How is it that our idiocy still surprises us?, we wonder. Is it that we still harbour the hope of overcoming our idiocy? Above all, we reflect, we are not complacent idiots. In fact, we are very active. The tragedy is that our activity is what confirms us in our idiocy, since it attests to the fact that we struggle with all our might not to be idiots.
We say tragedy, one of us says, but we mean farce, because it is the great farce of our lives that it has not been sufficient that we've run up against the brick wall of our idiocy not once but countless times, and that we're about to run up it again today just as we will do so tomorrow, and it will always be thus.
The idiot, we decide, does not want to be an idiot. But isn't that precisely his idiocy? Oliver Hardy is very serious; Vladimir and Estragon have their moments of pathos; Bouvard and Pecuchet have their great project: the idiot has the ambition of becoming something other than an idiot.
In our case, we decide, although we know we're idiots, that knowledge does not prevent our idiocy; in fact it encourages it, insofar as we act in order to overcome our idiocy. If only we could remain still, in our idiocy. If only we could pause … but then we would no longer be idiots.
The essence of idiocy is activity, we reflect; the idiot is the one who runs up and down, endlessly, who is able to tolerate anything but his own idiocy, when in fact his idiocy was the fact that preceded him and that he can only confirm.
At first, our role is to amuse others, but soon we will only bore them, and worse, they will resent us for wasting their time and the time allotted to us. In the end, we reflect, idiots come in pairs because only the two of them will be left, eventually, to amuse (to amuse each other). An amusement that, in truth, depends upon one idiot thinking himself slightly less idiotic than the other: which of us is really as modest as we pretend? And besides, our modesty is belied by our activity, which is always frenetic.
You tell me I am happiest when I'm making plans, one of us says, but I could say the same of you. The idiot is always young for that he gives to the future the chance that he will not always be an idiot; possibility, he thinks, is his milieu. But in fact, the possible is so for everyone but him. How many brick walls will we run up against before we learn? But we are always too young to learn, awakening freshly each morning into our idiocy.
Lars Iyer's Blog 