'THE ALL HAS TAKEN ITS TOLL': MASHA TUPITSYN AND 'STOPPING'

MASHA TUPITSYN

Masha Tupitsyn keeps a highly useful set of notes here, what she calls a ‘Daily’. A while back she quoted this from Jane-Luc Nancy:

Why me? Why survive, generally speaking? What does it mean to ‘survive’? Is it even a suitable term? In what respect is the length of one’s life a good?—Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Intru, 2000, cited by Masha Tupitsyn in her ‘Daily’, 14 September 2021

The quote reminded me of something my Lama once said about choosing the length of one’s lifetime. Do I want to live a long time and calmly? Or do I choose to live intensely in order to achieve something even if it costs me my life? When I set about my life, have I fully taken in its totality as itself a choice? Will I allow myself to die when I wish without it being a matter of suicide? Do I call this volupty? That is, is there an essential pleasure to be taken in giving it all away? Why not do so today?

My lama was speaking about this as an active choice. Even as a very active choice. We may face this choice. We may move towards it. We may live our life intentionally for the short or longer duration. We may choose to think about the choice as soon as we like. This is not just a matter of burning and fading (‘better to burn out than fade away’), it is to do with the adamantine dignity of a life as a choice about timing and amount of time. I do not have to live for any given duration. I can live, for example, according to the idea that enough has already been given. I can live as an incarnation of extreme gratitude, for the second, for the beautiful flicker. For the enoughness of life. I can even detach this notion of gratitude from anything like the life or death drive, as a butterfly might.

Elsewhere in the ‘Daily’ section Tupitsyn (who is one of the shrinking number of people online writing and communicating in an incredibly sober fashion) says this, a passage so resonating and honest one is perhaps immediately faced with the trial of wanting to suppress it:

When we’re behind masks all day. What is the point? Can we ever ask that question outside of suicide? What if stopping, breaking, refusing were anti-suicidal? What if it was pro-life, in the truest sense. We ‘hang in there’ and ‘keep going’, keep doing—slaves to adaption—as if any other way of thinking about the pandemic age is anti-life. As if thinking is anti-life. Anti-success, which I guess it is now. What the fuck is this American life? Do we even have it within us to ask that anymore?

This was written on 1 May 2021. It is totally essential in every way. Exemplary in its sculpting of language. How do we stop and break in an affirmative way? How do we break and enter into language like this? This is what I was already commenting on above, this notion of a stopping that is ‘anti-suicidal’. Tupitsyn asks whether we can even ask this, can we even say this thing at all. Do we have the ability to stop long enough to even pose this question of stopping in a true way? Has it all been lost? Has even loss been lost?¹

‘Stopping’ and its difficulty has been a concern of this blog. I wrote about it in terms of the mathematican Grothendieck, who stopped his career. I also have a ‘practise’ that gives me a definite sense of being able to stop when I choose to go in that direction, or rather of being able to stop in the not-stopping, of seeing what is stoppagless, of being able to stop long enough to examine what the stopageless now is and has always been. When I write about stopping I also sometimes feel like I am writing about stopping to protect myself against the implications of the practise of stopping. Or even better and worse perhaps, when I wrote about stopping I was trying to obliterate the memory of what it could be. Specifically, the memory that last time I ‘stopped’ in a serious way—got offline for a long period, didn’t write, swam in the river several times a day—it was one of the best moments of my life (this was in 2020). What we hide from one another is just how hard and beneficial stopping can be. But we also hide from the fact that stopping isn’t stopping—it isn’t, we might say, stopping anything at all. Anymore. Ever.

Nancy asks why survive, generally speaking? Tupitsyn wants to ask about stopping and breaking outside the question of suicide. How do I kill myself without harming a hair on my head? How do I have any notion at all of stopping? Isn’t stopping the last thing that stops? Has anyone, ever, stopped?

My Lama opens the question of choosing a style of lifetime, of life and time. In the simplest sense, ‘wanting to die’ may simply be a metaphor for observing that life has gotten out of control, the sense that we have done too much damage, that we want something else entirely.

Fair enough. I don’t want to die, but I do choose not to be here. I make this decision, but what astonishes me most is the continuing. That is, the disappointment of the stoppageless. And then I stop right there, I stop again. This time right at that sublime disappointment. I then ask you what that disappointment really is. What is it now open to? Anything? Something? What is it that is so stoppageless?

THE TOLL

Tupitsyn also writes in the same 1 May 2021 entry about a certain ‘all’:

We need time to make sense of it all, especially as ‘all’ keeps expanding. All is a full-time job. All grows every second. All is everywhere, all the time. All has replaced love and relationships. All has replaced time. All has replaced life. All has replaced future. All has replaced originality and grace.

All has taken its toll. Even the things I love—the things that give me strength—take strength. Take so much time.

‘All has taken its toll’: this is a very striking sentence. We hear so much happening in it, and it contains so much truth. The chiming, for example, of ‘toll’ and ‘all’, which has the effect of threatening to subsume even the ‘toll’-effect of the ‘all’.

It’s as if she says: it’s all too much; the all has gotten too much; we have all gone too far; the all has taken over; we cannot stop long enough to even contemplate the stop because of the all.

The all blocks the all.

It’s all. I can’t.

Tupitsyn says we need to take time to take it all in, but she then immediately says the all has gone too far. Everything has been swallowed. We have been swallowed by God and none of us can speak.

‘All has taken its toll.’

You need to stop but you can’t.

You want to stop but the stopping isn’t there.

It’s an all-time All. You have never seen anything like it. It is about to become even more. All.

NONE OF US CAN SPEAK

Being mute seems like an effect of what Tupitsyn calls the ‘all’. In the same set of ‘Daily’ entries she also continues to write (steadfast, simple, incredibly sober) about what we have been calling ‘COVID’. Or rather, she presents a series of links about ‘COVID’ and sometimes a brief comment.

It seems to me that presenting a link about ‘COVID’ in the right way, in the right context, can be just as striking as anything else, for example forming a detailed argument or giving a contextual account.

A link allows us to take some time and perhaps stop for a second. To follow a suggestion. When Tupitsyn does comment, it’s sententious. Pithy. On 27 August next to a video link to a ‘COVID’ discussion on Rumble she asks:

Where are all the holier-than-thou, virtue signalling wokers when it comes to medical freedom and the right to choose now?

I mean, that’s it, right. Politically, that is all you can say about the last two years. Perhaps we need to take the time to think about the directness of that question. Certainly, its directness often gets lost. We need to stop and just read what Tupitsyn says. We need to think about being incredibly sober even if we can’t be. Even if we are drunk on that as an illusion. Drunk on stopping. Drowned by the very idea.

A critical scenography that is keen to ask questions about race and gender in art, that is largely Marxist in its diverse inspiration, seems to have nothing at all to say on the deaths of millions of people during what appears to be a criminal medico-industrial takeover. To break through to the truth right now is perhaps to say it quickly and plainly and no other way:

Where are all the holier-than-thou, virtue signalling wokers when it comes to medical freedom and the right to choose now?

Where are they now? What happened? What happened to the supporters of BLM summer when a year later 70 percent of median age people of colour in New York were not allowed—are not allowed—into restaurants and cinemas? Stop for a second. What the hell happened? What is that? Why didn’t you stop to say?

FINALLY, I NOTICED ENOUGH

In ‘The Moths’ by Mary Oliver, we find these lines:

If you notice anything,
it leads you to notice
more
and more.

And anyway
I was so full of energy.
I was always running around, looking
at this and that.

If I stopped
the pain
was unbearable.

If I stopped and thought, maybe
the world
can’t be saved,
the pain
was unbearable.

The next line in the poem is:

Finally, I noticed enough.

But you will go on. All of this will go on, this heartbreaking fantasy of being able to stop, it too, it more than anything, will go on. Isn’t this final quoted line therefore a violent final fantasy? Isn’t the least likely thing to be able to stop now the actual stopping, the actual salvific notion of stopping? What is more disappointing, after all, than a poem? Despite your even knowing this fact—even this fact—you will forget it, and start again. Right up until the last second, after which there will be nothing at all, you will believe you can stop, once and for all, but you are unlikely to do so, you will not do so, you will never stop again.

Read Tupitsyn most days here.

1. This seems possible. It seems possible that what we notice now is that there is no defence at all, no stopping. That brokenness is how it is, forever. That all solutions have failed. That it failed. That those things need to be put in the past now. The idea of having solved, for example. That it is unstoppable. That we will never now stop. That we will forget precisely this. That we will go on. That we will go on thinking we are stopping. The illusion that it is us who chooses. That we will then stop. That this final stopping will have nothing to do with us. With stopping. With humanity. With our choices.