His first name was Firstname and his
surname was Surname. He was a disciple of academic trans-philosopher
and uber-thinker Dieter Schlemp. Schlemp had advised that everyone
unburden themselves of all cultural, ethnic and genealogical identification. That was why Firstname had changed his name. His new
name was, in and of itself, an interrogation of identity. 'What is a
name?' asked his name. And that question brought with it another
question - 'what is a person?' Firstname was going to find out.
Schlemp would be proud of him and regret never replying to any of
Firstname's tweets or following him back.
Firstname worked nights. He awoke at
dusk and went to bed at dawn. His was a twilight life of empty roads
and half-lit streetlights. He and his colleagues were like vampires.
Vampires that worked in a depot, moving boxes about. No one knew what
was in the boxes. No one had the energy to care. They just yawned and lifted the things and carried them from one place to another. Firstname put his
ear to one of the boxes once and could have sworn he heard the sea.
At work Firstname was referred to as
Justin, his first name before he changed it to Firstname. He asked
his colleagues to call him Firstname and they said 'sure thing
Justin' and never did. They didn't mean any harm by it, they just
couldn't get used to the name change. They didn't treat his decision
as odd or anything. They didn't make fun of him. They were too tired
for that.
Firstname was disappointed at the lack
of discussion his name change had inspired. No one seemed to care.
They were indifferent. People are indifferent to everything. The
Universe is indifferent. Schlemp didn't even respond to Firstname's
constant tweeting. 'Is this what it is to be a person?'
One night in the depot, Firstname
dropped a box and it opened. A seashell fell out. Firstname asked his
boss about it. Firstname's boss told him that the seashells were
ornamental. 'People put them on their mantelpieces and use them as
paperweights and all that shit', said Firstname's boss. Firstname's
boss told him that he could take home a defective seashell if he
liked. There was a bucket of chipped seashells under the
stairwell. Firstname took two. He took them home and attached them to
an adjustable metal arch and wore them like headphones. He used them
instead of an MP3. He walked around hearing the sea all the time. He
preferred it to music. It was less contrived. No one commented on the
seashell headphones but this didn't surprise Firstname. By now, he
was used to people not noticing things. They were preoccupied. They
had work to do. They had bills to pay. They were sleepy. Firstname
was sleepy too but the sound of the sea let him dream. He doubted
anyone he worked with dreamed. The closest thing they had to dreams
were modest ambitions, like the hope for a raise or something. Firstname didn't
judge them harshly for this. They didn't judge him and he wouldn't
judge them. That seemed fair. They were all just doing their own
thing, which was the same thing. Firstname was doing it too but at
least he was wondering what exactly it was they were all doing while
he did it.
'If you wonder don't expect anyone else
to care that you wonder', said Dieter Schlemp in a recent lecture
that Firstname discovered on Youtube. 'If you force people to wonder
they will resent it. They will resent you and they will resent wonder
itself as a distraction. If we must wonder we must wonder in private.
Wondering is a secret pastime for the few and we should remain aware
that it is no more than that. There is no honour in wondering, in
fact there is probably dishonour. Wondering does not make you better
than anyone else. Wondering is ultimately unimportant. There is
little to be gained from it in practical terms. To most, wondering is
an irrelevance and they are right.
Wondering is extraneous. Wondering is about
as important as the whirring sound a clockwork toy makes as it walks
from one end of the room to the other before winding down and
stopping completely.'
Firstname was shocked to hear this. He
held Schlemp in such high regard. He considered him an existential
paradigm buster. 'Existential Paradigm Buster', that's what the blurb
said on the back of Schlemp's book Derrida Does the Dishes:
Domesticity Deconstructed, published by Anosognosic Books, 2011. Now
it was revealed that Schlemp didn't agree with this accolade. The man
himself considered himself to be a lesser man, whatever a 'man' was.
Schlemp had wondered about wondering until he had arrived at the
conclusion that it was a waste of time to wonder. Schlemp looked
exhausted these days and he seemed intent on alienating his acolytes.
'I do it for the money', he said at the conclusion of his lecture
before leaving the stage to a confused and hesitant cricket match
applause. Firstname suddenly felt a fool for changing his name. He
decided that he would change it back to Justin. He wouldn't even have
to ask anyone at work to call him by his original name again because
they had never stopped.
Firstname collected up all the books he
had by Schlemp and left them in a plastic sack outside a charity
shop. He felt betrayed. He felt he had been abandoned by the leader
of his expedition as he was halfway across an antarctic plain. 'What
a prick', Firstname often thought as he eschewed the ways of a
wonderer and resumed earning and simply living and hopefully having a
bit of a laugh at weekends. He kept the seashell headphones though.
He couldn't bring himself to part with them. He decided not to wonder
why this was, just as the people who sent away for seashells to place
on their mantelpieces and use as paperweights didn't wonder why they
did what they did. For the briefest moment, Firstname found himself
wondering why they did what they did but then
he reminded himself to stop wondering and he did stop wondering and he no longer wondered
as he listened to the sound of the sea.
