It’s the caffeine, I tell myself. Too much caffeine – you were always sensitive to it, and now it’s the ruin of you. Patches of dry, itchy skin over your palm-heels – caffeine. Resurgence of eczema – caffeine. And reading back over the blog for the last few months last night when I couldn’t sleep (I can’t sleep anymore), I thought: this is terrible writing. It’s the caffeine.
I remembered the experiments where they subjected a spider to various drugs and photographed the web it made. First, the marajuana-spider – a lazy web, just a few glistening strands. Second, the alcohol-spider, no web at all, a few strands collapsed on themselves. Third, the caffeine-spider, a very intense web, but a mess of strands, a complete mess. So too with this writing, I thought at five AM this morning. It’s no good, I thought, as I weeded out the really terrible posts.
None of this is any good. A lot of activity, but for what? It’s like the web of the caffeine spider – a mess of webstrands, holding nothing, capturing nothing. What was I thinking? That I could publish anything I pleased? That my anything-at-all was worth publishing? But nothing I wrote was worth publishing, and it certainly wasn’t worth reading. Then it came, the dream: a cool, clear prose. Then it came: the dream of bell-like clarity, of limpid prose: the replete and glistening web.
But isn’t that its sleight of hand, that clarity? Is precision precise – is calmness another way to stand apart from the world and from the streaming of the world? Isn’t cool, precise prose the final temptation – the idea of a language that could say it all, in which everything could be said and could be said calmly: the many-stranded web on which the world would allow itself to be caught?
How I distrust it! How it is to be distrusted, the prose which makes nothing of itself, which makes no fuss! Clarity, precision: nothing worse. Measuredness, calmness: nothing worse. Better the web that laughs at itself, I thought. Better the web that knows it will capture nothing, I told myself. That laughs at itself, and is deliberately ragged. That laughs at itself and its own imposture. Better the drunken web and the caffeinated web! Better the web made on Cava and green tea! Better the revel-web that laughs at itself, at its own imposture, and that first of all!
Nothing worse that the calm and reflective voice, which is really the penitent voice, the craven-on-the-ground-before-God voice! Nothing worse than the sober voice, which is really the maudlin-drunken voice. Nothing worse than the voice that would lift itself above the others as if to deliver itself to a God’s-eye perspective, to the summit of the tower of Babel!
Below: the swarming of all the voices, the vulgar crowd. Above: the voice of God, the voice that sails close to God. What is worse than this voice, which considers everything and assesses everything and is untouched by everything? What is worse than it – this voice, which would lift itself from the babble of which it is part?
How to have done with it, the judgement-voice, the transcendent-voice, the surveying-everything-and-decreeing voice? How to plunge it, this voice, into the Babel of all voices? How to dissolve it in the Babel of voices disgusted with themselves and laughing at themselves?
How I revolt myself! How I disgust myself! – But without this revulsion, without this disgust, which is first of all a revulsion at God and a disgust with God – without this mobile horde of destruction which is first of all self-destruction? Without the daily confusion of tounges?
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