what do i ask from writing?
in this age of language rather than that age
of god, the writer loses itself in fragments of writing rather than fragments
of the godhead. language offers this modern losing and this offering is what i
ask.
as before, there are the sprawling apparati
of the age – the priests and penitents of yesterday, the communicators and
analysts of tomorrow – but the writer sidesteps these intermediaries, required
to experience the age not from the outside with its sparkling accoutrements but
the inside with its desolations and solitudes. the appeals of success, while
inevitably puncta of struggle, omnipresent and voracious, mean, little, and the
writer confronts the whiteness of the virtualized page like a sand city without horizon or
sky, from the simulated cave of its nothingness.
nothing compels me to do or be anything and i remain undefined. nevertheless, in the necessary accumulations of time,
society’s trade, i grow in definition, a definition primarily negating. this
growing gap between remaining in undefinition and accumulating negative
definition is an experience of writing.
i remain in poverty. poverty of knowledge, circumstance,
time, flesh. then i experience the absence of words that have never found
themselves, tundras of freedom.
having once found hallucination in externals
(food, drugs, sex, activity, money, status), using them as fuel for language,
now i migrate to internals (silence, pain, tedium, anonymity, poverty). each is
sufficient, for language is indifferent to its sustenance and simply requires
fuel. only we in our immaturity experience them as different.
i didn’t realize it at the time but it was
around 49 that i began to die. i die slowly, like a cloud. there are so many
births in death. and in each death, a new word.
humanity has never particularly impressed me
and so i’ve blindly sought humanity’s margins – primarily in art, occasionally
in people. not those misanthropically bitter or ruefully accepting people – while
on the margins wanting to be in the middle: buying lottery tickets, grumbling
about politicians – not the marginalized but those whose homes are margins, for
whom margins are centers, for whom there is no issue, person, or structure that
is a particular problem but only the order of existence.
so i’ve always made a fool of myself in
conventional society, not simply because the seriousness and criminality of it are
foolish to me and to conform to it requires acting foolishly, but as a technique
to auto-exile – to seek spaces where foolishness and convention can experience
alternative and emerging choreographies.
living away from the tumbling crowds all
there is is body; its language deconstructs the city.
i don’t distinguish between experiences.
loss i call loss and gain gain but gaining always involves losing and losing
gaining – everything is equal when it comes to language, this subversive and
transpolitical democracy.
as i become incapable of language – either
through death or those many deaths when language is absent – language remains,
and i am but one of its myriad lovers whom it embraces and ignores for synaptic
time. who am i to complain of my situation – is it different from others, equally
subject to brevity and vicissitude? that i am a rabbit in language’s claws? if
i am limited and cowardly … of course i am limited and cowardly. we are all woven
from such things.
i go to excess and past to get diseased, to
debase myself, to feel pain, for then i can write about beauty. when i am
whirling and stuffing myself with desirable things, there’s only sickness to
write about. i write about what i am not for what i am is already here.
