better than my bedsit.
I gestured at the books, piled high on shelves, on a table, on the floor. What is this? Alan told me it was an occult memory system. Then he left the room. There were letters at my feet. Bills. They were addressed to Callum MacDonald, Flat 3, 541 Holloway Road, London. Alan came back with whisky and gin, ice and a lemon. Alan was organised, even if his flat was a mess. What was he wearing? If I’d known I was going to write about him later, I’d have made some notes at the time. He didn’t like to stand out in a crowd. Alan often wore black Levi’s, lace-up shoes, an open shirt and a dark jacket. Since it was cold, he’d have been wearing a V-neck jumper. He had several raincoats, all dark. He’d have taken off his coat and jumper once we were inside the flat. The central heating was on and double glazing kept the rooms warm.
I took a sip of gin and asked Alan what he did. He told me he read and that when he’d finished reading, he’d die. I asked him why he’d come to Aberdeen. He told me he’d inherited the flat and the books it contained. When I asked if his parents were rich he laughed. The flat hadn’t belonged to his family, it had been owned by an older woman who’d become very fond of him. Alan kicked over a pile of books and told me he’d only been in Aberdeen a few days. He wanted to clear the flat, the books irritated him. I suggested that Alan try the Old Aberdeen Bookshop, an emporium close to the university that specialised in quality secondhand stock. Alan laughed. He was going to read every one of the books before he got rid of them.
Alan picked up the paperbacks he’d kicked over. A selection of titles by Erich Fromm. He told me the books were rubbish. He hurriedly read aloud from the introductions to The Art of Loving, The Revolution of Hope, To Have or to Be and The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. In each introduction Fromm repeated himself, apologising for the repetition of material between his new book and his previous texts but justifying it on the grounds that it provided the necessary framework from which the reader could understand the fresh insights his latest work contained. Alan asked me if I was familiar with Fromm’s work. No. He gave me Escape from Freedom and told me to keep it. He had an English edition of the book put out by RKP. The title was Fear of Freedom but the text was identical to the American edition with the original title. I have both books now. Soon after we met, Alan started selling the books he’d read to the Old Aberdeen Bookshop. I’d go over to the shop once or twice a week, picking up whatever Alan off-loaded.
I asked Alan how old he was. He claimed to be 36. At first I thought he was joking. I thought he might be two or three years older than me. We got along easily enough, maybe it was the gin. It didn’t feel like there was a 16-year age gap between us. I asked Alan if he wanted to have sex. He led me through to the bedroom and asked me if I’d mind being tied up. I was reluctant until he promised not to hurt me. Alan tied my hands behind my back. He put a blindfold over my eyes, then placed a hood over my head. He rolled me onto my stomach and touched my spine and the tops of my legs. He touched the back of my knees. Put my toes in his mouth and sucked them. He crawled all over me. Moved my limbs around and licked under my armpits. By the time he got me to shift my arse and shoved two fingers into my cunt, I was dripping wet.
I suspect Alan wasn’t using a condom when he fucked me. If he was it burst, because afterwards I could feel his come dripping out of my cunt. Alan threw a blanket over me and then he left. I don’t know how long I lay there. Alan had told me not to move and that he would be back. I was aroused. I drifted in and out of sleep. Erotic dreams. Erotic thoughts. I trusted Alan. I liked the sensation of his come dripping out of my cunt. I liked feeling helpless and I was overcome with excitement when I heard Alan’s voice again after what seemed an infinity of sleepless dreams and dreamless sleep.
I thought it was Alan fingering my cunt. Climbing on top of me. Ramming his big stiff cock up my creamy hole. I thought it was Alan because all the while I could hear his voice. He told me that I was the best-looking girl in the world. That I really turned him on. That he wanted to get me pregnant. Alan fell silent but I could feel hot breath on the back of my neck. Then something strange happened. There were two hands beneath me, fondling my breasts. A different pair of hands removed my hood and stroked my hair. This second set of hands lifted my head up, fingers found their way into my mouth. Then the fingers were joined by a cock. I was still being fucked doggie-style from behind. The fingers wet with my saliva were playing with my hair. I didn’t know who, couldn’t see who, I was giving a blow job.
Fingers fumbled with the blindfold, removed it. I looked up and saw Alan. Now I knew who I was sucking but I didn’t know who was fucking me. With the corner of my eye I could see a ventriloquist’s dummy. I’d noticed it earlier, when I first entered the bedroom, before I’d been tied up and blindfolded.2 I was coming, I could taste Alan’s spunk in my mouth, I felt the other man’s prick harden and then he shot his load. Alan withdrew his cock from between my lips and put the hood back over my head. I could hear someone dressing, they left. Alan was undoing the rope that bound my wrists. We curled up together, under the blankets, fell asleep.
We didn’t doze for long. Alan woke me getting out of bed. I watched him dress. A book-lined wall behind him. When he started pulling books from shelves I hauled myself out of bed. Alan told me that you had to treat books well, move them around, show an interest, or they’d die just like plants. He complained that he’d expected to find something more than commercially published paperbacks. His friend had been a magus and although there were occult titles, these were vastly outnumbered by philosophy, politics, literature, history, sociology and plenty of other topics. We went through to the sitting room and had another drink. I picked up the Erich Fromm book that Alan had given me. My host said Fromm criticises mechanisation precisely because his literary technique is mechanised. At that moment I wasn’t certain I understood what Alan meant, but as I acquired more of his books I realised there was nothing much to understand.
Alan criticised Fromm for denouncing a mechanical culture of death so that it might be endlessly reproduced under the rubric of life. Alan compared Fromm’s conception of a social character to Spengler’s agrarian mysticism and the claim that there are distinct social types to be found in the countryside and the city. When I said I didn’t know what he was talking about, Alan suggested I take his copy of Decline of the West if I wished to waste a few hours with right-wing froth. Alan picked up Fromm’s The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. I have his 1977 Penguin paperback edition in front of me as I write. He opened the book at page 440 and pointed to what Fromm had to say about the slogan ‘Long live death!’ Alan found a copy of Alexander Herzen’s From the Other Shore and pointed out that the Russian populist used the slogan ‘Vive la mort! And may the future triumph!’ at the end of a letter written in Paris on 27 July 1848.3
Alan criticised Fromm for understanding neither the historical genesis of the slogan ‘Long live death!’ nor its meaning. He pulled a copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables from a shelf and showed me a passage where the crowds manning the Parisian barricades of 1832 are depicted shouting ‘Long live death!’ He made me look at Marx’s two texts about 1848, The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire. He stressed that the latter work begins with the famous observation that history repeats itself, the first time as farce, the second as tragedy, and according to Alan this is exactly what happened in Spain during the civil war. Then he picked up Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and drew my attention to a quote at the beginning of chapter 13 from Hegel’s Phenomenology concerning the master/slave dialectic. Alan muttered that even a right-wing cretin like Fukuyama had advanced further in his superficial reading of Hegel than Fromm.
Alan kicked several Fromm books across the room. Dismissing them and their author for ignoring the death of Socrates as an act of scapegoating that gave birth to Western philosophy. Alan insisted that any philosopher or occultist worth their salt could tell you that death is the supplement of life, just as life is the supplement of death, that we only start living in death. The ability to imagine our own death not only makes us human, it may yet make us divine. Fromm imagined he was a Marxist and yet he completely ignored what Hegel had to
