Overwritten, overwrought, a prose grown too thick with itself, that is no longer quick, no longer speaks with assurance. An old prose, Byzantine, wandering abandoned corridors, lost in some inward dream. A deserted palace covered in jungle. The last missionaries in a plague-stricken outpost. Soldiers who have forgotten their orders and all orders. The army who do not know that the war is over. All this, I think, is what refuses to die in the prose I would like to write and that I would like to read.
What decadence! What Alexandrianism! And everyone can tell but me. Everyone can see it, and only I cannot, lost in some ox-bow lake, cut off from the onrush of cultural forms. I am old Europe lost in itself. Old lost Europe that has forgotten its culture and all culture and whose dreams without depth are projected onto the blank screen against which I write here.
And it is only for that reason you can write, that you are allowed to write, I tell myself: because nothing you write is of any consequence. Because writing here is itself delirium, the dream of a culture already dead; fetid air, and soon the doors will be opened, soon the new will come along and sweep you away with what remains of the old culture.
And in the meantime?, I ask myself. In the meantime, a private writing, a writing to yourself, to reach yourself – but that, too, is impossible, on the last shore of old Europe, like the poor Neanderthals who died on Gibraltar, the last ones, facing West, facing that as yet undreamt of America …
To reach yourself – but you were never anything, there was nothing there. A kind of kink in the history of Europe. An ox-bow lake going stagnant in the sun. Nothing finds itself in you. As though you were the dream of another, insubstantial. As you were only the circuit through which something else passed, a message, clear to everyone but you: old Europe is dead, old culture is dead, Literature is dead, even literature that proclaims its death, and a bright new morning is gathering itself to begin – a white new star to regenerate the swollen red giant of the old sun.
From now on, sentences will be swift and sure. Tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, there will no great authors, no books. Writing will stream along like a shoal of silver fish, owned by no one, moving in unknown directions.
Lars Iyer's Blog 