By email, W. tells me I come across as too whiny in the W. posts. ‘It’s better when you make yourself talk, rather than just reacting to me. But of course I am a terrible nag’.
W. remembers that I spoke to him at length about free jazz, commenting on its relationship to free improvisation, and the distrust many Afro-American improvisers have felt towards the rhetoric of depersonalisation taken over from John Cage and post-Cageans. Jazz improvisation is often linked to the idea of telling your own story, of finding your voice, not depersonalisation, I’d said, though perhaps this is not so at odds with post-Cagean discourse on free improvisation as one might think. Perhaps the two could be thought together, I’d said, and tried at some length to outline how.
He’d enjoyed listening to me, W. says; he’d learnt something, and why didn’t I write about that? I like to present myself as a victim, W. observes. It’s one of my key traits. In fact, it is my key trait. I want to think of myself as a victim and then whine about it night and day.
Is W. a victim? No, not really, says W. He doesn’t have the victim mentality that I’ve perfected. ‘You love feeling like a victim. You like nothing better than to be persecuted’. – ‘But you must admit, I’ve been a little persecuted!’ – ‘How?’, says W., ‘give me examples’, and when I do, he says, ‘you’re no more persecuted than I am. You’re not in the least persecuted’.
Why do I like to feel persecuted?, W. muses. It’s because of my general hysteria. ‘You’re an hysteric’, says W., ‘ceaselessly whining’, but he likes me because of this. ‘There’s something magnificent about your whining. Sometimes it reaches a magnificent purity. You attain whining itself, says W., ‘the pure "to whine"’.
W. is a mystic, and I am a whiner, he says. It takes a mystic to discover what is eternal in my whining. ‘It’s magnificent’, he says, ‘go on, do some whining. Whine, fat boy. Tell your story’.
Last year, on the banks of the Dreisam river (‘ah, the mighty Dreisam’), W. held forth at length on finding your own voice. He thinks he might have found his quite recently, he said. He’s noticed quite a change in his writing.
‘And what about you?’, W. reflected. ‘Your voice’, he says to me, ‘is like a transcendental whining’. It’s amazing, he notes, just how much I whine, and how much I give myself to it. ‘It absorbs everything you are’, said W. In many ways, he admires it, said W. He thinks it’s why he’s drawn to me.
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