Of course what I say to you, I said to H., and what I record here at the blog has nothing to do with philosophy. That’s very important, I said because philosophy’s important. Thinking’s a serious business, I said, of which I fall far short, I said. At best, what I write here with its lyrical laziness and would-be poetic flourishes is only the converse of sterile academicism.
There’s no thought here, I told H. You’ll look in vain here for any sign of thought. It’s a waste of time, I said, I’ve no doubt of that. And there’s no time to waste, I said. We need to find weapons, I said, and no amount of pathos about expenditure and excess will justify writing this nonsense in the teeth of the disaster. It is a matter of paying attention to what matters most, I said, of training and disciplining the attention.
Sitting in my office listening to Arab Strap and writing blog posts helps no one, I said. For a start, there are plenty of others who should be sitting in my office in place of me, I said. I feel them all the time. I am ashamed before them. How is it that I ended up here and they did not, I said. Look at me with my sagging flesh and my indolence, I said. I am already old, I said, too old.
Writing my books, I said, book after book and all of them bad, I said. And writing this here, trying to excuse myself for writing those bad books, but in fact just producing more overcooked prose, I said. I haven’t the sense to stop, I said. It’s a kind of illness, a mad prolifigacy, I said.
Truly it is as though I was born from the R. A. E., I said, truly it is only in our insant system that something like me would have found a job, I said. To think, I am partly paid to write I said. And I write this baloney, I said. Think of all the people who could write sensible things in my place, I said. Think of what they could do with this office, I said. Instead of whining on about their former life and the badness of their books they could actually do something, I said.
They wouldn’t start a blog like this, I said. Above all, that’s not what they’d do, I said. They’d use the internet for sensible things, I said. They’d write in the teeth of the disaster and write about the disaster. No preliminaries, I said, no messing about. No bad parody of Bernhard or Beckett. You’re running on empty, that’s what W. always says to me, only the last time he said not that but: your tank is dry, that’s what he said: your tank is dry, not an idea left, he meant, nothing left of all the reading I did so long ago, and even that reading, I told W., was casual and random and underdeveloped, it was dry from the first, I said.
My tank is dry, no question of that, I said, it was always dry, I said. It’s a sickness, I said, someone should put me out of my misery I said, I am like the chimpanzee who is teletransported in The Fly and becomes a singed mass of bones, flesh and fur. The destroyed chimpanzee who still emits a little gasping noise, or one the strange creatures of Bacon’s Three Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion, trussed up, turned upon himself making what I imagine is a subdued whining. His wings have been severed and all he can do is whine. Or I think of the creature of Zarathustra who is all ear, one big ear and then, attached by a stalk, a little envious face. Only I am all hand, a monstrous typing hand and my face is flushed with shame.
I am ashamed, I tell H., it’s terrible. And now I’m awaiting the proofs from the publisher. They’ll be here soon, I said. In the teeth of the disaster, I said. And the proofs of my book mocking the disaster, laughing at it, squandering time. Writing as though it were still 1950, I said. As though Kafka and Surrealism were the newest thing, I said. As though all that mattered was Giacometti and psychoanalysis, I said. Taking refuge in the 1950s, I said, without even confronting what was worst about the 1950s, I said. Think of the uprisings crushed by the Soviets, I said. Think of Guevara, I said. Those writers you admire were thinking of Hungary and Guevara, I said. They wrote their essays in the morning and came together in the evening to print clandestine newspapers, I said.
W. tells me my tank is dry, I said, but he’s not quite right because it was never full, I said. I never had a full tank, I said, not once. It was always empty, I’ve never had a thought, I said. I’ve never had a single idea, I said, I was the echo chamber of the ideas of others, I said. For a time, their ideas would bounce around inside me, I said, and then they would disappear, I said. My entire intellectual history was a series of such bouncings, I said. I was an empty space, I said, a hollow, a pocket in which every idea would lose itself and become banal, I said. It had been repeated a million times elsewhere and in me it was repeated for the millionth and first time. It had lost all context, all meaning and importance, I said. The idea was abstracted from the struggles of which it was a part, I said. They were busy printing banned newspapers, demonstrating and being arrested, I said, and you sit in your office listening to Arab Strap, I said.
And now I’m writing here, I said. Writing, hardly writing. Whining, and not even whining. A writing so contorted, so bent upon itself, all it can imagine is a half-mute mewing. The most pathetic noise. But not mewing, that can still be elicit some kind of pity. I am beyond pity, I said. Think of a kind of scraping, I said, and a kind of gnashing. Think of the noise a stuffed dog’s teeth would make as they bit through its skin, I said. Think of the creatures in the taxidermist, I said.
When did it become acceptable to write like this? I asked H. At what point would one have had the temerity to moan in this way? Once, I imagine, those with troubles kept quiet. They kept them quiet from themselves and from others. What use was it to bother others with your troubles? What sense was it to return to them yourself? While Kafka suffered, I said, he also wrote literature. In the diaries, I said, there are passages of fiction intermixed with passages which bewail his inability to write. But he wanted to burn his diaries, I said. Grete Bloch had begun to feed them into the fire along with his notebooks. What we have are the remnants, I said, and it is not as if Kafka intended to leave them for us.
Then there was Artaud, I said. He wrote about his sufferings to Riviere, the editor of the journal to whom he sent some poems. Their correspondence began when those poems were rejected. True, Riviere would soon suggest publishing the correspondence in which Artaud writes so eloquently about his suffering, but the poems were the thing; the rejection of the poems was the occasion of the writing, great as it was.
Then there was Beckett, I said, who is badly read if it is in terms of defeat and failure, I said. Beckett writes in the teeth of despair, I said, and so does Kafka. They despair, but they write anyway, and far from being writing of despair, I said, theirs is a writing of magnificent humour, I said. But there is nothing funny about a teleported chimpanzee, I said. But it wasn’t as though there was an intact and healthy chimpanzee to begin with I said.
It’s clear to me, I said. I am a nightmare the R.A.E. has about itself, I said. The R.A.E. wants to die and to die through me I said. I am the place where the R.A.E. cannot bring itself to death, I said. I am that site where it rots, I said, where it festers and all thought festers with it, I said. Thought has become stagnant here, I said. Thought festers and hatches strange kinds of maggots, I said. Blind wriggling maggots unashamed of what they are, I said. They are the new breed, I said. Soon they’ll sprout wings and fly about I said. They’ll fill the air with their buzzing I said, and that buzzing will be what is said at colloquia and on funding applications, I said. That buzzing will be heard in a million strategy meetings, I said.
You should have battered me to death while you still could, I said. You should have shovelled me into a bag and thrown me into the bushes, I said. But you didn’t and it’s too late. The blind wriggling maggots are wearing tweed jackets with elbow patches, I said. They’re driving the big cars their mothers bought them, I said. They’re driving to and fro from meeting to meeting I said. Their little teeth are grinding with excitement, I said. They drive from here to there to here. They drive round and round the M25 talking about surds, I said.
They’re not even dead, I said, because they were never alive. They do not rot or decompose, I said. And they are without shame, I said. There’s no shame in them, I said.
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