Splitting. From idleness, pointing back at idleness. All the pleasure of alcohol is produced in the crevice: vertigo, adhesion, myth.
More than alcohol itself, what demands vigilance is the drinking space and its panoptic ritual: the ritual of drinking hovers vaguely over the underage phase of lived experience as a collectively mythologized narrative of ideological control, then lands upon the trajectory of life with an exaggerated, heavy throw (début). Through its covert yet effective evangelism, it infiltrates the minds of everyone, and with its promise of the state of exception (stato di eccezione), it delivers life back to bareness (nuda vita), pushing the individual to the edge of social rules, exposing them without reserve.
Behind them stand the power structures, moral systems, and legal norms of daily life; before them lies a plane of self-destruction. All life experiments organized around specific activities and themes occur on this border. The bare life-form glances back now and then at what is called the everyday, the experiential, and the normative, and now and then looks forward into the abyss of suicide, unilinearity, narcissism, coercion, addiction, and detoxification, alternating endlessly.
The melancholy that follows drinking is a gaze upon one’s own reflection: “I am delusional,” “All I can see is a shadow,” “Inside me, everything is so quiet,” “Ah! A plane! Look! A plane!” All of this amounts to rough images projected over the vortex of the void, obscure, heavy, solitary, to the point that the body has no choice but to counter them with a sensation of buoyant drifting. In that ambiguous, languid silence, the fragrance of alcohol arrives from the scale of notes, positing itself as a stream of desire extending futilely toward infinity. The people around exchange glances over small, scattered echoes, carving out their own reflections in one another’s pupils. This reflection, this body, this glass fuses with death, reaching out bit by bit along the slow drip of liquid, peering at that plane whose keynote is extinction.
They dance on the edge (there are only two places here; the edge stands between them as dusk stands between day and night), dancing soundlessly, dancing thoughtlessly, wishing to dance reality into dream, wishing to hover above the plane of destruction. The drinker holds a posture oriented toward night, a posture that is proud, fervent, wrapped in flame, a posture that denies life and denies death, and that will, when daylight comes, be denied by both in turn.
Yoshiyama went outside again, and I followed. We stood side by side and vomited into the gutter. I braced my left hand against the wall, plunged my right fingers deep into my throat, and immediately the muscles of my abdomen convulsed, hot liquid surging out. Each time the retching rose from my chest and abdomen, a sour lump gathered in my throat and mouth; a push of the tongue, a numbness across the gums, and the granular filth poured into the water. 1
Let me say it again: desire intervenes directly in perception. This is a very strange, very magnificent thing, an unknown continent. But hallucinations, false perceptions, the fluctuations of delirium, and a long chain of dependencies are all too familiar, even as they are endlessly replayed in addicts, who make themselves experimental subjects, veritable knights of the modern world, or universal purveyors of corrupted consciousness. What does one pass through from one to the other? Do drug addicts gain their advantage through a new experience of a desire-perception system, or are they simply swindling themselves? 2