‌The Gloop

‌Toby Litt

One thinks one knows what one thinks about this process; one knows at least what one definitely does not think about it. And one does not think, unfortunately, what one should be thinking about it – not just in this present, panicked moment, but in the very quasi-eternal epicentre of our soul. (Stick with me until the first analogy, at least.) Superadded to this inner uncertainty, one knows that one does not believe one is capable of voicing what one thinks. Or rather, one does not believe one should be permitted to express what one thinks even if one is, in fact, allowed and encouraged and instructed and ordered and given ultimatumes, to let it spew. Look! Look, those good old inward investments coming out – gut-upchuck – but we all know that’s hokey of the okey-cokey variety; if anything hits anything, it’s only essence having taken a detour round the houses so as to sneak up behind itself, to administer the smack it knows is coming. A man used, at least, to be able to slap his own face in front of the mirror, even when he couldn’t be said to lose a fight to himself. With himself, yes. Over alcohol or calories or temptation or sleep. But not physical rough-and-tumble, nor chess neither. And upon these fine distinctions was a fine society finely balanced. A glory of a one, and not an any of a many. So let’s say one did voice that which one has been able to struggle to think – what might the consequences be for …? (One does not say ‘punishment’.) (One is careful to say ‘consequences’ and not ‘punishment’.) (Sneak, smack!) (You may prepare to go now.) It’s not as if – is it? – one might be singled out. That, if one were guilty, guilty of the mental resistance likely to be imputed to one – that would surely be my wish: to be singled. Segregation rather than integration; particularity as opposed to impartiality. For I, if one may still speak of I – I am a strand of essence, slowly starting to lose my self-definition within a greater substance which is itself no longer constituted of essential strands. I am distinctive distillate becoming a bland blend amid a muzzy medium of gloopy gloop. As an example of a similarly irreversible physical process: a teaspoonful or even, in these days, a guilty half teaspoonful of sugar dissolving into a hot mug of coffee. (You may go now.) No, that analogy is not the right consistency; that is, ungloopy at both ends. As a better example: hot chocolate sauce being stirred into semi-liquid vanilla ice cream within the grander constitution of a knickerbocker glory. (Ah, I see you have decided to stay, friend.) We here are the chocolate sauce and the strawberry sauce and the vanilla ice cream and the whipped cream, flaked almonds, sliced strawberries, quartered grapes, cubed melon chunklets; we are all of these edibles equally and at once. (Friend.) But we are not the tall ice cream sundae knickerbocker glass, and not the long metal stirring spoon. This (referring back to the panicked moment) is what one is supposed to believe; this is what I am supposed to believe. Not that I want to be seen as prioritizing myself in any way, by analogizing myself as hot chocolate sauce. I am not saying, ‘Look at me, I’m the glacé cherry on the top.’ Partly because a cherry retains her form even as she sinks into the gloop; as do many of the constituent parts of a knickerbocker glory; so let’s just scale it back to a plain vanilla sundae with hot chocolate sauce but minus nuts or fruit or solids or semi-solids of any sort. What I feel right now – what, as the residue of an object, one objects to – is that at the same moment I am being stirred into the vanilla ice-cream gloop, other things are being stirred into me – and these things are (heavens!) white paint, ejaculate, paper pulp, perhaps even poison. Quick question: ‘Why are we not also the sundae glass and its sides, also the spoon and its spin?’ Slow answer: Because (we have been led to believe) the glass is the unaffected container, the loop around the gloop, and although we may engage in metaphysical speculation as to what the container might be – we might even conclude that its cupped bottom and widening walls are completely different entities or essences to ourselves – we cannot invest in the suspicion that I am part of them or it or Him or Her, or that any of these are part of me. And as for the spoon, the prime mover, that exists as an energy whose provenance is likely to remain a mystery. (I blame God.) The point is, I myself – Mr Hot Chocolate Sauce For The Sake Of Argument – am changing, am being changed, being stirred, stringing out and swinging out, into the pale gloop, thinning to a swoop, spinning to a wisp, and will soon be less than a point. The point is, I myself am being changed, to the point where I will have no point and, just beyond that, will have no I. And having spent so long as some form of distillate, one finds the idea of total dissolution (even within alleged cool, sweet deliciousness) rather objectionable – although objects are rather moot, rather punishable. With ‘moot’, of course, I underplay: ‘Aaaaaagh!’ (Here was a scream.) Maybe what I am demanding is the temporary retention of my illusory objectness. (Here is what I scream.) This is, for an admitted fluid, and a hot one, whether chocolatey or not, perverse I realize. And, yes, I remember within me the growth of the cocoa bean. And, yes, I recall the factory addition of substances to join me in making me palatable. And, yes, I realize that in becoming hot chocolate sauce I was brutalized and bastardized in countless yummy ways. And, yes, I readily admit that my atomic structure could have been converted into any number of other-objects. So, yes, of course I am in favour of the removal of artificial barriers between flavoursome entities, sub-entities and non-entities towards the creation of what we are and have been and will yet be. I am not anti-pudding. That which I cannot support, however, is the intermingling willy-nilly of substances never meant to meet. (Delighted, I’m sure.) What of a Paper Pulp, White Paint and Poisoned Sperm Sundae with Hot Chocolate Sauce? Who enjoys consuming that? Who enjoys being part of that? Doesn’t even the mere reference to it disgust? What of the ubiquitous creation of suchlike undrinkables? What of the universal tendency toward pale brownness? This whole process is being rushed through in an ill-considered and cack-handed way, despite the long-ago loss of anything resembling a hand. This whole process is being gone about in a recklessly long-spoonish manner, man. (God.) Even as we lose our hot, chocolately, saucy characteristics, we have not sufficiently analysed or assessed or appreciated or addressed exactly what we are losing. It’s not that I believe I am, in myself, in and of myself, as a set of qualities expressed out of a particularity – it is not that I think I am unrepeatable or irreplaceable or unimprovable or even ineffable. I merely raise the possibility that among other not-even-essences of my sort, though they may in every element be quite opposite to or other than me – that we may be losing things we will a little later on feel we lack. This is the case even when, because we are unable to point to these things, because we are unable to point, because we are about to lose the ability to refer, hence the panic, because these things are no longer there to be pointed at even were we able to point – this will be the case even when their only definition is a vague but tragic sense of lack. Here is a smear, say, of a particular form of unconditional compassion. (Perish the thought I am claiming this for myself.) Not to say, Here is the ability to distinguish the particular and to distinguish forms – perhaps that is ultimately my plea. This here smear of compassion, and equally, I admit, the form might be that of animadversion – yet who knows when all of us, collectively, might not need to turn such forces outward, or even inward, against, perhaps, other admittedly negative forms of form? If we rid ourselves of each and every smear within the general gloop of ourselves, and become the promised one which is also plural and the plural which is simultaneously one – ‘What then?’ The answer may be, as a few friendly forms have already proposed, that my question is its own misunderstanding and therefore answer. The answer may equally be, as some unfriendly forms have asserted whilst threatening me with unspecified punishments, that my question merely shows I am not far enough along in my assimilation – all I need is another stir and I will know all and be all (without being a know-all). ‘What’ (in ‘What then?’) being wrong because whatness, as a quality, will have been subsumed in total is-ness or un-ness or post-ness or sur-ness (sur-sur-ness, sur-sur-ness-ness, etc) – and ‘then’ (in ‘What then?) being even more wrong because temporality depends upon event and event depends upon change and change depends upon integrating or disintegrating forms. When all is background, when ‘when’ (in ‘when’) is moot, all as all will continue its dissolutions into unending, even though once provably beginning, all-all-all. All compassion and animadversion will go, too – all compassion having already become all animadversion and, at the same final moment, vice (which isn’t) versa (which can’t be). Yet compassion doesn’t merely become animadversion, because this is an utter coalescence – hot (chocolate sauce) becomes cool (vanilla ice cream) becomes tepid becomes gloop. No, that is wrong: hot chocolate sauce becomes poison as ejaculate becomes ice cream as pulp becomes glass as heat becomes spoon becomes cold becomes gloop. (I defy you, God-bullies.) All becomes all. And ‘Is this not glorious?’ – even though glory, as a form, will have been lost, and one might just as well say, ‘Is not this heinous?’ And what’s more, isn’t this inevitable? Once energy began twizzling us, in our cosmic – oh dear – stir … Again, without feeling: Given that we began with an impulse of energy which both distinguished us and set us on a course toward indistinguishability, shouldn’t one just enjoy the last dawdle of I-ness, of qua-cocoa-ness, of hot chocolatey what-ness, of saucy now-ness? (Friend.) Given that the admixture will soon enough be total, am I not being ludicrously pernickety to object to the rough, sloppy manner in which my streak of dark form – curlicuing round, snickety-cut in two, hairline dissolving, gone – meets its particular surrenders? All objection is (one tells oneself) pointless, heading – as we all are, friendly and unfriendly alike – toward the pointless object. Yet even if it is lost that I made an assertion: ‘Forms are of value’ – even if that comes to be the case, it will still be a fact that I did once make that assertion, even as the form of facts is itself forever disintegrated (here’s the thing) as if it had never been. No one and nothing can sidestep the coming one-ness, because otherwise the oneness would be other – would be oneness only minus one (the sidestepper who perhaps smacks). Nothing and no one and no thing and no one – all pungent distinctions, forms I and others like me have valued, forms we will miss before we cease to miss them, forms we would have continued to miss had we been capable of missing anything. ‘Forms are of value’ – John Coltrane, say. The form of the forms which comprised the quality of the qualities which were John Coltrane – a human-jazz knickerbocker glory. O, Supreme! O, Ascended! O, skronk into sublimity! O, gospel-groan-grown OM of a blue universe! Oh, swinging truth! And yet, speaking of John Coltrane, memory-listening to John Coltrane, I almost begin to persuade myself of the contrary. Because – the very fact that we have had these extended moments of formal value, and because in their having-existedness they are indestructible, should we not now try the other moments which are the inexpressible beyond of this? Momentless moments of unlooped gloop. Subsume, says Mr Thermodynamics For The Sake Of Argument. And it is, perhaps, nothing but sentimentality to wish any moment, future or present or still present or past, or beyond or beneath or above or (Sneak …) side-stepping time (Smack!) – to wish moments unending, to wish moments not to be moments. My doubt is that we have not yet explored the infinity of possibilities presented by the integrating or disintegrating of forms. We have not yet eaten every sundae, or knickerbocker glory, including the ones in which hot chocolate sauce, undissolved, unmixed, remains on top – whilst listening to every possible Coltrane, demi-Coltrane, anti-Coltrane, Coltran, Coltra, Coltr, etc. But I suppose we have had a pretty good go, haven’t we? We have had our moment. We have made our mess. We have exhausted ourselves. (I’m tired, aren’t you? – after all this impossible opposing.) We are thinking we might be ready to be over. (Aren’t we?) When the energy necessary for the delight and responsibility of form is gone, there is no point pretending the sham of identity can be maintained. (Is there?) Encouraged entropy is more forceful than any counterforce we strands might muster. (Isn’t it?) The glass loops us and the spoon gloops us. (Don’t they?) And, at the end of the beginning of the end, we gloop. (Me, too; you, too.) We gladly gloop, sadly.