When I wrote letters, I wrote first of the surprise I felt by the date I wrote at the top of the page. Is it really so late?, I thought to myself. What did I expect? Perhaps I thought I lived in the last days, on the brink of the great apocalypse, that unveiling where things would be revealed as they are.
Had I freed myself from that childish desire to know a kind of revenge in the coming of the apocalypse, as if I had always been a kind of salamander awaiting its flames? It was, I felt, as if I already lived like the protagonists of J.G. Ballard’s disaster novels, in the time after the drought, the flood or the great crystallisation of the world.
The great artist writes of the death which precedes writing. I was able to write because I nearly died, said Bernhard, said Selby Jr. But is there a way of living a death which has not yet arrived, of living in the last days, in the certainty of a death to come? I am thinking now of Mishima, who timed his ritual suicide, his small act of terrorism, to coincide with the submission of the fourth part of his tetralogy.
But Mishima’s death was a death of impatience. He sought to take revenge on time, which he confused with a hatred of the Japanese modernity to which he belonged. To truly suffer from time is not to seek to bring it to conclusion. Nor is it to write. Guy Debord knew this, I think, as he kept himself from writing too much. He drank instead. This, indeed, is the reason why writers drink: to avoid the non-writing in writing. To endure great gaps of non-writing which expose them to the malaise of time.
Debord’s drinking carries him to the brink of greatness. He drank until his hands trembled and he could barely stand. His teeth were red from wine. That wine was the blood of time.
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