Some people lose their sense of timeliness or of time passing, become tied up in the thing they’re doing until a line like ah look at the time or something similar plunks into their mind – some one-liner that describes the glassy-eyed shock that hits when the clock’s tick suddenly becomes once again discernable, re-establishing itself as an irritant tic-tocking towards death and dementia or the Holy Ghost’s tinsel heavens or some other blind trail. With these sorts of people, it turns out they’ve been at the books, cramming more midnight oil into the burner into the small hours of the morning into the white metal dawn of a humming computer screen, for a beaver-industrious age, how’d it get this late, wrote a veritable novel, what meaty scholastic clout these persisters tend to have. These are the sorts of people who get things done, forget about dinner, so attentive to their diagnostics that they leave a dry shave of toast in the toaster, in the morning it’s a dried-up bran: all crumb.
 
When the smooth, peculiarly instantaneous present catapults itself into relief and the nose takes a sharp draught in and the body un-numbs, several things warm and thaw and make the breathy noise of a mouth before speech: joints suddenly need to be de-scaled, the neck needs attention, the feet undersides require a camphor jelly application, a whole collection of bodily debris, it turns out, have amassed under the desk chair – hairs, filaments, leg dust, shoulder fluff – when all of this is remembered this sort of person finally goes to bed, first attends to all of this body backlogging and then lies flat-back and snoozes.

 I imagine that it is a deep snooze without anxiety. Without the frozen-claw fists made weak with nighttime atrophy kind of anxiety that marks my sleep. I imagine it’s just good dreams, sex with a celebrity, a big meal, a million dollars. I’m imagining all of this, but because I’ve no formal training in psychotherapy or anything officially cranial, I cannot say for sure where an attention like this – an attention so rapt that the attender becomes effectively distracted from their own body – emanates from. I’m not quite sure if it’s possible to adopt, to affect like buying a new hat and taking on a new accent that’s windy and important so people freeze and vegetable-patch around you. Is it possible to become a person who’s completely immersed in their work? I want desperately to be the sort of person who is – who forgets to eat and wash and call their parents because they are so concentrated on their task, and if you’re wondering, and just how will you do that? I’ll tell you that the answer is

Nootropics.


The word nootropic was coined in 1972 by a Romanian psychologist and chemist, Cornelius E. Giurgea, from the Greek words νοῦς (nous), or “mind”, and τρέπειν (trepein), meaning to bend or turn. Nootropics are astrology for men, they’re a new industry of so-called cognitive enhancers that promise in particular to sharpen executive functions: memory, motivation, concentration – and they grandfather clock your central nervous system, which becomes regular, respectable, useful. Me, I bought a skid online, every flavor, not sure if they are even legal in the UK, online shopping, incredible. They arrived in an oblong container, and writing about them now, their fish oil-dense horse-pill taste is rising in the back of my throat: their flavor is robust, doggy. Wrapped in weird white label with text grafted on in red Helvetica, thin, the bottle has the air of bootleg pseudoscience. This impression is inflamed by the label’s graphic. Forking medium-width red lines produce a brain-coiled graph with nodes, which glancingly might imply the World Wide Web or metabolic networks, things backed by the greatest minds, no hoodoo here. This is exactly the sort of thing that I need to transcend my dumb body and focus on Production, I say when I receive them in the mail, and from the other room my blonde friend from Minnesota says, sure they are, good for you.

 But I am trapped in my body, aint that the cruelest truth. There I am, pumped up with warm energy, warm blood, it’s the feeling I get before I make a lifestyle change that I am certain will amend certain problems I have, like ten thousand unread email messages, forgot how to drive, no external hard drive, accidental tax evader, things aren’t as in order as I’d like them to be. I take my first pill with a spoonful of oil, crystalline and rancid, because an ardent nameless on Reddit said something about fat soluble. Beaming, already reaching for the eucalyptus essential oil I use for indigestion, I sit with my notebook and my Cherry Cola vape, wait for some unparaphrasable focus or some tuning of the world – I’m expecting something like when you smoke hash, maybe mixed with a certain seeing-red amphetamine athleticism. These pills are fancy, I say to myself.

What I ended up producing was a short essay about production.

My first line began: Some people lose their sense of timeliness or of time passing –

Following this first bit, something strange happened, and I wonder if here commenting on it might change the truthiness of the thing I’m recounting. Following the first bit, I launched into an essay about production, productivity, attentiveness – about my quest to become the sort of person who is so focused that they forget about their body, that they might literally rise outside of their body, that they may eschew things like every half-hour milky tea, listless walking around the house touching things, vaguely, lightly, a phone call to someone you do not want to speak to and the impression left is a light-heeled grease on the phone’s glass from your cheek, an hour spent then probing a cheek, a spot beginning to swell on the cheek, suddenly things like pores, hairs, strange shadows – the most microscopic intimacies of the skin’s geography – becoming bound up in the productive task. A relay race with arbitrary pit-stops. The more the mind activates an idea, the louder the body becomes, and the thrill of a good idea becomes a spiky and radiating thing, and with every living sentence crafted, there is a necessity to take a turn around the room, to press the pointer into the crease of another nail bed, to produce a pressure in the body that rhymes with the thrill of the thing written and also begins to generate a feedback, a heightening of the mind and of the body together, they are the top and bottom of a spinning wheel. Said another way, an intensity on the page incites a hyper awareness (in me, of my) body, which in turn inscribes itself into my text, my body and its fidgets and winces and twiddles, all of its spotty bits, pain, poking, hunger, all of it, sunk into the deepest stratum of my text’s subcutaneous layers.

And who, and what, is the loudest and most gruesome character here, in spite of my best efforts? It has arms, legs, warm-blooded wiring, hothouse brain particles.

Because I am trapped in my body, aint that the cruelest truth.