DUSTY - SLOW FADING - HERE
A long outtake from Dusty's POV
YellowGlue is writing a very fine explanation of Dusty's cocaine addiction that while it may not be universal, certainly explains the addiction of so many young people.
THE TERRIBLE CONFRONTATION WITH DEATH
WITH THE VOID
WITH REALITY WITHOUT THE VEIL OF ILLUSION
A REALITY DUSTY SEES. A HYPER-REALITY DUSTY SEES THAT IS UNBEARABLE
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For Dusty is seeing the SCREEN
 |
| BAUDRILLARD |
DUSTY HAS STOPPED FALLING AND HIT BOTTOM
And then, right there in front of everyone, it finally happens.
I'm not falling anymore.
I fall all the way down.
And the bottom?
The bottom is just dark.
Just alone, with chains and weights and locks you had every chance to shrug off and never did.
The bottom is keeping up appearances through a group picture with eight people who have no idea you just died so that the mother of your murderer can have a pretty picture to hang in her living room.
The bottom is feeling the person you thought for so long was love and home and heart and soul to you, looking right at you without any hint of an idea what she's just done.
The bottom is knowing she doesn't see you.
And if it's better this way, it doesn't even matter, because she never did.
If she had, I'd be walking to the Continental next to her instead of Petey.
I'd have her hand in mine instead of my phone.
I'd be kissing the pulse point I squeezed too tightly, instead of deleting her number and dialing his.
Edward has seen through the SPECTACLE of graduation porno disguising the emptiness of the ritual. And he sees the horror of the ritual to be continued with marriage, children, your own children graduating, finding something you tell yourself you want to do, and all the while just waiting for death. It is the awareness of DEATH in life that Malabou writes about. Is this what Jesus meant when he said, "Let the dead bury the dead?" Edward knows he is dead on his side of the window/screen, but so are they, only they are not aware that they are dead. So they do not require drugs giving the deadening of awareness.
This is the theme of:
DUSTY Chapter 35
I try to remember the last time I looked at my girl through unaddicted eyes.
It's been years. I've been lit, guilty, spun, drunk-wasted the entire time. Every day. Through each I love you, through
each touch, through each don't ever leave me. All the affection I have ever showed this girl has been habit-stained.
It's never just been me. Ever. Cocaine has always been there. And before coke, it was bud or E, or shots of Jameson
on my bedroom floor.
I've been dragging her though my bullshit for years, doing what I need to do to keep her, saying what I need to say to
make sure she's always around. I dump all of my misuses on Bella because she's the only one who can carry them and still love me the same.
After everything I've done, she forever loves me back.
I take another drag from my smoke and pull at the front of my hair.
Fuck, Fuck, Fuck.
I love her too hard.
I love her unsafe.
I love her to the brink.
Dope sick and tipped, I'm looking at her, and she's so small. She's a seventeen-year-old girl, cluttered with scars, manipulated into loving me. My stigma is all over her. I'm all over her. She never even had a chance against a monster like me.
I influenced her.
I sought and took.
I tricked her into loving me, because I did love her first.
I took advantage.
I've hurt her.
I just made her bleed.
That's not the first time. Cocaine smiles.
I've been with other girls, and I've chosen drugs—
I can make this go away, Dusty.
"Bliss,"I whisper with a throat lodged full of regret. I shake my head in an attempt to clear too many thoughts. I can think straight. I haven't had to think with a straight mind in so long.
"Hey," she says soothingly, brushing my too long hair away from my eyes. Baby smiles and my insides constrict. "Tell me," she says.
I clear my throat. "Princess," I say, brimming with anxiety and regret and self-disgust and how could she let me do this to her?
"Fuck," I moan into B's stomach.
Baby rubs my back and speaks quietly. "Tell me, Edward. Tell me..."
She turns my head with her hands on the side of my face, forcing me to be still, giving me no other choice but to look at her.
"I'm clean. I'm clean," I cry.
Looking at her is too hard. It's all there, on every part of her—our whole relationship. It's in the guilt behind her eyes, and in the purple below them. It's explained in her bitten-too-low fingernails, and in the dark bruises I kissed on her neck. It's in her cut lip and tangled hair. It's her sleeping in the back of this car when she should be at home in her bed. It's how she knows how to talk to me, a drug addict on a week long comedown. It's in the way she touches me, just right. It's in the life she's thrown away for this. It's in her uncertain future. It's in her broken friendship with Alice. It's in every lie she keeps.
It's in her beating-for-me heart.
It's in me, able to ignore all of it because I've been too fucked up to care.
And now I'm clean.
But I don't know how I can stay this way.
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For Edward to tolerate then access his power to be, to be an ubermensch (Nietzsche) this is his task in becoming "clean."
To quote Foucault on curiosity: it evokes "a concern", it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; an acute sense of real which, however, never becomes fixed; a readiness to find our surroundings strange and singular; a certain restlessness in ridding ourselves of our familiarities and looking at things otherwise; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is passing away; a lack of respect for traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential.
Eric Packer cannot reinvent himself either; find the "restless identities stirring":
Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point. What did he want that was not posthumous? He stared into space. He understood what was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be. (C. 209)
Dusty has decided to leave Bliss knowing she will suffer and knowing what she will realize from it. To become herself. To free her of himself. As Badiou says:
At the heart of love à la française lies the idea of
freedom. To love truly is to want the other free, and this
includes the freedom to walk away. Love is not about
possession or property. Love is no prison where two
people are each other’s slaves. Love is not a commodity,
either. Love is not capitalist, it is revolutionary. If
anything, true love shows you the way to selflessness.
In his recent book, “In Praise of Love,” the French
philosopher Alain Badiou
reminds us that love implies
constant risk. There is no safe,
everlasting love. The idea
that you can lock two people’s
love once and for all, and toss
the key, is a puerile fantasy.
For Mr. Badiou, love is
inherently hazardous, always
on the brink of failure and
above all vulnerable. Embrace its fragility, wish your
beloved
to be free and you might just, only just, have a chance to
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