Cioran’s Punk Diary
“Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being Punk.”
In 1937, Cioran ditched his parent’s house and his home country Romania to go to Paris and spread Punk ideology. He crossed the French border illegally with the help of a couple of Țuică shots. Noroc!
Nothing makes a man more courageous.
Cioran formed a Punk posse in the suburbs of Paris and he believed that one does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. Consequently he started writing aphorisms in French in the form of Graffiti on church walls and governmental buildings. One of his Graffiti wrote “Man is a robot with defects” on the walls of the Notre-dame Cathedral in Paris. Cioran was described by his posse as a screw-head antinatalist suicidal.
Unfortunately, he was caught several times by the French Police for such acts of vandalism, spreading Graffiti, and theft; in the police interview he told them: “Whenever we get a few drinks in us, we tend to do some pretty stupid stuff. Obviously, alcohol blinds our ability to make logical decisions and, our friends are usually all for us making fools of ourselves. So, when we’re drunk with people who love seeing us fail–we fail, and we fail hard.”
Samuel Beckett was a close friend of Cioran, and on one occasion revealed a drunk tale that took place in the suburbs of Paris in the 1940s: “We went to the tattoo shop across the street and Cioran got Brad tattooed on his arm pit so that he can say that he has a Brad Pitt. And after he woke up the next day from sleeping on the floor in an abandoned apartment, he looked over to me and said: ‘I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?’ I told Cioran that I couldn’t agree more, that was my only response, and then we sat quietly for about half an hour.”
Cioran once wrote in his diary which was discovered later by Beckett: “I was at a house party last night and I had an amazing conversation with myself in the mirror before I vomited. Then I thought that the most interesting aspect of suffering is the sufferer’s belief in its absoluteness. He believes he has a monopoly on suffering. I think that I alone suffer, that I alone have the right to suffer, although I also realize that there are modalities of suffering more terrible than mine, pieces of flesh falling from the bones, the body crumbling under one’s very eyes, monstrous, criminal, and shameful sufferings. After I had these thoughts, I passed out, and woke up the next morning on a stranger’s lawn by their water sprinklers. At first I thought someone was peeing on me, life isn’t that bad after all.”
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