Yet the dread
It was the day before the Manic Street Preachers were supposed to conquer America. Richey Edwards, of the Manics, left the Embassy Hotel at 7am on February 1st, 1995. The following day an advert was placed in a local paper asking him to make contact with his family. It ran for three days. Richey spent the year before in a nadir of anorexia, alcoholism and self-mutilation, and was hospitalised after an attempt on his own life. But this is history; part of pop culture like Kurt Cobain.
The 'unnameable lust' of causing harm to your own body, or reshaping your self, is attributable, it is believed, to the desire to express emotional pain; to ease tension; to escape from emptiness, depression and feelings of unreality. It is a way of escaping the numbness of reality. Many self-injurers have said that they cut to feel something. Self-mutilation is a way to touch reality after suffering a dislocation from it, to deal with depersonalisation.
The last sequence of Darren Aronofsky's 2000 film Requiem for a Dream has Sara, Harry, Marion and Tyrone all turn onto their sides, curled up in a foetal ball, utterly crushed by the systems around them. We watch their dreams as they bud for the first three or so minutes of the film and then wince and weep as the buds are ripped out and unremittingly, gruellingly, vivisected to oblivion. Our non-heroes are left as four husks, hope abandoned, only able to retreat like snaileyes into empty nothing. Prison, prostitution, amputation and ECT physically enact the destruction of the self with Hardy-esque cruelty and relentlessness.
Those who didn't understand the film said it was about how drug addictions ruin us. The inclusion of television, chocolate, tanning and dieting clearly whistled past their ears. Harry fucks his arm up with heroin in that film. But he should have used ketamine. 2-(2-Chlorophenyl1)-(methylamino)-cyclohexanone hydrochloride is ascending in market position. Normally used by vets (presumably a sign of a decent hit), Special K is becoming more frequently employed whilst clubbing. It's cheaper than E and coke, technically legal and you can take it by mouth, nose, iv or im.
"You just sit down paralysed." It makes you feel numb and disassociated from your environment. It has long-term implications for your memory. Big doses remove you completely from your body and its difficult to work with it. You experience a "peculiar sort of loneliness." Ketamine isn't the kind of life-affirming thing you get with E or speed. It doesn't mellow you out like pot does. It's an anaesthetic, you can't really move and you sometimes feel nauseous: you become the quintessence of apathy. There's not really a better drug to define a generation.Ket is escape. It is a tacit cultural acknowledgement that we're all being hollowed out. We'll only elect a left-wing government so long as it pretends not to have any principles. Ket and New Labour and self-harm are one and the same thing. They're markers of an empty culture. Don't think there's any escape from this. 1.3% of kids between five and ten have tried to harm or kill themselves, according the Office of National Statistics. Self-mutilation has risen to one in fifty for the 11-15 age group.
This is the fallout of the '80s and early '90s. It's the social consequences of individualism. The 1980s were a concerted attack on humanity from literature, pop culture and politics. It was based on the idea that an individual was a numerical figure that earned stuff, bought stuff. It immediately failed: the economy was over-stimulated and then slumped. The individual was disenfranchised and pop culture had its innards ripped out. We overheated then and are now in a global recession. That's why we're still blowing each other up even though things are going so well.
One of Richey's favourite authors was Albert Camus. His favourite poet was Larkin. Both articulated modern alienation. Both can leave you feeling numb, empty, impotent. This new state of being manifests itself in ridiculous levels of disillusionment and disengagement from the systems around us since they were used to hurt us. We don't vote. Fear of crime is far in excess of the incidence of crime. 40 per cent of American children think their mates are capable of murder. Slipknot sing eloquently that "he's a phantom, a mystery and that leaves me/NOTHING!" ('Eyeless'). "Inside my shell, I wait and bleed..." ('Wait and Bleed'). "FUCK IT ALL! FUCK THIS WORLD!/FUCK EVERYTHING THAT YOU STAND FOR!/DON'T BELONG! DON'T EXIST!" ('Surfacing').
Western civilisation appears to have acknowledged a nihilist universe. Any genuine knowledge - scientific, theological, political - is impossible to achieve. Unlike Camus and Nietzsche we have elected passive nihilism over the active nihilism they championed. We have resigned ourselves to struggle through life without certainty bearing negativity as the only alternative to death. We've bankrupted ourselves and now we're sowing empty.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off or unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
'Aubade', Philip Larkin
13th Jun 2002