What’s your problem?

I think my language centre is more robust than my sense of balance. With my right hand I place the shot glass on the bar, which I’m no longer simply leaning on with my left hand, but clinging to, and say, Same again please. Music. To my left, the loud, popular professor from New Jersey, from that university no one’s heard of. To my right, the farmer’s son from Alabama who wanted to become a priest but remained a student. We chat a little about our problems, not because we lose sleep over them but because it is our job to have problems. We’re all in the same job, which is why it’s OK for us to be imbibing nerve toxins together like this. Who else would you do that with, other than with friends maybe?

I can see the big mouth of the professor from that university in New Jersey that no one has heard of, it is opening and closing, opening and closing, his cheeks tremble when he laughs, because he thinks he is right or has had a good idea. I like the fact that he feels the need to talk to me about my problems, that he believes that he is interested in what I have to tell him. I like the fact that he is so completely convinced of the need to have an opinion about me and about everything that anyone might say that he doesn’t even notice that he’s got an opinion, he just has.

He quotes, illuminates new aspects, analyses, interprets, questions, criticises, and I want to say, Shut up you wanker I love you same again please. What?

Same again, please.

The farmer’s son joins us in the next round of shots, in more illuminating, more questioning, more understanding. More maybe this is what you meant? Is that not what you meant? That wouldn’t be a bad idea.

You think that would be a good idea?

Yes.

Yes.

Then probably that’s what I meant.

My unwillingness to hide my own opportunism provokes an awkward silence, or maybe it’s the shots, or maybe it’s not an awkward silence but rather an understanding one, sympathy for my honesty perhaps, or compassion for my despair, or that feeling you sometimes get when you’re drinking with people you don’t know at all, the feeling of knowing how they’re feeling because you yourself feel so and so, and feelings really are a complicated matter, and truth and all that, and you know what I mean?

Yes.

Yes.

I can’t tell if their smiles are genuine, it’s too dark. I can’t tell if mine is genuine, too much alcohol, but at this moment the three of us are the best friends in the whole world, our backs bent over the bar at similar angles, parallel lines on the path to infinity, we hearseethink and drink here side by side.

And love, of course, and what the hell does that arsehole think he’s looking at? I clutch my glass more tightly, if I need to smash it in his face the part I’m holding onto should remain intact, and the music goes bam bam.

After a while we’re discussing the question of whether or not we’ll ever be able to find answers. Whether it’s possible, not to prove a system on the basis of itself, that’s impossible as we know, as such and such has already shown, but whether it’s still possible to perceive it, recognise it, love it. The music goes bam bam, and that arsehole is still looking at us, and we return to the things we were talking about before. They use words I can’t define, and I answer with words I can’t define, but apparently don’t use entirely incorrectly. They look to see if I have something more to say, or if I’ve already said everything. I look to see if that arsehole is still looking. He is looking. I squeeze my glass. You’re empty, says the loud professor from the university in New Jersey that no one’s heard of. Same again, please.

Yes.

Yes.

I ask myself whether I would be able to define the word Yes, and what there really is to say about Yes apart from when to use it in a sentence, and even that is hard enough.

Do you like New York?

Yes.

We drink, and at some point I reach that moment, it happens, something changes, something inside seeps out, goes away, and the person who’s left behind says what he says, stands the way he stands, and moves the leg that’s resting on the metal rod underneath the bar tentatively in time to the music. It is good. The things around me have stopped screaming out their names, what there is just is, just like that. The bar’s smooth, shiny wood, the professor’s pot belly, the ladies’ clothes, the thin band of dark yellow light over the black floor and the white wall, the dancers’ arms in the air above them, their smell, their laughter, a bam, another bam, and the arsehole who is still staring, what’s your problem?

My problem is the question of why we experience anything. My problem is the question of why our bodies, with their intricate perceptive and processing apparatus, in addition to all that perception and processing, also produce something like an oh, so this is what it’s like to be me and here and now and doing this specific thing, or not. My problem is the question of what a scientific theory to explain our consciousness would have to look like. My problem is the fact that it sounds cool to say I’m a philosopher so I study philosophy. My problem is that I’m drunk and I want to fuck, but I’m a philosopher and so really problems like consciousness and experience should be more important to me than women. My problem is that I love a woman but I think that I will at some point stop loving her and I renounce a world in which that is possible. My problem is that I am a philosopher and I work on consciousness, i.e. what we used to call the soul, and I am sometimes afraid that the others who say that consciousness is nothing but an illusion might be right, because if they are then when we die we just die. My problem is that I’m a philosopher and so I sometimes think that if p is any given phenomenal truth and q is the conjunction of all physical facts, then p cannot be deduced from q.

I don’t have a problem, I say to the arsehole, who at that moment is not staring any more, and there is no more hatred in his eyes, no interest, no anger, he’s just not staring any more, never was staring at me, just at the spot where I happen to be standing, because he’s staring where he’s staring and he doesn’t care who or what might be occupying that space. His gaze is not the kind one can move into or out of, his gaze falls out of him and on the world, and he alone steers it, and to him I don’t even exist. I let go of my glass.