The Buffoon

1.

Blogging is not a work of time; it is not cumulative; the 24 hours which separates one post from another is enough time to forget what was written and to lose the thought that was conserved by writing. What do I remember, today, of what I wrote yesterday?

To keep a journal is to collaborate with time, returning to its pages to reclaim the events of the day – to reflect, in the wisdom of the evening, on the day’s course. Each of us has grown old by the evening. The morning belongs to youth, and the vigour of youth. The afternoon is long middle age. The journal is always the work of an old person.

What, then, does it mean to write in the morning? What does it mean to write now, when the world is still young and nothing has happened? I am young and should be acting in the world; I am young, and with the vigour of youth, I should be transforming what I find around me, participating in the immense labour of the day. To write now, to reflect now, is premature and wasteful.

Couldn’t these hours, the hours of strength, be used to write something more substantial? Wasted time! Wasted youth, as though I was unemployed before I began! Writing in lieu of action; writing lacking the experience that would substantiate writing – now it is only the ‘nothing is happening’ that asks to be written. Truancy, unemployment – nothing is happening, nothing began. Nothing happened; it failed to begin.

What does it mean to have failed before you tried to succeed? How is it that you failed before you even tested your strength against the day? Perhaps it is that you’ve fallen below failure – perhaps it is failure itself you failed, since you did not even try with your strength to make something of yourself in the world.

Then what success is this, this writing? What kind of success, a writing that can make itself out of a failure that has failed failure? Nothing is happening; this morning is the same as any other. Nothing happens: there is the same back yard, the same plants in the back yard, the same wall of the back yard and the backs of the houses opposite. Nothing happens, and the coffee beside me is cooling and the empty cereal bowl dries in the sink.

2

Today I know I’ve never written a line. I know it, I am sure of it, I’ve never written a line, never completed a sentence, and barely written a word, not even a word.

Begin, do not begin. Begin, fail beginning and the work of beginning. Begin, fail and fail the beginning and the work of beginning. You will not be caught by the beginning; it will not seize you. Do you think you can begin? Do you think you have anything to say and the means by which to say it? Do you think anything can be said, and be said by way of writing?

But you will conserve nothing by writing. You will keep nothing by writing, no memories. Nothing will be kept by writing; never will there have been writing. Never will writing have begun. Never will it have been possible for you: writing. Never writing and only the withdrawal of writing. Never the power to write, and only the withdrawal of the power to write.

You will not begin: that is what writing says to you. You will never begin, and you are barred from beginning, this alone is what is allotted to you: this is what writing says to you. It was given that you could not begin and could give yourself nothing by writing: that is what writing says. It was decreed that you would be able only to destroy by way of writing, and that your way is the way of destruction: writing laughs.

3

It is not that you write with a hammer. It is not that you destroy anything by writing. Rather that writing, in your hands, destroys itself as achievement and as the result of achievement. Rather that writing laughs at itself and arrests itself, lying on the floor. Rather that by your hands writing trips over itself and lies on the ground and laughs at the sky.

In truth, you can destroy nothing just as you can make nothing. Do you think you’ve said anything today? Do you think you’ve said anything by way of writing today, which is a day like any other? What do you think you have done today? I will tell you: nothing has made itself, nothing has substantiated itself. Nothing has enfleshed itself and made itself real. Nothing has given itself a body and made itself real. I will tell you what’s happened: nothing. I’ll tell you what will happened: nothing. You have made writing laugh and laugh at you. You’ve made writing laugh, and you are writing’s buffoon.

First of all you are a buffoon. First of all, the buffoon who can do nothing, write nothing and cannot stop writing. First of all the one who cannot write and cannot not write. First of all, the one committed to the ‘first of all’, the one who would write by way of impossibility. First of all the buffoon, the dunce of writing, the one even writing laughs at, the one even writing makes space for. Laughter: writing is laughing at you, buffoon. That’s your achievement, buffoon, that your tools have fallen from you and laugh at you. Yes, that’s what you have achieved buffoon: the very means of your non-achievement has fallen from you and laughs at you.

Just as you, too, have fallen, buffoon. Just as your place is on floor, buffoon, with the things of failure. On the floor, buffoon, unemployed like the others, and listless like the others. On the floor, as writing laughs at you and you laugh at yourself, buffoon. On the floor, laughing as the world laughs at you and writing laughs at you and you laugh at yourself, buffoon. There is laughter, buffoon, and that first of all. There is laughter, laughter is laughing and writing is writing as it laughs.

4

What will you achieve, buffoon, what will you make? Do you dream of achievement, buffoon, do you dream of success? For you write of failure too often for me to believe in your failure. You write of failure too often and at too great a length for me to believe in your failure. And I know you do not believe in it, buffoon, and isn’t this your buffoonery? I know you do not believe in your failure, buffoon, and that for all you write of it, you still dream of success.

And isn’t that the joke, the final irony? Isn’t the joke that you would still make a work of what cannot succeed, and that you would succeed by way of failure? Isn’t the joke that failure is your means and your procedure, that what you would make and would have made here is a sign of nostalgia? You would be successful, that’s your drama. You would succeed, that’s the whole drama.

For the irony outplays you as the drama outplays you. For it is evident to all what you want to achieve and by way of failure. Evident to all and clear from the first, and clear to all, what you would make by way of failure! Evident to all, and even to you – even you know what you would achieve, and by way of failure! What bad faith! What irony! What buffoonery, the buffoonery of writing!

For you are our fool, writer! You are our fool and we can hear the bells on your cap jingling! Fool! Buffoon! Entertain us! Come to us with your writing and entertain us! Show us what you have written and entertain us! We know you will join in our laughter! We know you, like us, will be swept up by laugher! What laughter there will be, us laughing at you and you laughing at yourself! What laughter that will be heard by the stars and by the darkness on the other side of the stars!

It is noon and you’ve already failed the day. It is noon, the hands of the clock point straight upwards and you’ve already failed the day and failed yourself. But what laughter you have given us in your failure and your cavorting! What laugher you have given us in your dunce’s cap and your bells! Say it again, fool: ‘I am a dead man’. Say it again, fool: ‘I am a dead man’. Say it for us, fool and bring down the sky and the stars: ‘I am a dead man’.