KEEP PLANNING – Philip Traylen

Why have you ceased communicating with all living beings and things, she asked by SMS. I mean, look at the light for once, she added, shining, dominating but also beautifying not only every single known or knowable object but also dousing, in another kind of light, the various sneaky principles behind it all… and you’re, what, in Tregtan, Albania? Doing what? He looked down at his plate, at the too-large croissants, suddenly looking to him like some kind of tragic Sartrean in-joke. He’d ordered two for some reason, and they seemed to be looking across at each other like Sartre and Simone, who cheated on each other every week to prove they were French. Okay, and who was asking? What’s wrong with these people? He tried to think about it, ‘the interesting relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre and his lover, Simone de Beauvoir,’ but the whole thing seemed out of reach, constantly slipping away into some nether zone of bathetic unimaginableness. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay he eventually replied, at intervals of one to three hours. It was the late nineties, the negative dialectics of read receipts was yet to make all conceivable forms of communicative praxis prima facie impossible. Your body, your body, your body, woah, woah, woah, he added, allowing the intervals to drag slightly, pushing the three-hour mark, like a string about to break. But she had decided it was futile; she was already applying for a job in Switzerland as a ‘greenhouse maid’. At twenty-one, she was maximally capable of self-fetishisation, maximally capable of self-annihilation through comic over-identification with the ecosexual fantasies of random strangers. Jesus, that’s the minimum wage, she said to herself, those alpine fucks don’t know how good they have it. Minimum wage reaching Mont Blanc heights down there, facking ‘ell, she added to herself, before flicking over to Norway. Not bad, but the whole place seemed cloudy, needlessly Germanic. Switzerland is Germanic as well, but its landscape has a restraining function; the lakes of Norway get immediately swallowed up by the sick Germanic instinct to self-mythologise, but those of Switzerland, for some reason, have the opposite effect, their only function is to gradually increase net global disenchantment. Must be because of all that lawn tennis, she said to herself, the number of people wearing white shorts… the lakes and the banks, between which a single green tennis ball seems to perpetually bounce… Post-Spinoza ass country, but still better than Norway. Colony of Karl ‘it’s so over’ Knausgaard, she whispered to herself unnecessarily while type-deleting whatever bro, a message which, had she sent it, would have arrived almost a full decade before its time. He, meanwhile, started thinking he might have overplayed his hand. How many times should a man refer to a woman’s body per lifetime, he vaguely googled, barely pressing the needful key. Touching it with great trepidation, as if it were the belly button of the world spirit, and not even checking the results… Probably full of shit, full of shit and lies… Secrets, lies and automobiles, he said out loud, thinking of the movies Secrets & Lies and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, respectively. Secrets, planes, lies, trains, lies, automobiles, that’s my whole life so far, and this longing for a woman’s homely touch… send a woman a whole garden by post, all the various elements, that’s legit anti-Sartrean praxis, you ever saw a man more different from a garden, from a nice little monastry garden… ‘Simone, I just slept with someone two minutes ago, thought I should tell you. Signed, Jean-Paul, the metropole. P.S., what’s your opinion about modern American literature, my dove?’ Eyes looking in four directions, okay “phenomenology.” He turned his head around slightly, thinking, as he often did, of the Taxi Driver scene. You talking to me, he thought to himself, turning his head back around, then said out loud, you talking to me? Meanwhile, on a slightly deeper level, he was trying to make a plan: a) commit a small, entry-level crime, b) run away ‘from it all,’ ‘change your life,’ go and live in a hedge somewhere. Adopt a hedge, spiritually adopt a hedge... I’m a hedge ally, he said ominously, still thinking somewhat about Taxi Driver. Jean-Paul… Gautier… Jean… Baudrillard… Jean… Claude… van Damme… Honey, what if I sent you a whole garden? he eventually said by SMS, fearing a steep increase in fees if she really had moved to Switzerland. Gotta pay the bats that bring it swooping down over the hills, ha. Go to bed, man / what time is it, he said in his brain. Nah, I’m going store you face down from now on, bro, he said out loud, looking down at his Nokia. How you like that. Face to the curb, bro, he whispered at himself, continuing to look at the unvibrating post-talismanic object. His mood thickens, becomes bile-like. The thickness is the girl, he thinks, the undergirding swampiness of my cognition, that’s the divine feminine, not the self-opening pearl of some Italianate ocean… sicklied o’er with the pale cast my ass, this paleness is intrinsic, if not endemic. You can turn off vibrate, but what if I keep going, what if I fill up your storage limit, what kind of phone won’t vibrate then? Yea, what if the cup runneth over? My cup runneth over, your cup runneth over, everyone’s cups runneth over. Everyone’s cup size eventually not only runneth over but runneth, dare I say it, through? Nah, don’t worry about it, he replied to himself, you gotta already start pre-thinking back on it, pre-emptive retrospection, the last weapon in the old toolbox, the dregs of Pandora’s box, the grease on the wood. Move on, drink some water, as they increasingly say. Nah bro, I’m going full internecine, I’m hauling the old Joycean murk back into that light you keep muttering about, I’m going with the flow. I’m going to Siberia, with the flow. Minimum wage, but spiritually. Because I’m a man, he said in his brain, thinking of her body rising again, but not out of the sea or the mountains this time, no, rising directly out of the inter-compressed idea of both, squeezed like a baby down the womb tube of our dead, self-compressed past, the mechanism of accumulation defaulting. Slouching towards Bethlehem to be, this time, unborn.

*** Philip Traylen is a writer from Wales. oldoldoldoldnew on Substack. 16 September 2025