Autonomy (1-6)

Today is my birthday. I turned 36. When Byron did that, he wrote a poem about how unacceptable it was that he was no longer hot:

Tis time this heart should be unmoved, 
       Since others it hath ceased to move: 
Yet though I cannot be beloved, 
                                    Still let me love! 

My days are in the yellow leaf;
       The flowers and fruits of Love are gone;
The worm—the canker, and the grief
                                  Are mine alone!

If you are interested in my thoughts on masculine beauty, feel free to check out my essay on the subject in the redoubtable London Magazine. However, today I am going to be using my birthday to be nostalgic about other things.

Rather than regret the continued passing of my youth (‘If thou regret'st thy Youth, why live?’), I am going to make some effort to preserve an aspect of it, and take advantage of the fact that it is my birthday to ask for indulgence in doing this. To that end, I will depart from this Substack’s usual critical writing, and be uploading in three lots of six chapters, a novel that I wrote when I was a younger (c.2018-19). It is called Autonomy.

It is about a man who inherits control of his father’s multinational logistics company, and decides to ‘liquidate the company, sell its assets, and then grind up over two hundred million pounds, by hand, in a large mincer’. The justifications he offers for this he draws from his unfinished and unfinishable doctoral thesis on the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno. As a result, he encounters incomprehension, anger, and subsequent legal challenges, chiefly from his older sister, but from the world in general. It is intended to be comic, in part.

I’m not going to write critically about it. You will probably be able to see the influences. If you’re a regular reader of this Substack, you may even be able to see the throughline of various preoccupations—though I want to stress that literally everything in this book is fiction fiction, as opposed to autofiction or the like, any resemblances...living or dead...etc.

As you can imagine, a novel of this type, was not necessarily seen as a hot commercial prospect when I tried to sell it. Among the worst aspects of Substack are its obsession with the publishing industry and with amplifying the ressentiment of the ‘white male novelist’ so I will spare you the dull stories. But looking over it, as an indulgence, during a year of various other, newer professional setbacks, I was pleased to find that I still thought the book had something to say (If thou regret’s thy Youth, why live?). I have lightly edited it, with help from the people who helped me write it in the first place. They know who they are. The mistakes that are definitely still there are still mine.

A writer, someone once said, has to create the taste by which he is enjoyed. I therefore feel a little more confident that regular readers of my criticism might enjoy this than the general public. If you have been willing to spend time with 5,000 word essays on Lukacsian typicality or what poetry has to do with metaphysical naturalism, this hopefully won’t try your patience too much.

If you are interested in the concept of aesthetic autonomy, from a critical perspective, among some recent works that I think are interesting are Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art, By Kerstin Stakemeier & Marina Vishmidt and Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art Under Capitalism, by Nicholas Brown, ‘On Artistic Autonomy as a bourgeois fetish’, by Sarah Brouillette and Joshua Clover, and The Sovereign Self by Grant H Kester. It’s unlikely that I’ll write about these ‘properly’, as I think this novel says everything I want to say on the subject, for now.

In the meantime, to paraphrase another great birthday poem –the untidy activity will continue.

Autonomy

Let the dead bury their dead

— Matthew, 8:22

1.

To give an idea teeth takes time. The idea that a fortune so large could do anything but persist, that it could even disappear—like a person, like the person who accumulated it, who parted with it easily or guarded it jealously, attended to it diligently, rubbing the side of his temples with his reading glasses on, finding opportunities for it in unexpected places, or who simply didn’t mention it, shutting the leather binding of a bill and handing it off to the side, never to be seen again—was, initially, inconceivable. Money feels no need to claim it survives in the memories of those who held it close; it flows. Sitting there, in the bank, it was already elsewhere. It was always working. It would not sleep. It would change in the twinkling of an eye. It would be incorruptible. But, when I found it was mine, it dawned on me that I had to destroy it.

Of course, from the moment the idea about the money began to take shape, people tried to intervene. There were supplicants. They talked to me about mosquito nets; they talked about green investment funds and housing co-ops; one idiot even suggested that I put the money towards research that might prevent the development of malign artificial intelligence. The things they said I hadn’t considered, I had obviously considered. I had thought about the workers’ livelihoods—their lives, even—and about the possible use that I could turn the money to. I had reflected on it until my own self seemed almost invisible; instead, inside me was the world which the money would be used to keep turning. But reflection could not sway me; I was determined to liquidate the company, sell its assets, and then grind up over two hundred million pounds, by hand, in a large mincer. I was resolved, absolutely, and if my legal troubles ever end, and when my sentence is served or even overturned, when I am officially, formally free, I still intend to feed each note into the machine that I bought from the butcher’s supply warehouse with my ‘own’ money. I will make my point in meaningless shredded paper.

The announcement that I would inherit outright control of my father’s company was unexpected. Mr Ronson, the solicitor my father, Stephen Dolan, had chosen to represent him in the matter of his death, informed me as I admired the painting in his office. Almost, but not quite, as large as his window.

— The phrase he used, when he told me about it, was good old-fashioned primogeniture.

He did not show me the will which named me, Lucas Stephen Dolan, sole heir, but looked at me, as if hoping that I would acknowledge the wording as characteristic, a living trace of my father in the provocation and outdatedness of his phrasing.

—But I’m not the eldest.

—I know, hence the word, ‘old-fashioned’. Of course, ‘good’ is a value judgment, beyond the competence of the legal profession. We deal with ‘reasonable’, a word which serves to keep us out of that kind of trouble.

The lawyer seemed to see something in my face. Some painedness I could not quite disguise. He was right that I was pained. Reason has its share of critics. I still hope to count myself among them.

By this, I mean that the unreason of reasonable people is at the heart of a thesis which I have spent the best part of the last decade on. I am, or was until recently in training to be, a scholar of critical theory. I want to stress here that I do not mean the general agglomeration of ideas about interpretation, which is only slightly more accurately known as ‘literary theory’. I mean thought that critiques, that investigates the ground of its own thinking, and goes beyond that, and in doing so tells you what is wrong with everything we understand as normal and natural, exhumes the bones beneath us, or unpicks the tapestry that from a distance we might have taken for a real landscape and shows you the red thread of barbarism woven through it. Following what is mostly a trail of dead and difficult German thinkers, I try to reveal, in part, the way that the human powers of reason, which emerged from the domination of nature, themselves naturalise domination.

Perhaps it would be helpful to think of it like this: we cannot think but in fetters, and describing these, the historical limitations of our thought, the way it is shaped, and indeed made possible only by the current social and economic order, is the enterprise to which I have dedicated the last seven years of my life. This may not be immediately apparent, if you read my old student profile on my university website, say. I deal, mostly, with aesthetics, with the question of what is on the other side of the freedom we believe we find in art; but in order to do this, I have had to question the common sense, the reasonable, and the person who can make these distinctions, the legal fiction that has somehow come to life and eaten the heart out of real people, swelling in their hollowed out remains. I have tried to show how works of art, the sensuous or physical forms of our ideas, might interrupt this decomposition.

You will see, then, why the appeal by wealthy corporate lawyers to some breezily universal, common-sense definition of the word ‘reasonable’ felt egregious. The solicitor’s statement was, of course, a manifestly ideological one. It was true in the sense that the fetish of reason served as a way of keeping the law from coming apart under the weight of its own contradictions. But what kind of truth is that? The painting seemed to throb angrily at me for a second.

When Eleanor, my elder sister, had been doing her Law Practitioner’s Course, while I was doing my MA, and we were both home for Sunday lunch, she would often explain some problem to do with the mental state or intention of the defendant or contracted party. I would ask questions about possible situations, or how it was possible to tell somebody’s intent, or why one thing was considered to break the chain of causation and not others, and when the distinctions became too fine-grained she would say it simply has to be seen in a certain way by a reasonable person. This had seemed to me to be the opposite of reason. And I had said that reason was clearly whatever gave a judge an erection.

At this our father looked at me, as did Eleanor, quizzically. Perhaps they were slightly offended by the use of the word erection.

—It’s an old joke about the definition of pornography.

—Why would anyone need to define pornography?

our father said,

—It’s self-evident, I would have thought.

—That’s kind of the point, Dad.

Nothing is self-evident. Though my father’s irritation with my demeanour was pretty close.

I thought this train of thought in the solicitor’s office, but said nothing. There are times and places to challenge instrumental rationality. When you discover that you’ve inherited a more-than-two-hundred-million-pound business empire, and that your older sister has not, is probably not one of them.

—So that’s why Eleanor isn’t here?

—I thought it best to inform you separately, Lucas. To be honest I wanted to avoid the scene.

—She will probably go spare, that’s true.

—But she does get the house. That’s not something to be sniffed at.

I did not believe that Eleanor would shut her nostrils to this injustice. She was not someone who would accept mistreatment, or what she saw as mistreatment, even if it took for form of a multi-million pound property. I looked again at the painting on Ronson’s office wall. It was, I think, by Sol Lewitt. He saw me looking.

—Do you like it? It was a payment in a contract dispute between a gallerist and an insurer. We were representing the insurer. They were having some kind of performance thing in the gallery, and one of the attendees went mad, which was the point, I seem to recall. The artists wanted everyone to enter into a frenzy, and in said frenzy, one man destroyed a valuable painting. Punched his way through it, I think. Then he stuck his head through one of the holes and hula hooped with it. For some time. Everyone cheered, except the poor gallery girls, who were very much shaken by the whole experience. It was worth more than eight million pounds. The insurers said the gallery was negligent, that they should have planned for this kind of madness in a performance. That had been its whole point, and if they thought it the west London art buyers would be immune to their perfomers’ madness, why did they put him on? They won. We won. And we were able to recover costs, but the gallery had gone bankrupt in the meantime. We decided we would accept the final part of the payment in works. In the end, we figured it would be a worthwhile investment to distribute them across the offices. That it might improve wellbeing.

—Has it?

—Well, we’ve not had an office suicide. Which is more than you can say for some of our peers.

Art, Theodor Adorno says, is the ever-broken promise of happiness.

—Besides, the value has appreciated considerably.

—It ‘s always nice when everybody wins.

—Excepting the art gallery.

I shrugged.

—Perhaps it serves them right for not believing in the power of the work they were showing.

He looked at me in such a way as to make his eye wrinkles fan out. On his face they looked less like crow’s feet, I thought, than like the vaulting of some gothic ceiling. He was solid, serious, a place of quiet reflection and compassion. I did not believe in him.

—I should have remembered I was talking to a philosopher. Your father was telling me about your thesis the last time I saw him.

—He was?

—Well, he was saying it was about time you finished it.

Again, he was attempting to invoke, or failing that, to evoke, my father’s character, to remind me of him. He was banking, I thought, on that revaluation of loved ones that loss causes, their foibles leant a poignancy that cuts through annoyance. I decided to deal with the content of what he said, and not the man he hoped to summon up by saying it.

My PhD, as I have mentioned, was then entering its eighth year, I was just over 30 years old—If I were an American, no one would have batted an eyelid. Surely, I thought, lawyers have no right to complain about someone drawing things out?

Having been vindicated by experience on this point has done nothing to soothe me. Rightness is not by itself satisfaction. Trust me when I say I say this with confidence.

—You can’t cut thought to measure, as if it were so many yards of linen.

He frowned, slightly.

—I suppose not. It’s on one of those Germans, right? Heidegg…

—Not Heidegger.

—Ah.

—It’s about Theodor Adorno, and the idea of aesthetic autonomy.

—Well then.

My father had never really been interested in art, even as an investment. In a way, I think that speaks well of him. We had a soppy, Millais-like painting in one of the living rooms, because my mother had once said she liked that. After she left, and even though she was not allowed to keep it in the divorce, my father had still insisted on calling it ‘your mother’s painting’, and when he said ‘I’ve moved your mother’s painting into storage, it reminds me too much of her’, I said nothing and put a hand on his shoulder, as if to reassure him. The woman in the painting didn’t resemble her at all.

The solicitor and I both sat in silence for a while. It seemed indecorous to speak, as if we were standing over a monument. Neither of us, I think, really understood what was going on. I was bewildered that my father would leave me in control of the business that he built, and which I had taken about as much interest in as he had taken in the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno. I heard two muffled men walk by the office arguing about the smell of a lunch.

My father had asked, initially, for a potted biography, and for a few of the key tenets of Adorno’s thought, but no matter how many times I had furnished him with these, with sayings such as an artwork is a desecration of silence, all that he retained was that he was a German half-Jewish Marxist philosopher, refugee from the Nazis who, consequentially, disliked most things, especially hobbies. It was not so much that there was, obviously, no money in studying this topic, which puzzled my father, but that he sincerely could not see the point of attending to things with what I would call a rigorous negativity, especially not down to the small details that Adorno used to demonstrate the latent horror underneath life’s banality. I once jokingly explained that Adorno saw door handles replacing knobs as a precursor to fascism, and my father’s most common way of referring to my work from then on was asking how I was getting on with my doorknob man. Likewise, I understood the word logistics, which he used to describe his business, in what was at best a lay-sense. I knew only that the work his company undertook tended to be either construction or violence adjacent.

We had treated each other’s actual worldly pursuits with a benign contempt. When we did get together, I would ask how business was going. He would invariably reply with the phrases, ‘booming’, ‘thriving’ or ‘squeaky bum time’, and that would be it. Just as when he asked me about my thesis, and my doorknob man, my response was ‘fine’. By the fourth year, I sensed that he didn’t believe me when I said it. I do still intend to finish. The prison library is inadequate, but one can get PDFs. I’ve been working harder on it now. Really all I need is institutional approval.

We liked and cared about none of the same things, and this was hard for him. But harder, I have since come to realise, was that I gave my parents nothing of my inner life. How could I? It had acquired the effortful, self-negating character of the prose I spent my working hours reading. And its basic theme was that the world was wrong. They, on the other hand, thought that the world was on balance better than the alternative. My father, for example, was of the opinion that as long as there was rugby, classic rock, and Church of England hymns, which he loved inordinately, the whole business couldn’t be so bad.

And this meant that, when we talked, it was hard to discuss either things or ourselves. We had fundamentally different ethea. This normally left us with the news, which we would discuss, insofar as my father would venture an opinion and I would say noncommittal things so as to elicit a slightly more detailed complaint from him about the people in charge. These people almost invariably didn’t know anything because they had never had to face the real-world pressure of running a business. The fact that running a business, as far as I could see, consisted of communicating with subordinates in much the same way that I imagined being a politician did, did not really come up. I would then try to find a way to express a smaller opinion, which would neither contradict his, nor completely sell out my own beliefs. This was an improvement from my teens, when we would have impassioned arguments, arguments that ended in my sitting in my room, convulsing in what I can only call rage sobs, my skin become blotchy, staring out the window into the west London night, headphones on, listening to something atonal and aggressive. By the time I left to go to university, the arguments had dwindled in frequency but, as a consequence, my father thought I didn’t put enough effort into the family. I would not bring girlfriends home, I didn’t talk about how I felt, I didn’t really open up or offer anything of myself, and I certainly took no interest in what my father did. This was the only way that I could avoid making judgments.

My inheriting the business thus seemed ludicrous. It was only later that I came to see the bequest as an act of profound rage. My father throwing the future of his company away to prove a point to his son. He had made a sword that he wanted to see if I would fall on. On one reading, it was so single-minded and heedless of the consequences that there was little to do but admire it.

---

2.

My father had always said that he made his money for his family, to give us a better life, that this came first. The only real exception in my adulthood to my refusing to engage my father, intellectually or emotionally, came when we had an argument about the nature of family itself, a few months before he died, in January 2019. It was at home, after dinner, and only the two of us were there. We had been eating some form of steak, I believe, as befits two grown men dining alone. It was large and bloody and delicious, and the meal had been so boring that my father, after telling me about a film he’d watched, where extremely famous old white British actors pretended to gain a new lease on life by spending time with some of Britain’s former colonial subjects, finally asked why I held him in such contempt.

Prior to this, he’d been telling me an anecdote about the time he had managed to bribe a Senegalese regional bigwig in the 1980s by promising to bring the Rolling Stones to his wedding, and then in fact bringing a tribute band from Doncaster who nevertheless ‘rocked the Senegalese’s socks off’. I had heard the story before, and knew that it had been a bargain at £150 plus the cost of the band’s flights. The deal that was made as a consequence cemented my father’s first major international contracts, supporting a large-scale building and irrigation project across three nations, and soon he was on a path to the obscene wealth which I have not yet given up hope of eliminating. The story was more entertaining than hearing about Eleanor and Hamish’s trouble with their tenants, but not entertaining enough to stop me from mostly dwelling on the condensation on my wine glass, and on the problems with object-oriented ontology, a philosophical fad that I was planning to attack at a conference as insufficiently dialectical, and therefore incapable of actually orienting itself towards the object. It was as I was thinking these thoughts that my father put his hand on my hand on the wine glass and looked hard at me and said:

—I’ve never understood you. We’re sitting here, having dinner, and I can tell that you’re just trying to brush off everything that I say and do, everything that I’m telling you about your sister, and everything that’s happened to this house, the story of how I built the business… the place and the people that made you. You try to pretend they don’t matter.

—…

—I’m not saying that you’re not polite. You’re polite, you do the right thing most of the time. You remember birthdays, you come to visit only slightly less often than you should, but that’s no consolation to a man when he realises that his son is indifferent to him. The point of having children always seemed to me that there would be people who wouldn’t make you lonely, and yet, with you, I feel lonelier than I ever thought would be possible. The main reason I still work is so that you and Eleanor will never have to suffer, never have to worry about money, and that your kids won’t either. In some ways, it’s a kind of sacrifice, you know? I know you don’t respect it. And that is actually painful. Despite our differences, you’re still my son.

—…

—And I want you to look past those differences. I want you to see the beauties, or the moments of joy and skill in my life. I don’t expect you to understand my story completely, but I want you to try. I want you to want to do this. I want us to come to understand each other. We’re both men now, and men may have their differences, but they accept those, and try to see underneath to what they share, and we share blood, for Christ’s sake. You’re my son.

—But what’s the point in provoking an argument? I can’t see how that would help either of us grow closer. I am accepting our differences. You tell me about the business, and, if you want to understand me, I can only reply that I think what you do is, in Marxist terms, the extraction of surplus value, exploitation. I’m not going to approve, and I don’t want to argue about it. Tricking someone into giving you a contract by using the fake Rolling Stones is only a heroic deed if you don’t value the humanity of the person you’re tricking.

I had put my objections in ‘Marxist terms’ to distance myself from those terms, to try not to offend him. It didn’t seem to help.

—And that’s bollocks. Exploitation is simply making the best of the circumstances, people were always willing. I’ve never forced anyone to do anything. Does it matter if the Rolling Stones weren’t at his wedding, if he still felt like they were? In your blog you always use the words subjective and objective, every bloody thing is subjective and objective, and I can’t see how you can be exploited apart from subjectively so.

He paused for a moment, changed tack, and tried to appeal to me in a different way. I was surprised that he had managed to find my blog. It was not something that I had updated more than a few times in the last 6 years; no one read blogs anymore, they seem almost as long and daunting as books. But I would, on rare occasions in the past, post pieces where I tried to think through certain philosophical and political questions. My father was the opposite of my imagined reader. I never read about his company; even if I saw the name Support Solutions in the business section of a newspaper I would skip over the page.

—Can’t you think of what I do like I think about boxing? I hate violence, always have, every fight I’ve been in I didn’t start. I hate to watch boxing, but I can tell when something’s done well. I’ve had to go with clients over the years, and I’ve had to be able to say ‘that was something well or poorly done’. I want you to try to see, from my perspective, what I value, what I find important. And more importantly, I want you to see that I do it because I want to do right by the family. I did this for you and your indifference, your disdain, taints everything.

My father had not finished his steak. But we repaired to the drawing room, leaving the steak bathing sadly in its own blood. We moved there to talk, away from the meat. There, I responded to his appeal that I invest myself more in the family, by saying that the nuclear family in particular was just there to serve the interests of capital, to reproduce it and to allow workers and the system in general to continue working. He did not respond well to this claim.

This was years after my mother had divorced my father and moved to live in Australia with her new partner, Raoul. We had always been wealthy, but over the last few years the company had managed to acquire a series of contracts that had greatly increased its value, picking up various outsourced duties of the state. In the eight years since the divorce was finalised, he had become almost doubly rich. Of course, as the argument continued, this newfound extra wealth came up as a way of talking about his deeper feelings. He had reinvested the money into the business, he saw nothing further that he wanted to spend it on for himself, it was not money, but emotional ties that mattered to him, ties to the business, ties to the family. Everything became entangled as we tried to explain ourselves to each other, without success. I believe at one point I even quoted Silvia Federici, saying that By denying housework a wage and transforming it into an act of love, capital has killed many birds with one stone. It had never really applied in our context, where of course housework was waged, and my mother was now entitled to receive maintenance payments which she had nevertheless refused.

It became obvious that we could not speak meaningfully to each other about such questions. My father had been quite deeply offended by the idea that his feelings were false ones, that they served some purpose other than his own. The language of reproduction, social or sexual, and in particular their inextricability, seemed to disgust him. Family was a higher purpose. You made money for it, it didn’t exist to allow money to remake itself. He had, on occasion, got up from his armchair to gesture more vehemently. The wine he held would swirl or wobble, as he tried to show how hurt he was by the idea that he did not know his own mind, that no one could possibly know their own mind. My father, obviously, had no time for psychoanalysis. He drank too much that evening, as did I, and though we ended it in surly silence, without ever actually reaching the point of shouting, I could see that our serious involvement with each other on the level of ideas had been a disastrous experiment. We retreated into civility. Above the fireplace was something that, up until that point, I had neither noticed nor commented on. A new painting. It was a portrait of a woman who again looked nothing like my mother, but in a slightly more recent style.

I see now, thinking about that conversation, in the light of how the will turned out, that he had ‘put his money where his mouth was’. He had thought more about the reproduction of his family than he had about the reproduction of capital. On the other hand, the tool he had chosen to prove his point was capital, and it has now broken the family absolutely. The money lives on, and Eleanor refuses to answer my letters or to visit me.

+

Soon after my conference with Mr Ronson, Eleanor called me and told me that we needed to meet. At first, she seemed angry at our father, much more so than at me.

—I don’t understand why he would do this, Luke. I mean, I know that he wasn’t ‘woke’ by whatever standards these things are judged now, but why would he do it? I don’t think I ever heard him say anything even Jeremy Clarkson levels of sexist.

—…

—Well, I remember watching Dr No with him once, and him laughing at that moment where Sean Connery sends the girl out with a spank and the words ‘man talk’. But I thought he was laughing at the absurdity.

—Adorno, in Dialectic of Enlightenment says that laughter is an invading barbaric life, a sickness infecting happiness. That our laughter in the wrong world is always without scruple. I think he uses the phrase parody of humanity. Even when we laugh at the injustice on the screen because it seems unrealistic, we’re condemning ourselves to accepting the existence of that injustice.

—Adorno can fuck off.

—…

—Is that what this inheritance is, ‘man talk’? Something between you and him. I think I’ve got the message. He doesn’t care about me enough to involve me in the business.

—You do get the house.

—Fuck you. And exactly. I get the domestic things. Even though you wouldn’t be able to describe what a business did if it hit you in the face.

It seemed to me, though I did not say it, that business was always hitting us in the face. We were sat in the outdoor seating area of a Paul in Holland Park. I thought to myself that now was not the time to talk about the extraction of surplus value, nor to mention that the separation between the domestic and the economic was an arbitrary one, nor that real-estate was self-evidently a business, was indeed my sister’s current business. She worked for a large law firm mostly doing ‘landlord and tenant’ cases. This meant that in almost all cases, she was doing ‘landlord’.

—I don’t understand why he did it any more than you do.

—So what are we going to do about it?

I should probably have told her then about the desire that had been forming in the hours since I left the lawyer’s office. But then maybe things would have simply reached the same unfortunate conclusion faster.

I want to stress that it was not because I disliked Eleanor that I did not immediately offer her half of the money. As she sat there, fretting, rubbing her face, pulling at a nail, I felt a significant amount of pity for her disbelief at what our father had done to her. I had likewise been confused that a man who clearly thought that money was an excellent repository of value seemed not to value her by his own standards. It would be incomprehensible.

Her and my father’s relationship, throughout childhood and adulthood, was characterised by struggles to understand how the one made the other feel. There were issues sometimes, I distinctly remember a hush descending on the house for an entire week when it was discovered that she had got a tattoo on her ankle, but these flare-ups were never quite the same as the undersong of dissatisfaction that I felt characterised mine and our father’s own interactions, which came down, really, to judgements of value. Three small thin stars, overlapping each other—a black constellation around the blank ankle bone—were a source of disappointment, but were not a deal breaker.

But behind this feeling there was no thought. I did not tell Eleanor what I was thinking, because I was not thinking just about my father, about his life, but about the wider meaning of the money. The truth of it, what it meant to the world, and not just to us. Did it matter what my father meant by the money? Was that what was important about it?

I remember, on one occasion, getting a lift in a helicopter that the company had chartered for him. My father had been called back to London from a brief holiday we were on in the Cornish countryside owing to some business emergency. He decided that it would be fun to take us on the ride with him. To bond a little bit. I was thoroughly nauseated by the flight. I was a child with a weak constitution, prone to travel sickness at the best of times. But my father had insisted, and I found myself trying to maintain control of my own body as bits of it seemed to rise at random with the helicopter, fluids inside sloshing this and that way as we banked. We buzzsawed our way into the sky, and as we came close enough to distinguish London’s congeries of stupidly shaped buildings, fewer then than there are now, my father saw that Eleanor was holding my hand, trying to soothe me.

—Ah love,

he said.

—let us be true to one another/ for the world that seems/ to lie before us like a land of dreams/

and then he trailed off. Whether this was because he had to proffer me a paper bag because I was about to be sick, or because he did not know the remainder of the poem—he was not often a font of quotations, even from anthology chestnuts—I can’t say. However, it struck me, as I came to know the poem later, that it perfectly embodied the bullshit sentimentality of the contemporary bourgeois. There is no truth in the world, so we must hold fast to one another; we retreat into the family. But disagreements have stakes that cannot simply be laid aside in order to be true to one another. That would be just another falsehood. Both my father and my sister took the people engaged in the argument more seriously than the argument itself, but some arguments were about people, about all the people caught up in the tyranny of the way things are. To this day, I remember, in a particularly physical way, how small London looked, and then how huge it grew, and then not being able to make out my reflection in the glass of a building taller than the one we were landing on, before I sought further consolation by focusing on the bag.

I had just about finished vomiting as the helicopter touched down, a process which both my father and sister found hilarious. But when I accidentally spilled the bag on myself, and on Eleanor, he became impatient, and she was obviously disgusted and incensed. At school, later that term, they had a poetry recital competition, which Eleanor entered, saying she wanted to recite the throw-up poem. I don’t know how she did in it. I was not concerned.

This is all to say that Eleanor and I were not quite on the same wavelength as children, or as adults, and that she took after our father more than I did. It was therefore absurd to me to be in the position I was in. I don’t mean that our gender roles in the family were reversed, or anything as straightforward as that. An alternative way of seeing it was that Eleanor was just more capable of relating, of making relating a kind of process that was not in itself conditioned by anything else. It was something worth doing for its own sake.

Though as with my father, mother, and a fortiori my aunts and uncles, cousins and second cousins, we were not close, I harboured no ill-will towards her. But I could not begin to talk to her about what I should do with the money because I knew that she would want it to be about us, about our relationships, or our relationships with our father.

One way of thinking about our interactions, I suppose our lives, is that we were like moons orbiting the planet that he was. Sometimes he would bring us close enough to affect each other’s movements. But perhaps now his absence was setting us up to collide into and annihilate each other. This would have been her way of seeing it; I would have had to explain that I did not place her deserts, or her claim to the money, in relation to mine, but in relation to the history of the money itself. It was not a topic on which I expected her to see reason.

+

The idea of destroying the money, or at least the ghost of this idea, had begun to haunt me prior to meeting her. I had gone home from Ronson’s office, trying to shut out the events of the day and return to work on my admittedly overdue thesis. Adorno was not going to understand himself. I had opened his late treatise on the possibility of philosophy itself, Negative Dialectics, and found myself dwelling on a passage in the introduction that stuck out by chance as I tried to find the page I was looking for:

A father’s retort to his son’s decidedly uncomfortable views is that all things are relative, that money makes the man, as in the Greek proverb. Relativism is a popularized materialism; thought gets in the way of money- making.

Adorno is here discussing the origins of relativism in the bourgeois ideal of political equality. Every person’s opinion counts for the same because people are theoretically identical, equal units called individuals. But, under capitalism, this claim makes them as fungible as money, is in fact derivative of the logic of capitalism itself, that of the self-interested pursuit of money, which becomes the only measure of truth, the sole way of valuing that is not ‘just an opinion’. To accede to a value found outside ourselves would be a violation of our freedom, as the bourgeois sees it. This very freedom cuts us off from others and the world—you have to admit a truth that is outside yourself or become empty. A son comes home and says that the world is an immoral cess-pool, and the father is disturbed by the fervency of that statement. So he defends his own comfort by saying each to his own. And within each to his own is the very logic that says that each already has his own, that the distribution of power and wealth which the son says makes the world a cesspool is fair, and in some sense objective—if there is no truth outside ourselves then we have to accept the pursuit of self-interest. Beauty and truth are both destroyed by the money relation, which renders itself the lone objective thing, relativizing everything it touches. Of course, money is labour transformed into a token of exchangeability for further labour power, if we follow traditional Marxist thought, and this labour becomes force, the force of truth, the thing that gives weight to an opinion, which makes it valid, but also which offers it a proving ground in the world, when one puts one’s money where one’s mouth is, say.

Anyway, as I was reading this passage, I could not get out of my head the image of a t-shirt my father would wear on the few occasions that he wore t-shirts.

Normally he would wear an actual shirt, regardless of the informality of the occasion. He was a fastidious dresser. Exceptionally neat, and normally well-fitting though they were, I found his clothes repugnant. Especially the smart casual clothes, the blue jeans paired with shirts and blazers that he wore on the weekends. He did not wear red trousers, because, as he said, only twats did that, but his clothes were close enough to a certain kind of weltanschauung that I still wince when I think of them. But this T-shirt he would wear when he was on holiday somewhere hot, or on the few times that he went to the gym he’d had built in one of the many superfluous rooms of the house. It said on it, The Game of Life: The One Who Dies With The Most Toys, Wins!

---

3.

The funeral was a fraught affair. Eleanor was still angry and confused by our father’s will, and so I had done the lion’s share of the organisation. My father was cremated, and we attended a service after in the local church. Inside, it was fairly undistinguished, though the stained glass above my pew wasn’t bad. I took it to be St. Francis of Assisi, because he was flanked by several birds. The pallor of his skin and furrowed brow made him look almost outrageously serious. Too sombre even for a funeral.

There were a large number of people there, my father’s friends and colleagues mostly. My mother was conspicuous by her absence.

Eleanor gave a fairly pedestrian reading of ‘Remember’ by Christina Rossetti. I was confident that she had chosen it by googling ‘funeral poems’.

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

Like most funeral poems it didn’t really seem suited to the occasion. They tend to be either too genuinely desolate or too platitudinous to work in that situation. The Rossetti one was both. It offers a facile consolation to reveal the real devastation. Not what you want at a funeral. It had the advantage, however, of being old, of being remembered. At least some of the people in the room would have read it in school, would have encountered it at other funerals, and so would know that the feelings the poem asked you to feel were appropriate.

About three years earlier, I had attended the funeral of a friend who had hanged themselves. They were a poet, whose work had some currency within a certain avant-garde scene. Militantly devoted to communism, they made these video recordings of their poems which were mostly screamed, the video intercut with frames of bizarreries, nature documentaries, a seemingly neverending scroll through someone’s social media feed. Their friends had decided that it might not be the place to play the video of the poem in the humanist funeral processing centre, or whatever it’s called. But their partner had got up and read their work in a way which seemed to show the weight of death bending the poem back into seriousness and tradition. It was strange, because the poem began something like

Klingsor languishes hissily in the migrant detention centre

blue birds tattooed over the shoulder of the woman next to him.

Cathectic devastation!

Petty nationalism of the strongest ocean deity.

I’m not sure if I’m remembering it correctly, but that’s an approximation, and it was awful—how the poem seemed in this context. Everyone there who was not involved in avant-garde poetry, sat there accepting that, although this kind of thing went over their head, it meant a lot to the dead, so they would have to show some respect. It had been one of the poet’s more accessible, lyrical pieces, which itself indicated a compromise of sorts with the event. Everyone there was compromising together, pretending not to be embarrassed.

Avant-garde poetry does little for me, but I admire the steadfastness of its spirit, its rejection of certain kinds of facile beauty, facile personality, in order to show, in the negative, our capacity not to be collapsed back in to the general obscenity of the world. Doing the ugly thing deliberately, identifying with the senseless and the evil, creates a parody of autonomy, of free choice, which might, one could argue, be the closest we can come to experiencing it. And yet, here, the poem seemed to grow bloated on the respect the occasion demanded. Their partner’s eyes were shining as she read it, holding back her weeping with a strength that was much easier to admire than the rebarbative complexities of the poem itself. The dead poet’s friends and peers were smiling, trying to enjoy the sensuous intensity of the language, of their righteous anger, just as the parents, uncles and aunts were bowing their heads, doing the decent thing. Nobody was even trying to stifle a laugh. There was something about that which struck me as the most tragic failure possible. If the context can render the poem comprehensible, isn’t there something sad about that? Neither the suicide, nor the poet, really overcome their surroundings.

People at my father’s funeral shifted in their seats, coughed and shuffled to their feet to sing ‘To be a Pilgrim’. I watched a number of people reach into their pocket at moments, as if to pull out their phone to check it, and then stop, reminding themselves where they were, and the appropriateness of the situation. This must be the only situation, really—a funeral—that such decorum is demanded absolutely. To disrespect the dead unlike, say, a bride and groom: that injures him because he is now made only of your respect. One of my favourite moments in Adorno’s book of aphorisms, Minima Moralia, written during his exile from Germany during the second world war, is a discussion of what he calls the ‘dialectic of tact’. Tact, he argues, is the willed obedience or deference to a kind of ceremony, not that which is compelled, like kneeling in a particular way before the Queen, but that which you choose to do out of respect for the other person. For Adorno, ‘the prerequisite of tact is a convention which is both fractured and yet still extant.’ But, as with most things under late capitalism as he sees it, ‘This has now irretrievably decayed, and lives on only in the parody of forms, a capriciously dreamed up or recollected etiquette for the ignorant’. Thus, seeking advice on the right way to tell someone X or Y is not tact, because you are searching for a form that surrenders your interaction with the other person to a rule, whereas choosing to obey an obsolete rule you’re not compelled to, perhaps bowing, or offering your seat, is something different. I had begun trying to figure out which kind of tact not answering your phone in a funeral is when the organ oozed into each corner of the church.

It was the opening bars of ‘I vow to thee my country’. It seemed so generic, the kind of hymn that every Englishman of a certain age and temperament would want played at his funeral. The kind of hymn they would have at their wedding, too, entirely dwarfing the occasion of its singing. As a consequence, I found it almost impossible not to be moved. There was a kind of pained concentration on the faces of many businessmen, as if they were thinking to themselves think dignified thoughts, which nevertheless seemed like real respect for my father. I saw several dozen mouths together make the shapes needed to make the sounds:

The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,

The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

Some were even weeping, at this song which reminded them, I’m sure, of the values they had learned at school, the values which they probably thought had won the Second World War, and which they thought that somehow my father’s business career had embodied. This was his very person, this song, and there seemed to be nothing contradictory in mourning him through its words. To honour Britain was to honour my father, because he was a man of noble sentiments, I thought their thoughts said, though perhaps they were simply thinking that the song was hard to sing, or was a stone-cold classic, or that their clothes itched, or that the partner of another colleague seemed attractive. But there seemed to be something clearly expressed in the total affect of the occasion, a dialectic between the impersonal and the personal that captured how I felt these people felt about my father. I looked over at Eleanor.

She was not singing. She was clenching the hymnbook. A small amount of her hair had come loose. She was wearing it up and pulled back, but three or four stray hairs curled over her forehead on the right, and I knew that this would be frustrating her, if she could feel the hair against her skin. Her boyfriend, Hamish, a large, square-jawed man, moved closer to her, brushing her shoulder with his own, or with his tricep, as his shoulder was so much higher than hers. It was a tender moment, and I wondered whether the hymn had got to him too. He was certainly the type. He was a barrister with the unmistakeable bearing of a former head boy. It was as if the badge was still attached to him. I remembered when he had first come round the house for lunch, I could barely conceal my disdain.

This had been Eleanor’s first year of university, before my parents divorced, and before I had finished school. They had met at some society or other, they told my parents, while my father carved a joint of lamb and pretended to do that thing where the father tries to intimidate the daughter’s boyfriend.

I have no idea where this tradition comes from, or who enjoys it, and it seems to me to reveal a libidinal economy which should by rights disturb anyone who does not think that fathers should want to compete in displays of sexual dominance involving their daughters. Doubtless in this context the daughter becomes simply a currency for the purchase of masculinity, but that doesn’t really explain the absurd deference of the boyfriend, who, in order to be approved for copulation with the daughter, has to pretend that this middle-aged man is in some way a threat. It seemed particularly absurd to me at that point, as I watched this enormous, beefy man be obsequious as he could, and laugh with a suitable nervousness at my father’s joke,

— So what are your intentions with my daughter, bearing in mind that I am holding a carving knife?

Hamish could, I am confident, have broken my father’s arm in an instant, making him drop the knife without any risk to himself, but he simply laughed and said that he thought Eleanor was terrific, and his intentions were to come here and meet her family, but that bearing in mind that my father was holding a carving knife, he also, if he was being honest, hoped they might live together when they moved out of college.

This was what they did, and they had been together ever since, apart from a two-month break, which I did not know the details of, but which had entailed my father repeatedly ringing me to ask if I had checked up on Eleanor for a while. The quiet way that he had performed his worry, and the way he connected it to my filial or fraternal duty had been frustrating to me at the time, inauthentic, but as the last few bars of ‘I vow to thee my country’ came to an end, everything seemed to fit together. I still had no inkling of what he’d meant by leaving me the money, nor how I would evade responsibility for it, but as he came to seem to be this constellation of effects, I felt that I knew him, better than I had thought, and not as well as I should have.

I walked out of the funeral, shaking hands with everyone. Everyone apologised to me and praised the proceedings. At the wake, someone who had been with my father in Senegal asked me if I’d heard the story of how my father had won his firm’s most important contract by bringing a Rolling Stones tribute band to an African politician’s wedding. I said that I would love to hear the story, and invited someone else over to listen too. We’re all trapped in a net of sorts, and there is nothing we can do to escape it.

---

4.

I was first introduced to the work of Theodor Adorno in a toilet. I was at a party somewhere in East London at the tail end of the 2000s, and had taken significantly more MDMA than I could handle. I had decided to lock myself in the toilet to both evacuate my bowels and level off, occasionally vomiting for good measure. This was a humiliating process, as the flat was not large, many other people needed to use the toilet, and I imagine the noises were fearsome. Still, by the time I was ready to come out of the toilet I was beyond the possibility of humiliation.

But while I was in there, and while my bones seemed to ignite in painless flames and my stomach curled into a fist to punch itself, my gaze fell on the book by the side of the cistern. It was Minima Moralia. It had a cardboard-brown cover, the texture of which felt pleasant against my hand. I imagine anything would have felt pleasant to the touch at that point. I proceeded to open it, and to try to focus on that, rather than on whatever was passing out of my body. Reading while obscenely high is neither impossible, nor revelatory in itself. It simply demands will. And at that point, that was what I needed, to feel my will asserted as a counterpressure to that jolt of manufactured happiness that was going straight through me.

I forced myself to sound the words I forced my eyes to pass over: The son of well-to-do parents who, whether out of talent or weakness, chooses a so-called intellectual occupation as an artist or scholar, has special difficulties with those who bear the distasteful title of colleagues. I read them again and again, sometimes saying aloud, ‘the son of well-to-do parents’, and ‘distasteful title’. To this day, ‘distasteful title’ seems to be one of the most physical or embodied phrases, returning some of the urgency of that particular moment to me, the slightly metallic taste my tongue then seemed to acquire as I said it.

It took me a long time to receive the words as if they were being spoken to me, rather than as if I were somehow building them. I had not chosen an intellectual occupation, I was an undergraduate, and most of my peers were likewise well-to-do—if not quite as well-to-do as I was. But I recognised, as I worked my way through the passage, that there was sense in it. Adorno was arguing, as far as I could then make out at the party, that the privileged thinker or philosopher, who is in a position to reject the commercial imperatives that compromise most thought, then faces resentment for her amateurism. Though the freedom to only tarry with the questions that you’re driven to answer by love looks more like our ideal of serious intellectual inquiry than the harried professional, worrying about how many times their paper has been cited, this freedom is itself deformed by the unfreedom of one’s peers. You have to act like them, to produce work that they take seriously—you cannot actually be free. No one is left unmutilated by the logic of the larger system, neither the privileged nor those who scorn them. Perhaps the immense amount of sweat I felt come running down my brows made it seem like more work than it was, but as I thought I understood the point, I felt proud of myself.

I would like to say that I continued reading because I was struck by the force of this man’s mind, but there were other exigencies. It took me a long time to make the sentences make sense. They seemed to double back on themselves, to undo the logic of their predecessors, or to reveal the way that that logic was only contingent. Something could be true in one moment and not true in another, and this was the case not just of his writing but of the world, I thought, as I stood up to examine my sweaty face in the mirror, too soon, and sat back down again. Such an idea seemed intuitive to me. I was convinced that I had seen the operations of language and pure thought rub up against each other, creating sparks in the gaps. Maybe 60% of this was the result of being high, but his sentences, or rather the translator’s sentences—to this day my German is too laboured to feel like I can talk about the original with confidence—managed to make understanding how everything was compromised feel exhilarating. To try to pull the tablecloth out from under one’s own certainties is the closest that philosophy can come to magic. Every sentence spoke of the impossibility of freedom, and yet at that moment, in the tiny bathroom, flanked by triangles of black mould creeping their way towards the floor, I felt free.

When I had finished evacuating my bowels, I walked out of the toilet to find the world changed. I danced rigorously to the alternating post-punk and 80s pop playlist. I talked to the tenant of the flat who had Minima Moralia as his toilet book, and he told me about Adorno. The vague outline of his biography, as a philosopher and failed avant-garde composer, who tried to understand why Germany slid into barbarism in the nineteen twenties, why reasonable people failed to see the clear path to a better future, and concluded that it was because reason itself is co-evolved with a barbaric urge simply to eat everything, and will tend back towards barbarism unless you think even harder. Concepts, ideas, were what humans had instead of sharp teeth, and could be as vicious. You had to remind yourself aways of the dental character of thought by grinding your teeth. I nodded and rubbed my hand with and against the grain of the sofa, making and then erasing darker brown lines against the general brown.

We talked for some time. I’m absolutely confident that everything we said was inanity itself, but it seemed as if, for a moment, I had borrowed the cadences of somebody else’s thought, that what was normally a haze had a particular shape, the shape of this man’s brain that I was trying on. We talked, when we weren’t dancing, about the monstrosity of the world system. I know it sounds strange, and antithetical to the joy of that kind of party, but at that moment I was closer to the ecstasy of youth than I’d ever been in more blatantly hedonistic moments. If I were to justify that statement now, I would do it by saying that it was closer to the dream of total, integrated pleasure, not an attempt to shut out mind and live in the body to avoid the pains of the damaged life, but rather letting every aspect of oneself inform the others. There was a song playing by the Killers—a popular indie band who I hope posterity has not preserved, hence my explanation of them—and the singer was asking ‘Are we human/ or are we dancer?’, which is an obscene corruption of Yeats’s ‘Among Schoolchildren’. But I have tried to believe that behind every stupidity there is a genuine question.

I knew nothing at that point of Adorno’s own musicology, which would have proscribed every piece of music that we listened to, at least until Rupert, whose book and house it was, put on the prelude from Tristan and Isolde. He was constantly rubbing people’s shoulders and trying to explain why he loved the tension and lack of release of the piece, as everyone who was physically capable of leaving slowly shuffled out the door into the dawn. But Adorno’s own censure wouldn’t have mattered. I believe that his musical theories are more generous than many have considered them to be, leaving room for pop music to be thought of dialectically, but at the time, all I cared about was that I had seen a new country appear on the horizon. Certain aspects of my life, I told myself, were going to become clear. I had taken MDMA enough times before to believe that this was not just the usual bullshit euphoria, that openness which you grow to dread, knowing that you’ll have the same conversations with people about their troubled relationships with their parents, dance in the same compulsive way once again. This was none of these things.

I stayed well beyond the end of the party itself, with Rupert and four other people, sweating and shivering and trying to comfort each other about the day to come. They were slightly older than me, postgraduate students, who seemed to treat everything with an intensity that it deserved. They talked about poetry a lot, about the ways that poetry might resist. I enjoyed the idea that there was no need to even define what we wanted poetry to resist. More interesting to me than poetry, though, was they ways in which they discussed everything critically. It has become old hat to offer basic, suspicious readings of everyday phenomena, showing how they serve the forces of darkness, perhaps it always was. But at this point, in the morning, in my life, in the world historical situation, it just seemed to me like they were taking things seriously. It mattered to them, the performance of gender, the songs of Joni Mitchell, gentrification, Jude the Obscure—you could live through discussing these things properly, as I had always wanted to do, so long as you learned to be critical. You could be critical of everything, and everything would reward you. Rupert told me, as he walked down the corridor towards the toilet looking peaky, that he and his flatmates had got into the habit of referring to defecation as ‘reading Minima Moralia’, and I am not being facetious when I say that this form of self-improvement changed my life.

Of course, from my current standpoint, there is an argument to be made that the change was not all for the better. But what happened seems to me have the air of inevitability. On some level, I’m sure my father and I both wanted it to happen.

+

From then on, I dedicated myself to Adorno and his thought, I wrote a master’s dissertation on critical theory, and began a PhD at a London university, titled Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and the spectre of autonomy. By autonomy, I mean the freedom and independence of one thing from other forces, the sense that some object or person moves itself, that it matters for its own sake, as an individual might be important, and free, on the other side of the overturning of the world. I also became more involved in politics. Not in a hardcore way, but you might have seen me at certain Marxist meetings. I rarely said anything.

What they sometimes call the ‘objective conditions’ were not good for revolution. Students took over conference rooms and manager’s offices, and rebellious sleepers lay down on the doorstep of St. Paul’s Cathedral. England’s major cities were wracked by riots, and yet nothing seemed to improve the outlook for a better world to come. I half-heartedly offered my body to some of these causes, wrote essays on my blog justifying the violence of others, but really, I thought about how I could recapture that initial experience of everything appearing connected, threaded together on the promise of a better life. You might argue that there’s a vanity in that, and there are days when I find it hard to deny. Thinking with other people’s thoughts is a little bit like lifting weights. You’re not moving them anywhere, but somehow you yourself change.

There were times when I thought this change made something possible. What I sought was after all a kind of collectivity that really feels like you’re a person for the first and perhaps only time. But it wasn’t there in the chanting crowds, any more than it was in the various relationships I fell in and out of in a manner indistinguishable from anyone around me. I became stronger in certain ways, but neither myself or anyone else ever stopped hurting. And yet, what else is there to do but to move through these failures? As I had learned that night in the toilet, and as all of my reading would continue to convince me, we have to accept the impossibility of thinking ourselves past our present, and we have to continue to try. Nothing else will do.

By the time I was 26, I was living in a way that my father would have found incomprehensible. I don’t mean my fairly conventional life of institutionalised faux-bohemianism. I’m sure he could understand rising at nine, working in a library and being able to go to an art-gallery in the day if I wanted to, or attending conferences called things like ‘The Materiality of Ghosts’. But I’m not sure if was possible for him to see what doing those things would do to you. I think the thoughts themselves, the everyday experience of being me, were in a different language to his own. I don’t know what humanity is, what it feels like in general. There are days when I think no one alive is human. They simply speak and feel the material conditions that pass through them, unreflectively. We can try and use the words of the dead to give this process a more appealing shape, to feel more in touch with our own self or selflessness. I don’t know. But the humanity of my father, and my sister for that matter, seemed impossibly different, not humanity at all, as I recognised it.

And yet, whatever I did have or not have in common with my father from my point of view, there was always the objective connection; how could I not have escaped being shaped by the money my father possessed? There were times when I thought about it in literal terms. The money that I had been schooled by, housed by, fed by, was my father’s control over the labour time of various workers, which allowed him to construct whatever it was that he constructed, wherever it was that he constructed it, cobalt processing plants, railway stock, immigration detention centres. And I would see this time compressed into me, as one makes artificial diamonds from coal. My artificially refulgent soul, alive to the horrors of the managed world, was the product of this money in a way that I could never quite live comfortably with.

Nevertheless, for all of this time, I would read arguments which seemed to suggest that such individual moral discomfort was irrelevant, or liable to steer you wrong. To worry about the duty of the individual, one’s morality or implication within a system which could not be made moral, could not be reduced to the size of an individual conscience and then drowned in a bathtub, was to make a mockery of the problems we were facing. My personal responsibility was, it seemed to me when I was thinking clearly, a question of self-aggrandizement. I could not in any meaningful sense reject my father’s money, even if I was not spending it, which I largely wasn’t. Wrong life cannot be lived rightly. To think otherwise is to fall prey to monstrous stupidities.

I say this because, at the same time as I was setting out on my path, the path which led me here, and which has cut me off from my family, some of my peers who had not been educated in critique were investing themselves in a very strange set of arguments about personal responsibility. To them it was clear that you had to give away money, but further that it was therefore your responsibility to acquire as much money as possible, and this seemed to me to be an obscene concession to the logic of the world system. And, at the same time, it was illogical. If the financial gains you made were just, why would it be your responsibility to return them to those who had been robbed of them? To attempt to salve your conscience seemed to me to be impossible.

For instance, I remember meeting my friend Ben, from school, about a year and a half before my father died. He was then working in the City in some capacity, but when he had been at university, he had become devoted to a movement to maximise the utility of charitable donation. We were in a bar in West London. He looked tired, and he told me about his need to get promoted in order to earn more money in order that he could give it away. He was richer than most of his peers, but it was clear to him that he could and therefore should acquire more in order to get rid of it. He said that he had reached a kind of double bind, however. In order to be promoted to the point where he would earn significantly more, it had become necessary for him to ingratiate himself with his bosses. Unlike him, they did not donate 70% of their monthly salary, nor their entire bonus to various charities that a spreadsheet told him maximised something called Quality Adjusted Life Years.

—Quality Adjusted Life Years?

The bar we were in was full of older Russian men and their much younger Russian girlfriends. Gleaming bottles framed the mirror, most of them varieties of Vodka. House music played at a medium volume, and the lights were dimmed to give the whole place a kind of unburnished gold effect, as if all the people in it were on a 13^th century fresco; everyone there a Madonna or wizened child.

We were there for the birthday party of an old schoolfriend, himself a Russian of sorts, but I suppose English in tastes, opinions, morals and intellect. His name was Andrei, and he was then working for an Israeli tech company. I think his job was to figure out which home appliances could be more connected to the internet. I don’t really remember why I came, other than I had thought it might be interesting to see where other people who had not experienced the same good news as I had, about the wrongness of life, had ended up.

Ben replied:

—It’s a way of figuring out not just how many lives you save, but also how much their life can continue at the same quality of health. So if you save someone’s life but leave them paraplegic, versus if you save someone’s life and they’re in perfect health, then you have 1 year x, say 1 in terms of quality, or 1 year x 0.2.

—And this is quantifiable?

—Well, not literally, but you can approximate quantifiablity. You have to. How do you think the NHS approves which drugs it buys, if not through some kind of metrics, some quantifiable framework of what different kinds of lives are worth? I mean, when you think about it, how do prices work? How do people decide how much a particular object is worth, they quantify utility to them. There’s no objective correspondence between the object and its value, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand how they correspond, we just have to approximate, and aggregate.

I did not particularly want to talk about how prices worked, so I left that topic of conversation, and tried to steer it back to his problems with his superiors.

—The thing is, they like the money. Sure, some of them give lavishly to charity, at charity balls, etc, but that’s all bullshit. It’s feelings, not hard numbers.

—And you feel out of place at these charity balls?

—Completely. I mean, They’re always for something useless too, like musical education for underprivileged children in Tower Hamlets. One fucking trombone could buy a thousand mosquito nets in east Africa, which in theory could save hundreds of lives. Well maybe not a thousand mosquito nets, but certainly a decent amount.

Ben pulled out his phone, as if to compare the cost of a trombone and a mosquito net. His movements were slightly slowed. Perhaps he hadn’t drunk that regularly, if he was living as frugally on his obscene salary as he said he was.

—Anyway, what was I saying, so these guys, they want to know if you’re the kind of person they can hang out with. You know, if you have the right stuff.

—Yeah. I get you.

—But so, yeah, I mean, this means dressing to impress, for example.

I looked at Ben’s clothes. He was wearing a t-shirt that said 80,000 hours on it, which was a slogan, he had told me, for the Effective Altruism movement. This represents roughly the amount of time you will spend working in an average life. If you quantify it, you can think, the logic apparently goes, about how best to spend it. It was a sort of memento mori, a numerical skull, more shocking than the iconographic kind, which had decomposed into kitsch. The t-shirt was rumpled and a little frayed at the collar. I looked down at his wrist though, and saw that he was wearing a watch which, while not gaudy enough to inspire a rap lyric, was still ostentatiously expensive. A few days before, I had been in the waiting room of a dentist’s, reading one of those luxury magazines, when I had come across the slogan for a watch which seemed to resemble this one. It said ‘You never actually own [our brand of watch], you’re merely its steward for the next generation’, or words to that effect. I’m not sure, now, what brand of watch my father wore.

—So I have to make them think I share the same values. I have to have this watch, and go on certain kinds of holidays. And then there’s the cocaine.

—The cocaine?

—Nobody wants to have to endure your company if you’re a killjoy. And if you take it you can’t be just sponging it off everyone else, in fact, the lower down the foodchain, the more need there is for you to get the bags in. So every Friday, I have to call my dealer, and waste 200 quid on cocaine.

—I mean, that seems like a lot…

—And every time I make the order, and my dealer says he’s sending a guy over on a scooter—it’s always on a scooter—then I think how many mosquito nets could I have bought with this, or how many microcredit operations could I have financed for female entrepreneurs in Mali? It’s like… have you seen the film Schindler’s List ? You know the end?

And I thought about Ben, weeping over his cocaine or veuve cliquot, or the silk ties he presumably wore, and his clashing collar power shirts, trying to think of these purchases, these personal luxuries, as an investment, which would one day mean he could return the money with interest to the starving of the world. He suddenly looked doubly exhausted, and genuinely sad. And then he asked me if I wanted any cocaine.

When we came back from the toilet, he talked to me, and Andrei, who had joined us, about what the most effective donations really were.

—Well really, if you think about it, the largest crisis we have coming is climate change, and resource war. We’re looking down the barrel of the apocalypse. And what’s the way we stop that?

—Solar Panels?

said Andrei.

—Population growth—but not just any population growth. If we want to solve our crisis, we need to max out on human intelligence. Right now, I give 20% of my income to a company that offers IQ tests to women in India, and then incentives for them to have children, or free IUDs, depending on the results.

Andrei nodded, and asked for the name of the company, he was thinking about whether he might make a donation. I said nothing, but assented when he suggested that we go to another venue, he was beginning to tire of the music in this place. I had been tired of it for ages, and stepped into the Uber, feeling only the briefest chill of the winter air on my neck, before I was wedged between these two men, while Andrei’s girlfriend fiddled with the radio, and the driver launched us into the night.

---

5.

There is a danger in my telling you this, in providing you with the background to my decisions. That you might take this all to be reducible to the story itself, and to its teller, to me, and my psychology, my empirical life, of which this is an afterimage. And yet without the story there is nothing, only my failure, passing from hand to hand in tiny quantities, abstractions slipping from employee to landlord to index fund, back to landlord through dividend, into the hands of a waiter perhaps, who passes it on in cold cash in exchange for a drink, and so on into the last recorded transaction of congealed time. If you are to see the idea, the truth-content of what I tried to do when I was going to grind the money up, you have to see where the idea comes from. You have to then see through it. If I were to claim that there was nothing more to the idea than itself, that it was simply the truth, and it had nothing to do with my situation, that would be do to violence its specificity, it would be an abstraction, equally empty as any explanation grounded in ‘individual psychology’, those proffered in the language of my captors. You have to see it as, and I make no apologies, a determinate negation. And so I keep writing, in the hope that each detail is changed by its contact with the idea, as all is seen, identical but changed, nonidentical, in the redeemed world.

The morning following my night with Ben, Andrei and Tatiana, to pick up this thread—just as an example, a detail that might have stood changed in the light of my later actions—I had to speak at an academic conference. It was called ‘Aesthetics and Autonomies’, with the less appealing subtitle, ‘from Kant to Koons’. There was probably a pun being made on the German word kunst. It was at a university near Brighton, which prided itself on its openness to continental philosophy. This is what they call philosophy that attempts to answer the problems of philosophy, rather than reduce them to nonproblems by pedantically redefining words. It you make the problems go away, it’s called analytic philosophy.

I was in an extraordinary amount of pain as I entered the large conference venue, too large for the number of people interested in such a topic. I felt like my brow ridges were falling away from the rest of my skull, collapsing onto my eyeballs. I won’t even talk about my stomach. I went to pick up my name-badge. A slant of light caught the laminate of some of these, making them, from a distance, seem to sparkle like the sea. The woman at the desk, presumably a fellow PhD student, gave me a look—I was unsure if I smelled bad or simply appeared in pain.

Fortunately, I had already written my paper several days before, which was about the ways that autonomy had to be wrested from the heteronomous. It was called ‘second thoughts on second reflection’, a reference to an undertheorized concept in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.

Perhaps, considering its role in events, it is worth going into more detail about what I mean by the autonomy of art. Chiefly, it refers to the independence art has from any function, thus making it, in one sense, free, moved from the inside by its own logic or process rather than some external force. It gives itself the law.

You might want to think of it like this: some medieval peasant hates her husband, say, and decides to go to the local witch, or warlock, to have her husband cursed. She arrives, and hands over her sack of chickens, or the flour, or her own soul, if need be. The witch, having opened the sack, and been satisfied by the presence of the chicken, stands up, ignoring the clucking sound now coming from the corner of the room, and begins to speak in short rhyming lines, calling on some evil deity to do something about the terrible husband. The poem is a chilling one, and after it is spoken, maybe a thunderclap echoes outside, briefly drowning out the chickens, who have perhaps grown increasingly agitated in the bag, and may have even realised that they will become dinner soon. This curse is not autonomous, because it is directed towards an end, the elimination of the husband. It is part of a cosmic structure. Its rules are the rules of how you cast a spell, so if it rhymes, it rhymes because rhyme is how you bind the devil to your will.

The autonomous poem, however, escapes this end. It may sound like a curse, it may rhyme in exactly the same way, share the curse’s words, but that is because the poem demands this for its own purposes, it exists independent of some subordinating function—husbands can sleep safe in their beds, though perhaps they found the poem disturbing in its very powerlessness, if they overheard their wife reciting it, as she cooked a chicken casserole, thinking she was alone.

Other examples of non-autonomous art would perhaps be religious or after-dinner music, or the friezes on the wall of a temple. Anything that acquires its rules from outside of itself. Autonomous art demands to be experienced as art, rather than in subordination to some idea beyond art. It breaks free of allegory, for example, where every detail in the story corresponds to a pre-existing idea, more important than the story. It proffers you an experience of freedom. In much the same way, if you argue that humans exist to serve the greater glory of god, or the king, you are not saying that they are valuable in themselves, whereas when you say they have rights in themselves, you are endowing them with autonomy. You make the space for freedom. There is no idea bigger than the person who has it. It is no coincidence, then, that these two claims, for the autonomy of art, and for the autonomy of the human emerge together.

Adorno, among others, argues that this is a historical necessity for capitalism—it creates and needs the idea of the autonomous human, and thus licenses autonomous art. Since then, however, Adorno thinks society has ‘become ever less a human one’, and human autonomy, like artistic autonomy, has ceased to matter.

After all, this autonomous human was really a fiction, a kind of utility-maximising premise for the economy to operate with. He was a miser, perhaps, a man who never willingly submitted himself to any ideal other than cold hard cash. When people begged him to do something out of patriotic duty, he refused, because he was not commanded by such a duty. He was himself. When people appealed to his mercy, likewise, he said that he owed nothing to the poor. He would shoo the importunate away and rub his hands together in satisfaction when they left. And yet, perhaps we can see a larger idea behind him, perhaps we can see allegory creeping in through the tradesman’s entrance: being himself, he subordinated himself to a bigger idea without realising it, capitalism itself. Seen this way, art’s autonomy becomes a mockery of the freedom we can never achieve, commodified and sold back to us. Like the factory owner shooing the beggars away, perhaps, the piece of music or painting or poem remains unmoved in the face of entirely legitimate demands. Does it still look beautiful then, in the guise of that miserable old man, thinking himself magnificent, but revealing himself as hollow?

At the same time, for Adorno, if art capitulates to the demands of the world, say, by being political in content, it devalues itself. All that art can do is grieve for the sacrifice it makes. By becoming autonomous, it becomes powerless, but this is better than the alternative. By contrast, a political art acknowledges the principle of instrumentality, of use, that governs all other bourgeois interaction. This fails absurdly. It is as if the miserly factory owner started hacking bits off of himself to feed his workers, or melted himself down into glue. He is no longer cruelly untouched by the exploitative principle he serves, but rather embodies it as he dismembers himself. The song cannot put meat on the table. Instead, for Adorno, Art has to become difficult, hermetic, negative, radically darkened. The miser’s autonomy might then have be more exaggerated, to refuse to console anyone for the injustice of the world, perhaps it must almost become a caricature—not the wealthy man scaring away the orphaned chimney sweep, but something more brutal, a monster that eats the little boy, someone whose behaviour makes no sense, and thus breaks free of the merely selfish freedom of the current dispensation. It cannot disavow its connection to the meat, but it has to make the obscenity of this link clearer. Perhaps you might want to see, as if in a darkened mirror, the blood dripping down the lips of the singer.

Many people now see such a claim as itself an elitist position, too invested in the power of the artwork rather than its social function, or the practices it licenses, the capabilities it looses into the sphere of social reproduction. Some forms of marginalized social life demand, someone might say, to be included in the realm of freedom that we find in art. The songs of the slaves that built the pyramids, and not just the pyramids, or the ironic way that a queer community appropriates mass culture and turns it against itself, these might be worth attending to as models of freedom which we can use, in which we can take joy and steady ourselves against the indignities of life. They might even bring about the revolution that elitist art mourns like a death that is yet to come. My paper was intended to challenge this populism.

Like all conferences, it was mostly dull and exhausting. The academic conference as experience somehow leaves you with the feeling of having attended a festival, despite its lack of entertainment. Though perhaps in this case the state in which I’d already arrived biased me towards such a conclusion. One particular paper, however, elicited my curiosity. It was on the aesthetics of tribute bands. I went to find it, only half-realising why it appealed.

The first woman on the panel with the tribute band talk was speaking, when I stumbled in late and sat down at the back of the room—trying to prevent the minor shame of my arrival from merging with the hangover to become extreme physical discomfort—about how pop music fans, ‘Swifties, Beliebers’, and so on, were actually an integral part of the creative process. The talk began with a story about Beethoven, and how, on his desk, he had a framed motto, from the pyramid at Sais. This read:

I AM THAT WHICH IS

I AM ALL WHAT IS WHAT WAS WHAT WILL BE

NO MORTAL MAN HAS EVER LIFTED MY VEIL.

This came, not exactly from a real pyramid, but from an essay on the sublime by Friedrich Schiller, the Romantic playwright and aesthetician. The speaker said that this inspirational motto suggested two things about Beethoven. The first was that he was the embodiment of Western, Romantic ideas of the individual genius, the emphasis on the subject’s sublimity, in direct contact with truth—and a monument of sorts to the obscene injustice of history. The second was that he was, insofar as he seemed to adopt this saying, from an orientalist rewriting of ancient African history no less, as a kind of personal motto, also a participant in what we might now call meme culture. There was a trace amount of laughter, when she displayed Beethoven next to the famous meme ‘grumpycat’. If you have not seen the image, I would say it is fairly self-explanatory, and it would be obnoxious to reproduce it here.

—Beethoven then, was the node for the distribution of an idea which he tried to render in his music, subjectivity as an absolute principle, the singular, the authentic, the genuine, and thus the impenetrable. But in his embrace of that idea, revealing the way that idea was distributed, he himself debunked it. Beethoven was not so special after all.

It was at this point, then, that we could think about the ways in which the music was received by fans, that these would tell us more about the network which was emerging to replace subjectivity as the central location of being.

I realised my head was tightening itself further round my brain, causing my eyes to swim. I tried to count down from ten, to break the pain down into endurable subsections. As I reached five, I heard the speaker say that the circumscribed and solitary Romantic individual was over, and the ‘Stan’ was the herald of the cyborg future, a network of communal adoration that was also revision, adding to the song, a chain that far surpassed the human singer. I concentrated on my hands.

The next paper was the one which I had come to see. It was given by a stocky woman from the Midlands, who worked at a university in the Midlands. She began by giving a history of the tribute band, which emerged in the UK in the late 1970s, and which really took off in Australia. Being extremely large, and far from the musical centre of the imperial world-system, Australians developed an insatiable demand for imitations of the bands they wanted to see. This went beyond covers, which, of course, were a widespread practice, predating our own silly notions of authenticity in pop-music. Instead, tribute bands were a weird and contradictory development, the imitation not merely of the imitable abstract music of the song, but of the band’s ‘aesthetic’, which, in this context, meant the things that made them unique. Thus, the tribute band would slavishly imitate the song in a way no covers band would, reproducing everything, even down to particular sloppinesses of singing technique, or characteristic mistakes by the bassist, for example. She talked about the tribute band as a particularly working-class form, perhaps parodying the fetish of authenticity, as seen in the popularity of tribute nights; a form of self-reflexive consumption like that of fake designer brands. Perhaps, she argued, such a form of consumption challenges the legitimacy of the system of cultural legitimation, as in both cases the original products depend on the commodification of genius and the introduction of a hierarchy predicated on this fabrication. Her argument, though, took a strange turn as she continued:

—But this is all well known, and much of it can be found in Linda Hurley’s seminal work Tribute: Authenticity, Audience, and the Avant-Garde. What I’m here to discuss is one particular incident, involving one particular tribute band, early in the formation of the practice. Because the relationship between the tribute band itself and questions of cultural appropriation, themselves inseparable from questions of colonialism, is illustrated in particular luminous detail, it seems to me that this example is of vital importance. It’s the story of The Stolen Stones, a tribute band from Doncaster—whom I interviewed as part of my research—and of their trip to the border between Mali and Senegal, in order to play a wedding gig, at the behest of a British businessman. The thing about this gig was, that it was always their job to pretend to be the Rolling Stones, but here they were actually pretending to be the Rolling Stones…

My hunger temporarily abated. She recounted, from the band’s perspective, what had happened when my father had gone to win the bid to provide logistic support for the building of a hydroelectric dam in the basin of the river Senegal. In the end, the woman giving the paper claimed that the logic underpinning this story returned us to the blues, stolen by the Rolling Stones, which itself was a music made by people stolen from Africa, and that the gift of a counterfeit of a counterfeit of a culture in fact stolen from that same area, in order to curry favour with a local politician, demonstrated the ways in which our ideas of autonomy, of the individual creative genius were always underpinned by the unacknowledged theft, the colonial plunder which kick-started the industrial revolution, and even in this case by the ripping off of the tribute band, who, by their role in the deception helped create an infrastructure business that is now worth literally hundreds of millions of pounds.

Another of those attacks of hangover nausea that seems to spill out from inside the Trojan horse of hunger, wrought its particular vengeance on me, and I snuck out before the questions to eat as many of the caramel biscuits as I could. I heard the awkward arrhythmic rise and fall of applause from the two rooms with the parallel panels, and decided to sit in the corner of the hall, reading. There seemed to me to be something indecent, obscene, even about attending a panel on aesthetics, and hearing, recast in the language of contemporary academic criticism, the story that my father had told me. But it made sense. His company coiled itself into every corner of British life, and the same was true globally—why shouldn’t someone join the dots, and why not here? I saw the network of academics conferring over coffee weave itself around me. I could not speak to anyone. And soon it was time for my own panel to begin.

As the first speaker was giving her talk, which had something to do with the art historian Michael Fried, and the many ways in which he’d been wrong about everything, I allowed myself to fall backwards into a hypercaffeinated haze of not listening. There was a metal box on a slide behind me. From one angle, it seemed to me like the mirror on Andrei’s living room table, from which I had watched Ben look up in increasingly giddy fervour as the previous night had decomposed around us. It felt strange, then, in the conference room, to see something polished but somehow devoid of my reflection.

At one point, Ben had been trying to explain how personal moral change could transform the world, and how this squared with the price mechanism as the most efficient way of knowing what had to be made, making the connection between which was well beyond us at this point, when he suddenly stopped and said:

— Even though it doesn’t matter, I still want people to know I’m a good person, that I’m investing myself in a future where I will do good. But that’s irrelevant, as most people’s calculations of what is good are irrational anyway. Which is why I need the money to outvote them. But, you know, sometimes I see their distaste…

Perhaps Adorno’s most famous individual quotation is that wrong life cannot be lived rightly, by which he means that you can’t be considered moral in a world that is grotesquely immoral. One of the ways I have tried to explain this idea before is to ask people to think about the story of how the Ancient Egyptian gods judged the souls of the dead. Osiris, god of the dead, and of crop production, placed your heart on the scales next to a feather, and if your heart was free of sin it would weigh less than the feather, which came from the wings of Ma’at, goddess of truth. But objectively, no heart can weigh less than a feather, and if to be lighter than a feather is to demand that we do not benefit from the exploitation, the immiseration of others, whether that be the slave in South-East Asia who farmed the prawns in your sandwich, or the garment workers in Bangladesh, or all the dead whose labour has now congealed into capital possessed by your father, who will have a heart that could float above that? You see a feather floating in the air and you know that all is lost.

About ten minutes into the anti-Fried talk I sneezed. And saw, to my horror, that the papers of my co-panellist who was still waiting to speak were now marked by small reddish dots. He had not seen, because he was attending to the talk, but I could see, within the blood-stained mucus, a powdery residue. Somehow there was still cocaine trapped in my nose, and now it was on top of this man’s notes for his talk about poetry and the ‘distribution of the sensible’, a stupid idea. I tried to reach for his papers while he was turned to face our co-panellist to just brush it away, and hopefully leave a tiny inexplicable bloodstain, rather than a lump of bloody, snotty, badly cut cocaine. But he turned his head to the other side as I was stretching out my arm, and so I made a move as if I were stretching my shoulder and flexing the fingers of my hand, or like playing an imaginary piano badly. I stared again at the lump disfiguring a poem indented in his talk, obscuring the last line of the stanza that came before these lines:

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.

I decided the only way to salvage the situation was to force a coughing fit directly over the papers. It was a half success. The page with the lump on blew away, interrupting the talk, and I rushed to help my co-panellist gather the page, which, when he lifted it up, was slightly stained—something he could now plausibly attribute to a mysterious substance on the floor. It had caused far more disruption than I had intended. But the lump was gone.

---

6.

My father died of an aneurysm. It was sudden, of course, and there was nothing anyone could have done. If he had had cancer, he would have received the best medical care possible, and I’m confident that he would have beaten it at least once. I imagine that the jocular bellicosity with which he would have referred to the cancer, as if it were one of his business opponents, would have irritated me immensely. He would be lying on the hospital bed, tilted forward at an angle, reading the Financial Times, and saying I’ll have this thing licked soon enough, don’t you worry. Or, during the times when he would be an outpatient, and set up comfortably at home, he would pour himself a glass of whisky, because what would be the point of beating death without quality spirits? Perhaps he would even take up smoking cigars again. The smoke would rise defiantly above his balcony, like the opposite of a papal election. The dark grey smoke signalling that the incumbent is, in fact, still with us. There had been an administrative error, and there would be no change at the top. His dying suddenly did not rob me of the chance to see his vulnerability. I would not have seen it anyway.

In any case, he made it to the hospital before he died, having collapsed in a business meeting in his office. His office is large and rectilinear, like a slightly strange L. It is well decorated in a style that some people might think is too traditional, but which he said would never go out of fashion. He apparently fell when in front of his desk, which was, in the traditional fashion, large and dark, and, in my experience, almost always covered in piles of paper.

As a child I would sometimes sit in the anteroom to the office after school, looking in when the door opened, or examining him through the window. These were the moments when my father wanted to make a point of engaging with his children; he would have the nanny, Lucy, bring us to his office, and then he would drive us home himself, just in time for us all to have dinner. At times, I would sit in the office itself with him, waiting for this special lift home while he worked.

I would read books as he read through the piles of paper, and I would ask him, if I tired of the book, what he was working on. Mostly, however, I did not tire of the book. Indeed, there were times when my father was annoyed that I would not respond to him, because he himself had finished his work, but I wanted to stay, sunk into the comfortable leather seats, reading the tale of a teenage girl who bound her breasts and disguised herself as a boy in order to be accepted in an elite order of knights in a fantastic kingdom, where there was magic and danger, and where, although the chairs were probably less comfortable, life still seemed immeasurably freer. On one such occasion, my focus on the story I was reading was broken by a light but noticeable contact being made with my head. It felt something like a moth or daddy longlegs flying into you; it was a paper aeroplane, which I saw on the floor.

—Pay attention Luke, I said it’s time to go!

—Sorry Dad. I’ll be ready in a second, I just want to finish this chapter.

—Life doesn’t always give you time to finish the chapter, you know. And you have to learn that soon.

I looked at the paper aeroplane on the floor. It was some kind of accounting document or invoice. I did not see, nor would I have known, what it would have been about, but the flying piece of paper held a particular fascination for me because there was clearly visible writing on it. It seemed as incongruous as if somebody had gone around scribbling on a swan. What I do remember being struck by is one of the numbers written on the left wing of the swan, it began with a three and stretched into the hundred thousands. I remember thinking it seemed absurdly big. I was about ten years old, and although I knew of the existence of such enormous numbers, I didn’t have any memory of encountering them in the wild, so to speak.

—What’s the problem Luke? Put the book back in your bag and let’s go.

I did not know what to say about the number, so I directed my thoughts to the medium that had delivered this enormous invoice to me.

—Daddy, how do you make the paper fly across the room like that?

—I’ll show you if you leave with me right now, he said.

And he did try, when we got home, to show me how to fold the front and sides of a paper aeroplane. I grasped the concept of the initial central fold, but beyond that, things got away from me slightly. The misshapen ones I made simply fell downwards in a circular motion. I was never a particularly dextrous person, and my father likely found this irritating, as it meant that it required a great deal of effort to teach me basic physical skills like tying my shoelaces, or doing up the toggles on a duffle coat, or tying my tie in the knot and length that the school would find acceptable.

Once, I was placed in detention because Andrei peanutted my tie—this means to pull down on the tie until the knot tightens—and I was unable to release it. The resulting knot looks like a peanut, or is said to, hence the name. I sat at the back of my physics class, trying desperately to get my fingernails under the purple peanut which was disordering the tie, making the back half shorter than the front one. Eventually I decided there was nothing for it but to stick a pencil into the knot. I managed to get some traction, hoping to find a sort of Archimedean point for the knot, so I could begin to prise it apart. However, this did not work, and the pencil cracked in a manner noticeably louder than either the gum chewing of Jean Duval, or the Eminem song that Will Fletcher was listening to though one earphone slinking up the arm of his blazer. There was no justice in the fact that I was punished for trying to conform to regulations. I remonstrated with my teacher about this injustice, which made matters worse, and so my mother and father were called to take me into detention that Saturday. I told my father my version of the story, and he looked at me and said

—I believe you, but there’s an underlying problem there, Luke. You can’t just go through life being such a spastic.

I promised my father I would no longer be as spastic as before. Though to this day—or at least until I was no longer permitted to wear laces—I find my laces coming untied more often than any of my peers.

I do not think my father went down in a manner that sent up a flock of agitated paper. Though perhaps he did, perhaps he did a sort of pirouette and knocked the paper before landing with his chin on the desk clunkingly, then his head snapped back as he fell further backwards. Perhaps he rolled again and spasmed, a twitching thing in front of the private military contractors who wanted to make some kind of deal to carve out a safe route for commerce. My father’s PA, Eleanor, did not reveal any of these details when she rang me to say he had been taken to hospital. I did not ask for them after I called her back to let her know that he had not been saved.

+

Eleanor and Hamish were already at the hospital when I arrived. They stood facing each other and a sea green feature wall of the waiting room, and did not notice me until I was almost upon them. They both hugged me and Eleanor told me that Dad didn’t make it. We reached mum on the phone, who sent her condolences in what seemed to me to be a fairly truncated conversation. They had sat waiting for the surgery to end, and then had remained there after we found out it was unsuccessful, waiting for me to arrive.

The money does change the way you experience your death, I’m sure, and the way you experience sickness, but at that moment, the opulence of the hospital was not apparent. Or rather it was apparent that it was failing in its assigned task. It looked, or looks, more like a decent four-star hotel or spa, some of the features are in a light-coloured wood, so as to avoid the feeling one often receives from most large NHS hospitals that the patient is inside a machine, is undergoing some kind of transformative process, being made into something. That this machine often looks as if it’s seen better days only adds to this feeling.

Here instead, they attempt to simulate a homeliness, but this just makes it more uncanny. No matter how much less harried the staff seem, and how much more accommodating they are, and no matter what the difference is in the quality of the food, the attempt to throw money to fill the hole of impersonality created by death fails. The person sat on the chair next to me was reading the lifestyle supplement to the Economist, this one featured a series of poems about jewellery, commissioned from ‘leading poets’. I felt a bit like I could push the scenery down; lean too hard against one of the wooden panels and it would collapse, revealing a long stretch of clinical tiled floor, blood still in the runnels. If I pressed the painting it would tear like tissue paper, revealing some animal carcass hanging from a chain in the distance. I’m not saying that it’s harder to see your father die in a private hospital, but it heightens contradictions.

—I can’t believe he’s gone

Eleanor said. Hamish took her in his arms.

—I’m so sorry El. I’m so so sorry.

They remained in that pose for an age, so it seemed she was disappearing into him, into the folds of his navy-blue greatcoat. He was so much taller and broader than she was. And then they realised that I was still there. I was incorporated, with a slightly awkward gesture, into the hug. Eleanor sobbed, Hamish consoled, and I said nothing.

There was a game that Eleanor and I used to play as children. When nobody was in the house, or if the maid was too far away—perhaps somewhere in the kitchen—to hear, we would take a mattress from one of the beds and push it to the banister. Often we would leave smudge marks on the walls as we attempted to reach the destination. When we reached the edge, we would tip the mattress over the side, watching it fall down the depth of the staircase, to the ground floor. Then, we would stand on the banisters, look directly down and throw ourselves over, aiming for the mattress. Eleanor was the braver one, jumping first most of the time, and urging me not to be pathetic or a wimp. I would look down at her, framed by the wooden staircase, completely at ease by the side of the mattress, and I would aim myself for the mattress by her side, as if I were a diver.

We would run back up the stairs, overjoyed by our intactness, and laughing, to fall again. Until finally the inevitable happened. It was not that I didn’t hit the mattress, but I didn’t hit it with my whole body. I landed with one leg out. It crumpled. I screamed in pain, and the maid rushed into the hall to see what the problem was. I lay spread-eagled on the mattress, Eleanor crying over me.

I had been taken to the hospital, the one my father was now lying dead in. And they had set my leg and placed me in a cast. Between affection and anger, my father called me a spastic, when he managed to get away from work to come see me. My mother made a fuss, and they forebade me and Eleanor from ever playing the game again. I remember Eleanor looking down at me, crying, her face all screwed up. I remember the preponderance of crap on the mantelpiece. I saw the glinting of the glass shelf we called the forbidden zone, where we stored knick-knacks, Senegalese and Malian artefacts, old fashioned English objects, a bunch of other things. It was as if the pain had poured gloss over everything, making it stand out, or perhaps I was simply trying to be observant, to have something to focus on beside the pain, and it’s only after the fact, at this safely distant point of time that these things shine.

I remembered the game, and the fall, and the hospital, as I was half in the hug and half out of the hug, interrupting the intimacy between my sister and her partner, so that none of us were quite receiving enough of it ourselves. I think it was this memory that made me feel briefly unable to support my weight, but it could just as easily have been that Hamish was leaning his rugby-player’s frame on me without realising. I went back to sit on the chair again, rubbing my knee.

A nurse moved through the corridor with one of those IV roller things, dodging us and the other patients. Her presence was as a kind of dance rather than as a person, though she smiled cheerfully the whole time. In the middle of the abattoir, a soundstage. She was perhaps not one of the staff who had been there when they failed to save my father’s brain from his own blood, otherwise she may have had a more sombre expression. Though, then again, even in private hospitals enough patients must die that you grow used to the experience, and treat it as another worker does the weather.

I stared at her. Somehow I could not conceive of her as having personhood, any more than I could conceive of back-up dancers in the kind of old film I was reminded of as having it. Her outfit matched the walls. Her hair and skin matched her outfit. The gentle impact of her shoes on the light wooden floors was likewise excessively musical in a way that depersonalised her. It was as if she was animated by the place, and animated it, in turn. She was simply a part of the interface, which was there to turn my father’s body into her wages, and then back into the healthy body if it went well, or into someone else’s health, under different circumstances. The machine of the hospital, having this other appearance—made me feel as if it was there under my own skin for a second. That nobody was a person. I rubbed my temples, surreptitiously pulling the skin just below my ears forwards, as if to reassure myself that it wouldn’t simply come off like a rubber mask. But when I removed my hands from my eyes, I saw, slightly horrified, that Hamish had, almost immediately before the nurse would be walking into it, extended his arm. He was making some kind of gesture down the corridor towards the room where my father’s body was resting, and the nurse was going to walk into it. But she dodged out of the way easily, rather than falling, clotheslined and with the drip stand on top of her. There are small miracles of smooth operation all the time, I thought, for a second unconcerned with my father’s dying.

—That was a close one,

said Hamish.

At that point, he went to make phonecalls to some of Eleanor’s friends, and to members of our family who would know him well enough that he could break the news. I sat there facing Eleanor, who was struggling to speak.

—I never thought of him as vulnerable. He seemed built to live another fifty years.

She said.

—Me neither… How does this work? I don’t really know... the procedures, you know, with lawyers and things. The funeral. You must have encountered it before.

—That’s not my area. I think we just talk to dad’s lawyer. And then we organise things, for the funeral. I suppose the body will be collected from here.

—Listen, El, I’ll try to take care of it. You’ve got so much more on than I do, it makes sense.

—You’ve just shown you don’t know anything about it. I’m not sure if that’s the best idea.

—Did you get a chance to see him? Before…

—No, he was already in the operating room. They had to go as quickly as possible.

I paused for a moment, unable to think of anything worth saying in this context. Everything that suggested itself was small talk but of a kind that was also morbid and invasive. Eleanor’s grief for my father would vastly outweigh my own, I’m sure. I did love him, but it was the kind of love that never quite rises beyond the mere acknowledgment of its existence. The grief I was feeling, the outrage at mortality, all of the usual feelings, were not exactly about my father as a person. They were about my father as my father, about the reminder of my own inevitable death, maybe, and about the sudden cauterisation of all of the memories that I possessed of him. Suddenly, each recollection that I had would have this ending. They had become teleological, and this was one of the reasons I was crying, with Eleanor’s forehead just brushing my nose. In a way, I’d thought of my father as an opponent, someone whom I’d set myself against in certain ways. Whose opinions I disliked, and whose presence was discomfiting to me. To me, that was where his personhood lay, in the challenge I felt from him. Without the challenge, all of my experiences seemed like so many futile victories. If you could know that all it took was time to allow you to assert yourself, or not just know, but feel it, then would any interaction with your parents mean anything? I had won the thousand little conflicts of my youth suddenly, all at a stroke. Well, an aneurysm, I found myself thinking and wincing at the same time. What pleasant moments there were too, whatever feelings he invested in any given moment, no longer had their source. Anecdotes cannot be where a person lives, or persists. There would be something monstrous about that.

I came home from the hospital in a cab. North West London distended by my side. I came towards the Euston road where the lights of the much larger hospital were still on, a yellow-bluish swimming pool tinge. The driver stayed mercifully silent, was not listening to music and was uninterrupted by the radio. This was everything that I wanted from him. Miracles of smoothness, I thought, staring at the red river of lights ahead of me, and the yellow river of lights to my right.

Eleanor and Hamish had asked me to come back to their place, but I couldn’t really face it. My flatmates were all away on a holiday, to which I had not been invited. They had each replaced previous flatmates, slowly substituting their intimacies for mine, to the point where now I knew them only from the recommendations of someone else and from passing them in corridors or being offered tea. People claim that it is not good or healthy to be alone in moments such as these, but I felt more worried about having to perform an adequate grief. It was not that I was not myself grieving, but my grief was, as I have attempted to describe, at a level of abstraction which was too removed from either my father or what I though Eleanor wanted to talk about. I knew too, that Hamish would almost certainly be better at consoling her without me. I don’t think he could perform the kind of blokish solidarity he felt obliged to use on me while being there for Eleanor. The split character of the whole thing would be too much for his tiny brain. I would be sat there on the sofa, say, staring at the pot-pourris they have in a wooden bowl on top of the coffee table, next to some recent uppermiddlebrow paperback called something like BFFs, and Hamish would hand me a whisky, and explain that the pot-pourris was nothing to do with him, and perhaps say something slightly funny about my father. Perhaps he would do most of that that for Eleanor, too. She loves the man after all. Though she would already know the truth about the pot-pourris. That show of strength, like a man whose hands are too large to allow him to be delicate, can obviously be reassuring. And yet, it would not reassure me, and the dynamic would have been wrong, so I went to my house, alone.

I tried for a second to read Adorno. I found myself gravitating involuntarily to the aphorism which is rendered as ‘final serenity’, in English. A newspaper obituary for a businessman once contained the words: ‘The breadth of his conscience vied with the kindness of his heart.’ The blunder committed by the bereaved in the elevated language reserved for such a purpose, the inadvertent admission that the kind-hearted deceased had lacked a conscience, expedites the funeral procession by the shortest route to the land of truth’. I think I reached as far as this aphorism on my first encounter with Adorno, all those years ago in the toilet, but its particular mean spiritedness had always struck me as embodying his project. He says that generous, kind, personable rich people are still objectively evil.

To speak ill of the dead is a violation of decorum, but to not speak ill of the dead, when the dead were implicated actively in the evil is to make the manners more important than the massive machine which is destroying everyone, or to strain at the gnat while swallowing a camel. Something about that, the seriousness of the point, which suggests that there are objective standards which matter more than the particular channels into which we have invested our feelings, and that holding to these standards may even seem inhumane to the casual observer, always struck me as impressive, and terrifying, like that moment in the bible where Jesus says If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. Adorno doesn’t say give everything to the poor, but he demands perhaps what Jesus also demands If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. Yet Adorno’s own, more-than-comfortable childhood home was clearly a source of wonder and solace for him in later life. Sometimes these things are strange. I closed both Adorno and the Bible that I had been leafing through, finding no consolation in either place at that moment, and proceeded to walk idly round the flat, doing bits of tidying. I organised the bills into a pile.

Around me, the house looked fake. The land of truth—what does it look like? Are its various, beautiful certitudes as painful as we imagine them to be? In every corner of each room, I found filth. Dust on the slats. Mould in the grouting. Blood in the runnels. It was all tissue-thin—behind it lurked some blank infinity. The bathroom mirror gave way onto a world of perfect, terrifying stillness, iron laws; inside the mirror I saw on the landing wall a smaller mirror, which showed inside a world of total change, decay, decomposition. And both were true. I remembered Ben telling me, that evening two years earlier, that in the end, what mattered was that consciousness itself survived. That out there, among the stars, as they began one by one to wink out, there was a thought to register them. Maybe it doesn’t matter, he said, if it’s human. If we can align it with our values, our successor species can exist in the realm of truth itself. We just have to make it past this phase, the protracted adolescence of consciousness—we have to make that future god want to guard our memories. His eyes were wide. His face was deeply creased, as if he had lost several Quality Adjusted Life Years in this single morning. Tatiana, Andrei’s girlfriend had said she wanted to dance, and signalled to Andrei that he should join her. He motioned her away, and said that nothing that didn’t fuck could be aligned with human values, as she threw herself into the music in annoyance. Whatever is begotten, born and dies, I remembered saying. The vast windows of Andrei’s flat blackly lacquered the view of Imperial Wharf. I went into the bathroom there, and staring at my own wreck I thought about the time, going to see some horrific art performance with Siobhan, I saw a dancing couple smearing coal dust over one another to protest against the couple form and fossil capital and the absence of far reaching, infinite queer kinship. It was stupid and heavy-handed and I remembered there staring down at the urinal trough and seeing my nostrils yawning and thinking about the ways I was coming to resemble my father, decaying in a pattern similar to his decay—the damage of life. I saw all these images in a gleaming chain. I remembered being in the bathroom mouthing distasteful title and clutching Minima Moralia. I remembered my father, and my sister patting me on the back in the helicopter as I saw the buildings shine in the early summer evening gleam. I sat down on the sofa and scratched it to calm down. I did not want to fall asleep and dream of my fall. The too-small mattress. The forbidden zone.