“What is the matter? Hold it level!
Drink fast and it will warm you up.
You are familiar with the Devil,
And shudder at a fiery cup?”
(Goethe)

Cioran is an exception: ignored, bound by insomnia, and driven into self-imposed exile, his voice expresses philosophy’s resignation to failure. How shall we begin to understand a voice that is both allusive, duplicitous and moreover resistant to rigid examination? No tenacity of analysis or rigour of abstraction shall permit the reader a vantage point. On the contrary, one must also spit, scribble and scoff upon his words, debase them in port and musty odours, stub cigarettes upon the page before they can be understood. Do we not owe as much to him?
As for the themes of his work – they are as much a cycle of idée fixes as they are recognizable notions. Contrasting his early work with his latter work, then only the expression alters: “My vision of things has not fundamentally changed; what certainly has changed is the tone.” Like Schopenhauer before him, though without the pious overtones of redemption, Cioran’s thought is, arguably, rooted (the word founded misleads) in variations on the theme of decline. Cioran had toyed with Nietzsche as a youth, constructed finger puppets with his solitude and sang ancient burial rites to appease his speculations. But it was until he disrobed this Nietzschean mask that he began to furrow his own sense of moral and existential atrophy. The death of God is a luxury that entices us all. It leads us to bathe in dereliction, forces us to pose questions as old as Thales, and renders us giddy in the face of an unfathomable abyss. But desensitised to this theology of exile, then we at once return to the habitual ennui of the everyday. It is this stale reversion to the everyday that we find so lucid in Cioran.
Exhausting himself with his own gluttony of despair, Cioran’s natural stance is a volatile oscillation between the debasement of Epicureanism and the noble fortitude of Stoicism, each of which castigates the other in scorn. But likewise this oscillation is paralleled by the twin concessions of abandonment and resignation. Remaining exiled between these two polarities, Cioran nevertheless rejects the notion of home claiming that “I have no nationality – the best possible status for an intellectual.” But Cioran’s exiled disposition does not lead him to a Postmodernist conclusion whereby the decentred centre becomes a home in-itself: playfulness and a preoccupation with deconstructing language have no place in his philosophy – “dissection of language is the fad of the whose who, having nothing to say, confine themselves to the saying” he writes in Drawn and Quartered – nor, for that matter, do the multiplicity of meanings within a heterogeneous society bear any considerable influence. Extending beyond the margins of the self into an inter-subjective dialogue, is a lure he resisted. As such his work reeks of a “basement coolness” whose pages invariably lead to the failures of the self and an absence of a ground beneath them.
No philosopher can endure his own cavity without recourse to a some degree of spiritual respite. Cioran was no different. Consumed with the formless, he nevertheless took it upon himself to craft a landscape littered with familiarities composed from an apocalyptic canvas. The lure towards eschatology as a comfort, a means of orientation, serves well in Cioran. Indeed, not only is the affirmation of the void a means of rebellion against the void (cf. Nietzsche’s amor fati) but it also acts as the Archimedean point upon which Cioran is able to attest his bile. The tendency towards decline in Cioran is no flippancy of habit, but rather the conviction of a revelation that can only be realized once it’s been exhausted: “When night spreads darkness over the passages of hours” writes Lautréamont, “who has not fought against the onset of sleep, in his bed soaking with glacial sweat.” We might well be tempted to correlate Cioran’s philosophic sense of decline with a form of historic decline expounded by Oswald Spengler. Though without contorting the two figures together, then the comparison falters since whereas the latter seeks to persuade the reader of his case with an arrangement of carefully prepared analogies and examples, Cioran meanwhile, like that other isolated voice Max Stirner, sings for the sake of singing. Knowing that the act of writing undermines his aspirations of defiance, he resists the position of augury in favour of a stance more attuned to a chronological voyeur of decline.
Let us draw the curtains once more: “In civilizations on the wane, twilight is the sign of a noble punishment.” Thus he writes in a Short History of Decay. I have read the words innumerable times, swept the pages in pockets, and pitted the stone in favour of the flesh. The creation of decline as a creation of form is an accolade that must be fought over. But what criteria is there for decadence, what means to judge one’s ability to fall? I take it further, implant the seed in the vessel before the furnace has been lit. But like Cioran one does well to bathe in the decline before it dissolves. And that, like he himself protests, is the advantageous and voyeuristic vantage point from where we stand – “Who can keep from falling in love with the great sunset.” But this is no sentimentalism of romance or nostalgie de la boue towards the abandoned. We would have reason to fall upon our pens should Cioran slip into an advisory note, a reflection that extends itself beyond the self. Götterdämmerung repeats itself in Cioran but only takes on the form of Serialism and fatigue: the end only appeases when it has turned towards a reflection on what’s actually lost. The tiresome. The impotent. Let us all get drunk and stamp on clothed class, upon where “the flies buzzed and droned on these bowels of filth”
Certainly it takes a degree of persistence, perhaps even fortitude, to withstand the fall, to not to be disinherited by the exile that entails a rise in consciousness. Perhaps even we grow to outsmart our decadence, to align ourselves with our flaws: “Fascination of decadence – of the ages when the truths have no further lies.” Nietzsche too, despite his solitude, took it upon himself to will his downfall, to arm himself with the bacteria that had originally castrated his vigour. What strength, what nobility! We rightly suppose that Nietzsche went insane with some dignity, that he had already tied his laces before he stigmatised himself with piety. Turning to Cioran – Zarathustra’s bastard – then we hope to avoid such a promiscuity of virulence. What delight then to encounter him celebrating in disintegration, to find him basking in the fetid light, and to hear his voice gladly succumbing to dissolution!
But has Cioran’s word done enough to dislodge us? We have waited patiently, often with seem joy, at Spengler’s proclamation of decline. The carpet unfurls, the walls shake, the ancient burial rites are resurrected. In the distance we can perhaps ascertain the light dimming. Without waving banners we hope to be sunk before the flares catch the attention of distant onlookers. In the meantime there is only regurgitation – “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown” as Celan writes with absolute solemnity – the same hideous gown worn in different shades of purple and gold. The orchestra stalls at the edge of the precipice, protracting upon their own demise. What then has Cioran done to ingest us? Perhaps not enough, perhaps too much. He won’t be studied, but will be kept in the “basement coolness” where Witold Gombrowicaz originally placed him. His readers remain those tyrants of despair who have failed to mature into pragmatists of hope and conversion. With melancholy, they linger lugubriously upon the loss of a language whose potency is ineptly incapable of absolute expression.
“The centuries have grown heavy and weigh upon the moment. We are more corrupt that all the ages, more decomposed than all the empires.” Languorous, these words say nothing we don’t already know, and yet they wrench the implicit bond that we partake of and render it overt. Let us hope we can mourn better than those before us, let us hope we can submit to silence better than the revolutionaries who sought to vanquish themselves of Time, the diable au corps of despair itself. One need only to consider the slightest page from even the most fragrant book to be shown a reticence towards the simultaneous affect and effect of decline. Here is a lengthy quote from that polymath Borges whose density of thought deserves our full attention:

On the incandescent February morning Beatriz Viterbo died, after a death agony so imperious it did not for a moment descend into sentimentalism or fear, I noticed that the iron hoardings in the Plaza Constitucion bore new advertisements for some brand or other of Virginia tobacco; I was saddened by this fact, for it made me realize that the incessant and vast universe was already moving away from her and that this change was the first in an infinite series. The universe would change but I would not…

Borges’ quote is contaminated with both suffering and joy. Like Cioran there is a reluctance to embrace the passing of time but equally a repulsion with the maudlin introversion of transience. Hegel was aware of this dilemma and sought Reason has the mediator between the particular perishing in time and the universe existing beyond time. Unable to find such a mediation however, consciousness glides into the unhappy consciousness which is to become a central standpoint of the soul who both loves and despises decline. To Cioran’s credit, the vile unattainably of a plausible reconciliation and the vacuous consolation of the demiurge of logic and abstraction, only confirmed his opulent misery: “I turned away from philosophy when it became impossible to discover in Kant any human weakness, any authentic accent of melancholy.” Borges would have conceded with this remark despite his penchant for Berkeley. In both Borges and Cioran the eye for detail and decay is particularly pertinent. Only whereas Borges is impersonal, reserved, and detached, Cioran implodes upon his own vocation.
It is notable that Cioran’s sense of decline seems also to entail a sense of nihilism. Again he differs from Spengler, but again he ingests the mourning of an occupation with reason. Let us assume he is in the right. Let us assume that the rise of progress is synonymous with the rise of reason and that without the former then there can only be decline and epistemological ruin. The fencer’s who pirouette with knowledge now admits to the existence of their bloated solipsism. To fence in the night! To fence with one hand tied behind ones back! We shoot dead birds with blunt swords and hope to extinguish the whole species. We hope. Let us assume then, that to rid ourselves of reason is to rid ourselves of progress: “We begin to live authentically only where philosophy ends, at its wreck, when have understood its terrible nullity, when we have understood that it was futile to resort to it, that it is no help.” Forgiving Cioran for his use of the word authenticity, then we can ascertain a clear favouring for an unreasonable progression, a pathway that progresses despite their being a groundwork to support it – that is progress. He had perhaps not fully realized it, but such things are the procurement of absolute desire.
The puerile delight we take in vulgarities – the cunt – is no less a perversion of standardization than it is a concession to utopia. Masking ourselves in our dreams we debase our desires so that they will inadvertently seduce us. We shall have to burn ourselves before we can realize our clarity. No noxious tincture of Schopenhauer, Schoenberg, or Schubert will ever redeem us. Mourning is an advent that espouses a multiplicity of meanings. In Cioran there is the propensity to defiance, in Bataille a vacillation between chastity and profanity (“a man eliminates himself from the rank of his kind” writes Cioran “by the monastery or some other artifice – by morphine, masturbation, or rum” ), in Nietzsche a retrospective tendency towards the Hellenistic polis. But we swoon in nostalgia when it comes to partaking of old relics. How then does Cioran approach the mounting decline with which his beautiful sense of Weltschmerz emerges?
“Yesterday, today, tomorrow – these are servants’ categories”, he writes before eloping into reverie. Of course to consider there being a decline, to consider that we must straddle ourselves upon charred iron in the debris of Being, is to presuppose that time itself has allowed such fortune. We need to be led into the barrel before we can be drowned, need to be assured that we shall be worthy of somnolence before we can submit to collapse. Time cradles us, soothes us into demise by startling us with the glare of our own corrosion. A pleasure then to bathe the flesh in tepid water that creates the impression of an early death. But perhaps such pastimes are expendable, perhaps the pleasure is already at-hand. Able to project ourselves into a future whose absence is already conceived, then the nourishment of the derelict exposes itself. We intuit our decline by apprehending it, by tending to it and prolonging it like a lazy orgasm. That is our means of celebration which Cioran only hinted at. Until at last: “Silence, cooked like gold, in charred hands. Great, grey sisterly shape near like all that is lost.” Celan.