Furtive and Bearable Cessation

Furtive and Bearable Cessation picks up, in train of thought, from where Mehdi’s first antinovel, The Food in the Manger, leaves off, though the stories are separate. A large part of the book shows the dissolution of a personhood (Stuart), as a continuation of thought along the lines he had long been pursuing in his desperate nihilism, as well as a rupture at a point where Stuart can no longer be trusted to keep his beliefs and perceptions congruent with real things. Stuart has started by planning his suicide in the succeeding few months but loses touch with reality and “remembers” an unreal idyllic childhood in a town that is almost like paradise on earth, is like this because of the intense love that comes into being so easily and simply there – love for God and nature, loves that are friendship, and those that become romantic and erotic. In this imagined past, it is as if he and his friend Cadmus were so happy that by adolescence they forgot how to function constructively, and just peter out, though, on a more real level of the story, their downfalls are darker and more complicated than that. This book is a living death and a longing for life. The geometric image of a person in “dark night of the soul” being driven to such a narrow and painful point that a radical change happens in a new and unanticipated direction, sits at the core of this part of the book – a turning similar to that which happens after you are moving to a point that is no longer the wrong distance from a concave mirror and your reflection in it blurs for a second and then turns the right way up. In a way, Furtive and Bearable Cessation depicts a kind of spiritual sleep – not spiritual black sleep but spiritual REM sleep – that might lead to or hold the seeds for a spiritual and social awakening. In this book, there are not stories (of linear time) as much as intensifications – deepenings, (depth: the third spatial dimension, usually, but what is meant is another temporal dimension – squared, or, rather, cubed (pocket of) time), and becomings-more-acute. Furtive and Bearable Cessation is kind-of a book of ambivalence, of pausing stranded. The characters are outcasts, stunted creatively and stunted in will to live or act morally, yet hopeful that in their near-nonexistence the deteriorated world can emerge from paralysis and shock and be made vital and vivid, stellated in forms of socialist anarchism. They are in awe at that which exists but also easily become frustrated and sardonic.