Lights Out in Wonderland

by DBC Pierre

  * How self-righteous are those conditioned by fear. Holding back is their main drive in life, and hence all they preach. Origamis take no risks, wear mediocre clothing, and say mediocre things. They have a smug air, or an air of overly reasonable bonhomie, which is a high form of smugness. Look at how solely they're responsible for most counteractions to endeavor, and for marginalizing people with traits outside their own rigid norm. Origami people are the identifiers of the problems of others, the foretellers of downfall owing to all but themselves. These ignorant, dogmatic lurkers are secret enemies; and even as you read this, they're out there busily hoarding evidence of your failings.

  * What is this limbo? A kind of detachment from the object world, a club-mix of what we fleetingly taste in moments of shock. Already I sense that it has an envelope, a zone we must stay in to keep it afloat, pushed by fear, pulled by comforting oblivion. Science would call it dissociation; but in life we have a choice between the clinical and the romantic—and limbo is the romantic choice. In case you need arguments for choosing romance over science, remember this: science still doesn't know why we sleep.

  * Ah, Customer Service. It falls to Dalí Girl to work the gulf between a photograph of a glamour model in a telephone headset and a collections department not based at this address. She squirms because despite efforts to erase her common sense, culture has left a nodule of reason intact. That fragment of tumor makes her uncomfortable enforcing outrageous terms. Her employer should have picked up on this.

  * To take hold, a decadence relies on communal thoughtlessness, and this is first brought about by language. Through language the acts and notions which a few years ago would have caused outrage come to be accepted. Ever more careless words introduce attitudes into the culture which make reason unfashionable. Vocabulary shrinks, forcing more concepts to live behind fewer expressions; and in this process the acceptable and unacceptable come to mix, and are passed off one for the other.

  * Remember Hobart Loots said: Lots of things are included in everything; but there's only one anything.

  * About suicide: imagine the spirit as a mansion. You'll guess we don't use many rooms. Apart from a few moments in childhood we don't dance around it in sunlight. But there's a traffic of things in and out, and what happens is that unwanted bulks can gather inside. Gather and gather, menacing us. Unable to shift them, we hide in ever smaller spaces. And in our last hole, life offers a choice: to play out our demise in parallel theaters—psychosis, zealotry, religion, cancer, addiction—or to bow quietly out. But beware: life doesn't ask these high questions when we're confident and fresh—it waits for hopelessness.

  * People in a restroom with substances occupy the most principled ranks of camaraderie. In our time there's no greater treaty of discretion, no more widespread code of honor.

  * Note that in planning the perfect debauch, an innocent party, or even a lunch, or a life, these three component notes should have attention paid to them individually. Had I realized this earlier my life would have been a fragrant symphony indeed. Ah, well.

  * Tonight it's plain: humanity isn't divided by race, creed, color, or wealth; one thing alone makes humans unequal, and it is energy. The gift of Enthusiasmus. Those endowed form an aristocracy, and recognize each other in an instant. As for the rest of humanity, though we can as a mass be written off in a democratically useful sense, some nonaristocrats can also be honored: the insecure who have not built defenses of false confidence; the humble and straightforward who accord respect; and the bingers and revelers who at the height of a bacchanal remain true to the spirit of nimbus.

  * Articulate your wish, watch for signs, then snatch opportunities as they're delivered—this is the clear and practical guide from the Enthusiasms to navigating a life, or a death, through nature's world.

  * No better evidence exists of nature's trickery than childbirth. Witness the towering arrogance of new mothers for proof that nature uses Rohypnol-like drugs to achieve her ends. Watch them unleash a teat in a café, control the width of a busy sidewalk with a carriage—because in their drug-addled minds they bear not cousins of apes but tiny superiors of infinite entitlement, whose eminence bathes them by association. If it weren't a deranged phenomenon, why would nature trick us into it? Why don't we find the blissful dell of family by a process of reasoning? Because there is no blissful dell. Only the stranglehold of callous nature.

  * Learn to love a hangover. Nurture and adore it like sad music. This Cinderella of debauch is a hidden boon, perhaps its greatest one; because wise decisions are made there. A good hangover, a few hours into its term, brings hunger, and gratitude at survival; it resets the human condition to its default, admittedly wretched but also realistic and serene, disinclined to mayhem. It's a window from the deathbed looking back, where we wish less jarring choices had been made. Therefore make no decisions while drunk—but use the hangover to make them at your most prudent, human calibration.

  * You might conceive arguments against this, but no. A tiger is fluffy and will kill you. A snake is designed to be invisible until it strikes. This is nature.

  * Sleep depletion has a fragmentary effect on notions. See how they can shatter into swarms of notionettes, till in the end I'm not so much dealing with an image of Smuts hanging as trying to banish the urge to discover the Japanese word for belt, in case I can recall it from among the sergeant's words. This is too dramatic and roundabout a way to experience concern for Smuts. If you encounter this: back to bed.

  * Reality is a lottery of horror whose chaos led humans to develop an alternate world of hopes and plans. Human existence is what we do in the gap between those worlds. All joy and failure arise from managing that fragile duality—and unhappiness from trying to live too far above horror. Life is most bountiful when we stay low and expect little. As with limbo: decide to die—then live. But protect your gap, as regimes will seize it to fill with their ideas, controlling your fears for their gain—and none more than commerce, assuring us we're different, and should expect more. This evening's vital message, then: Mind the Gap.

  * All dynamic things seem to be conical in form. No matter where you begin an endeavor, or what nature it has, it sets off from a yawning gape and either unravels at the rim, or propels you to a narrowing point. Space itself may be conical. Life may be conical. Be prepared for cones.

  * Stress chemicals kill nimbus. They must be like a slurry that enters the bloodstream. One effect is to diminish the bravery that attracts good fortune, and at the very moment it's needed most. Surely then the world of this slurry, its management and disposal, is at the heart of the human mission to discover.

  * Life is abject and stupid when deeply scrutinized. The evidence from all who've felt or thought too deeply is that understanding brings disillusionment. Moreover, I vouch to you from that state. Very few can live to a certain depth alone, where mysteries glow beneath them enough to form a sumptuous backdrop to otherwise simple lives, without having to taste poisons from below as well. While it's the job of artists to roam these depths and reflect their madness, it isn't recommended in order to have a good life. The conclusion: don't dive—merely float and swim. Delight in stupidity. And where the deep sucks you down, run to that sanctuary for all victims of the deep: intoxicants.

  * As a general rule watch out for silent romances. At only twenty-five I already have two indelible welts of passion and regret from people I never met, and only saw once in passing. It's a testament to the barbarous artworks of nature. A fleeting silent romance still touches the source where all feeling is born, and is strong precisely because we know the romance will never be. It's the highest romance—because only the ones we never have are perfect.

  * How to recognize good people: Scrape away the liberal dogma, and the obvious is true: you recognize good people by their faces. This truth is shunned, even presented as unfairness, but only because those doing the shunning want
to be recognized by edited histories rather than the clear facts that their eyes are greedy or that they look like assholes. And there's a companion truth to this: assholes find each other's faces good, and hence congregate. This is the mechanism by which governments come to be formed, along with other zealot groups and committeelike structures. Remember: a good person will only want to interfere with their own life. You need do nothing more than this to be good—and your face will reflect it.

  * Let's also admit the obvious: if a spiritual force underlies human life, it seems best described by classical gods, that is, a council of capricious portfolios governing the spectrum of natures between kindness and cruelty. To those of orthodox faith we must gently but firmly ask: does life really suggest the existence of a single caring force? We just can't ignore the lack of providential intervention in the vast majority of sufferings. And if there were such a power, be pragmatic: would resurrection from a peaceful grave to join smug and raucous evangelists be a fate we should rush to embrace?

  * John 2:10–11.

  * Note that handbags come sized according to the age and concern for things in general of the carrier. An aging person must need more support from external accessories as their inner powers decline; plus their sensitivity to that decline must lead them to imagine even more dismaying contingencies. Thus in Gisela's bag you could fit a plumber's toolbox, in Anna's merely a chocolate éclair.

  * Should you ignore my example and choose the path of physical decay, perhaps not all of it is bad news. While the body withers off the bone, the process we call life still seems to take place inside. What seems to happen, I've discovered by observation, is a process of reduction, as in a meat stock. By deathbed time, only the primal salts and essences seem to remain. It appears any life distills character like this, no matter what one's pot starts out containing. So the dissolute, the infirm, the addicted will all distill; and therefore have we any business imposing standards on them or on anyone, whether for charity or social order? No, because life is that distillation alone, and it proceeds heedless of anyone, with what ingredients it has.

  * The head of a pharmaceutical company admitted that only thirty percent of drugs work properly on thirty percent of people. And if you observe life you'll see that he merely identifies the mean threshold of human success in nature. The drug company was a working model of the mathematics of expectation, endeavor, whim, and fortune. Therefore abolish the notion of one hundred percent solutions so touted by culture. According to nature, thirty percent is a windfall.