathieu's mind, pulls out certain fragments of shame. These fragments are glass shards, not because he cuts himself, but because he wants to. They scream exile, severance, melting. They are all the Chaos. Yet they are kept tightly crystallised, grid-locked, within glass, and their opacity, their blood-red vengeance, shines through.
These shards are weapons. Mathieu thinks of using them to cut Maurice. Shameful, yes, but highly cathartic. Could clean up the mess. Mathieu reckons Goethe was a sad [retracted]. You have to kill yourself over a girl? (Better to kill him!) He wants to read Goethe, to re-read jungen Werthers in its native language, but alas! that is Maurice's dream, the one that speaks German. If you're caught in the dream of the Other, you're [retracted]. Maurice is the Other. Mathieu is [retracted]. Mathieu conceives of a new dream in which Goethe was French and therefore Werther too.
In any case, was it too late? is it too late? to ask [retracted] out? will she respond? does Maurice really love [retracted], or is she just a dream sequence? to him? to me, I, myself?
Mathieu does not know. So he asks questions. He writes poetry to find resemblance to some closure to the questions. He designates Maurice as the role of the Other, the evil superior big Brother, whose very role in the relationship designation is to screw him over. He writes odes to anti-Other, and villanelles for the Other (this does sound like a masochist). He haikus, sonnets, freely verses. The writing flows. Constrained freedom. Liberated slavery. One of another – never-ending chiasma. Still, a bit of the positive side persists. Hope is somewhere to be found.
As he writes, the superego changes. It is no longer Maurice, the rival alpha, but all the rest, non-stutterers who mock those that stutter. The eloquent people. A sort of fractured Maurice, each and every of his Platonic forms melded into another person, a weapon, to strike Mathieu from each and every corner. One gay person. Two gay persons. Three little gay persons. All out, dicks ready to strike and sodomise. The first one is A. A for Anal, for all the humiliation Mathieu has to suffer, has to endure the groveling at his feet, prostrate. The second one is W. W for Wank, as in all the further humiliation at the hands of Sacher-Masoch incarnate, who beats you up, makes a laughing-stock out of you in a circle of intellectuals, once-fellow intellectuals, those that are Maurice supporters even though it is Mathieu's father who is a nameless bureaucrat. (Wanking has a connotation of introversion, highly perverted sickos, deluded, secretive, grossed-out orgasms, and so on.) The third one is N. N for Negro, or Nigger, seeing that in today's non-denominational society, names don't matter since there are 5631 genders out there and 3000 other names for gender-fluid baby octopi (your humble narrator would, here, like to make a disclaimer that first, this is the thought-processing of poor Mathieu's mind, not his, and that second, while he (and even Mathieu) is of a generally liberal Left inclination, it must be pointed out that current-day radical ethics often involve self-fulfilling prophecies and edgy, agitating show-all remarks, i.e. remarks whose only ontology is existence, not essence) and therefore the word Nigger and all its offensive denotations, connotations, references, allusions, are way, way outdated. Nonetheless, N here dislikes Mathieu to the very point of strangling him. It must be said that Mathieu, fully aware of this hostility, fantasises equally about using one of the three thousand differently-named octopi's tentacles to squeeze the living hell out of N, the third gay guy.
They all laugh at him. They all do. Why me? What have I done? He knows that solipsising is self-defeating, yet… it cannot be stopped. It is depression. It is an excuse. My desire, or lack thereof, or meta-desire, or deconstructed lack of meta-desire, for the river-flows and the orderless constituents are mine and mine alone. Nature wrote her books to write me off evolution's path sooner or later. It never ends, oh! it never ends. I am bitter. I am sorry. I am bitter for being sorry.
The rain comes without him having noticed it. The dense cubic air has begun to flow. The blocks of the house are still as orderly as before, and in a sense their orderliness has been reinforced. Bitterly writing, the sky growing darker and darker, thunder rumbling, lightning crashing, zapping. Subliminally, one of Mathieu's poems finds the use of aforementioned imagery relevant. Even though he hardly looks up as tears literally fly out onto the paper, as in his poem "my tears/ write my feather's fears".
Two poems and a half-poem later, Mathieu gets up and heaves a sigh. The first poem writes of writing poetry. The second writes of sigh-heaving. The half on certain metaphysical death. Does Life imitate Art? He wasn't sure. Suddenly the subliminal came back to him – he saw Maurice as the face of God from the window, from outside, beyond the thunder and the clouds, glaring at him, leering at him. He visualised the leer during a masturbation (self) session to objet petit a; looking in the mirror, he saw it again, a faint reflection off his own eyelids, that demonic, evil stare. As if Maurice was chanting "Date, date, date, date,! You'll never get it; it's fate!" right at orgasm point, at his strongest and his weakest, reinforcing the logic that masturbation is a symptom not of self-care, but of self-harm and man's innate frigidity. "[retracted], O [retracted]!" he shouted as he came, but the imagination re-drew perception, re-wrote representation, into a new state of delirium as "Maurice, O Maurice!" It sufficed to Mathieu that he was mad.
Mad; atrociously mad. He swung at the wall. It wouldn't budge. He swung again. Suddenly he registered it crumbling apart, flowing, and the faces of A and W and N deeply contorted, deeply frightened, in a satirical inversion of power, now begging for help, mercy. Mathieu laughs. "[retracted] you, ha-ha!" and closes his eyes, squeezes them tight; this madness was too good, too exhilarating for him. Maybe it was a birthday gift. Mad Mathieu. What a day, this birth-day! If the date won't come, he would go to it. He would go to her, reach for her in his dreams, in his fantastical, poetic imagery. Poetic, vivid imagination.
At tea-time the rain poured more intensely than before. Mother-machine returns from previous location, makes tea – coffee, yoghurt, fruit – sets it on the table. Humming sound of flowing rain. Laconic silence.
MILF desires to know: "How?"
Mathieu desires to reply: "What?"
MILF desires to probe: "How about your going out?"
Mathieu desires to deign to decline probe.
MILF is now a Form. Platonic, permanent. Embodied in eternity are her (falsely) stockinged feet, her eternalised blood-red, MILF-red toes, lipstick, thick lips placed in a maternal, patronising kiss. Dominatrix demon. She hollers:
"You must be gay, isn't it? What?! Not letting mommy fondle your cock a little bit? Not going out with someone? Huh?! [pitch higher] What about [retracted]? Don't lie! I saw it in your "Secret" journal. You wanted to come in her face. So what now? Did your stupid books make you want to be gay? [pitch even higher] You're mommy's boy, aren't you? You want me to bring her to our home and watch while I jerk your pathetic cock off? Huh? [pitch highest] Answer me!"
"[retracted] you! [retracted] you! [retracted], [retracted], [retracted] you, you whore! [retracted]!"
The tea-party mysteriously goes as it comes. It was beyond Oedipal. It was Real; an impossibility. He finds himself in his room again. Or study. Or wherever he was for his two poems and half-poem. Whatever he wants to call it.
It isn't gone. MILF mysteriously returns, out of nowhere, invisible yet present, imprinting upon memory's skull a searing scorch of iron: "You'll never be handsome enough for her!"
Thus was Mathieu's true form unveiled. Now he has looked into the mirror which he hadn't even bothered to think of this whole day, in the bathroom during the morning, through the windows in their opulent morning reflection, within MILF-machine and her pantyhose glow. His face drips blubber. His mucus snots down, like snort off a pig. His eyelids roll up like a funny face. His ears droop and sag like the limpest of phalluses. His penis becomes a vagina. His lymph and stomach and nodules and oesophagus and liver and lungs and kidneys and brain and testosterone and blood and water and semen and fibres and retinal fluid and arterioles and capillaries and nerves and spinal fluid and mesenteries and testicles and feet and bones and hands and muscles and human glue and human elements and human structures all merge, per machinery regulation, like MILF-mom did, in her transcendently immanent form as a conjoined mixture of sound and spectacle. His limbs form tentacles, which slope down to allow downward-flowing liquids to cascade, facilitate their purpose quicker. He stares at the window at the faraway sky as he did while running and giving up and not wanting to but still doing it but reining himself in and pulling tight every single body of organs in his body together to one fixed and final purpose to clear that distance he has set himself a goal for to clear it under pain of death and immense pain before death to fix it to simply get it done to do to do it and he utters a scream of part frustration and part motivation in hope that the former would inspire the latter and insinuate a surge of impossible strength and perseverance to the commitment and to do to do it to get it done and he traces music floating in his ears wafting beside him so he reins in even harder to it but the limp organs still fall off and merge in puddles of gunk and sperm and human dis-energy and all the flows beside him torment him for minutes for hours for weeks for an undefined N amount of time and finally he seems on the verge of exploding or imploding but his heart still beats his last organ but now it's just a rogue militant that beats out loss and heartbreak. He disintegrates.
Mathieu wakes up. He lies on his bed, passive. He is awake, wide awake. Today is Sunday. It is his birth-day. He lives in a house that is a connected set of repeated blocks. He realizes, says out loud, "it's all just a dream, a long, recurring, dangerous dream".