Spectator of Souls
K stops walking, sits on a bench and places his head in his hands. What is at the root of this Nausea which has settled like mud on his thoughts? What is this feeling? He closes his eyes and delves into the deep corners of his mind. Everything is timed to the minute, he begins; you work, you consume, you go bed at ten o’clock; you go to school, you fall in love, you marry and live in domesticity; you have children; you believe in God; you drink three cups of coffee and eight glasses of water a day; frivolous conversations in cafes, restaurants with oversized wine glasses and chic, affected food, shopping malls that suck you into a vacuum of consumption - trapped in a supermarket society; awkward, artificial smiles taken for photos on annual holidays in places where the sun promises fun and fulfillment and escape. There are business and lifestyle magazine subscriptions and memberships to museums together with glossy Cubist and pop art books piled on a glass coffee table. In the garage there is a German convertible perfect in its synchronisations. Awaking, pissing, eating, working, sleeping. All is as predictable as a clock in this pixelated existence. For K, as forty looms in the distance like a hungry hawk, the greatest danger is to lose oneself in this life, to pass through this world quietly as if nothing has happened.
More than anything he would like to look down on the ordinary man and be proud he is not one. Nevertheless, his life in many aspects is thoroughly ordinary. University followed by a predictable career clockwatching in a suit; a mortgage and money in the bank to counter difficult times; dressed respectfully and inconspicuously; on good terms with the police. He makes an annual call to his accountant to pay his taxes. He monitors the slippery slide of inflation and interest rates. He attends ceremonies, celebrates weddings, commiserates at funerals, congratulates at graduations, little ceremonies, milestones which numb the plain truth, the menacing repetition of his life. He is the personification of a little bourgeois world. As it is he feels neither highs nor lows, pleasure nor pain. This is a toneless, sterile life.
He has a sudden urge to take off all his clothes and run naked through the streets yelling and screaming; a sudden urge to a have a fist fight with a stranger; to smash something, anything, a church window or an office building; to rob a bank; to hold a half-loaded gun to his head and pull the trigger; to strangle a stranger, their red, spluttering face in his hands, their life at his whim; to molest a little girl; molest a little boy; have sex in public with the next person he sees; develop a heroin addiction. For what he detests now more than anything, what he curses himself for is this contentment, this flat trajectory of his life, this stultifying middle class, this dull prosperity, this fat, simmering mediocrity.
He thinks again of killing himself. The thought floods his mental intestines like an anaesthetic, softens up his muscles, fills him with sweet disgust. But then, there is the whole laborious process of preparation – finding a rope for a hanging or the tubes to connect to a car exhaust, preparing a note which will convey intelligence and regret at hurting anyone reassuring them it’s not their fault. Somehow, when it came to the final crunch, when it came to slicing that knife across his wrist or pulling that trigger of a gun aimed timorously at his head, he realises he’s still fond of life, stupid as that may be. It is ludicrous but he hangs on to notion that there is an exit from this Nausea, there is hope, that the burden of existence should be carried up the eternal mountain because the view at the top might be worth the sojourn. No, suicide, that most basic philosophical question, is not a solution. He prefers to live on, even without illusions, without goals, without a fated future but not passively end it all. Of course merely by living one is killing oneself. The only difference to suicide is that living takes so horribly long with every day a recurring death.
Then maybe a visit to the psychiatrist would remedy his situation. At weekly sessions he could say how he’d awaken each day and hope something extraordinary would happen, something to break the routine, swell his heart, make the world spin round in a glorious rocket of colour and noise. He’d sit there in front of the psychiatrist, whose eyes would glaze over with disinterest, and tell how at each sunrise he wished he’d meet someone to give him purpose, a friend, a lover, a brother, a mother. Maybe he would be deemed abnormal and placed on sedatives to smooth out the toothed edges of his feelings. Can a person be considered insane when he feels the disappointment of each day accumulate, his heart growing empty; simply stand by watching as the stream of identical days begins again, over and over?
K knows since moving to the City, he’s found it difficult to create solid relationships in a city so titanic, where people hold conversations with themselves. Every day he feels himself a lonely figure in the inscrutable crowd.
And even sex is a cold affair. At lunchtimes, K visits the dingy sex venues of the City and has anonymous sex with other men to alleviate the persistent, crawling itch of his libido. Total fulfillment these episodes did not achieve and K is usually left physically spent and emotionally unsatisfied. Yet, he keeps returning every week for the body contact and the simple carnal catharsis. In those venues, amid discarded condoms on the floor, semen on the walls and melancholic porn in the background, K thinks about his life and its direction, the past and the future, the incessant requirements of a society that is increasingly hollow.