with few exceptions, i have preferred
writing that has emerged from places of exile, horror, estrangement, despair,
anger, darkness, confusion, transgression – these shadows of culture, these
dumpsters of health. so to write the first step i knew was to travel to these
spaces and make them my home. writing would then happen, a product of this
environment, as much as wellness is a product of capitalistic society.
writing is a cold love, but it is a love. and
its coldness can feel like a welcome from the unreliable heat of what is
normally called love. never familiar, it’s familiar. never intimate or
reassuring, a dark companion.
these many languages of writing. journalism,
scholarship, business, politics, technology, philosophy, mysticism, criticism,
affection, lust, play, speculation, whimsy, … isn’t each a celestial object,
artificial satellite, bound by gravity, electromagnetism.
i don’t want to write until i write well – i
want to write until i can’t distinguish well and sick. the whole world recognizes the beautiful as the beautiful yet this is
only the ugly, the whole world recognizes the good as the good yet this is only
the bad.
thought is primarily oneiric not rational; its
rationality is valid but secondary, posterior in time and being to dream.
writing translates the dream of thought to language; communication articulates
thought’s reason.
writing is death. the only death remaining us
in this age of virtualized death. writing is death because it replaces the body
with itself and kills the operations of the human in the body. it teaches
nothing, aims for nothing, loves nothing, advocates nothing. its selfishness
and selflessness are vast – the former in that it doesn’t care for others, the
latter in that it doesn’t care for itself. writing is not itself. it is the
dead other that has taken over as host of the human. so zombies and immanence
assume popular and intellectual consciousness. but writing is the mother of
zombies, the father of immanence. it eats through the world at the speed of
words. first and last technology, it surrounds the fat societal middle from
within and without and consumes it until all that’s left of society is air. so
there is air disguised as society and writing disguised as nothing and here we
are in the consummation of love. this consummation doesn’t care for the causes
of liberation – whether gendered, sexed, raced, classed, specied – for in it
these causes have been completed in an age so primitive its memory is only
available in dream.
only the dead write and only the dead read.
books are the means of communication between the dead and the dead.
no longer is there writing on the wall. the
wall isn’t there, broken by dreams of unity. writing is written on the air …
yet the question remains the same: who would there be to interpret the words,
and what power shall die tonight to be replaced by another face in the parade?
writing isn’t about names, but about the
indistinguishability of names and the unnamed.
literature has taken the burden of assuming
the vestiges of nature – a realism heaped on humanity’s urban shoulders. the
exorcistic spasms of surrealism and dada have been forgotten and nature’s
contingencies have flooded the aesthetic realm of words.
to write about the body offends the body,
which is what such writing, intentionally or unintentionally, aims for – to
reproduce the offense it has suffered. writing writes from the destroyed body,
aiming to reproduce beings inviolate.
