A dresser crab builds its shell from whatever's to hand. It takes what it can, what it must, in order to have a shell. Its defence is borrowed. And you? You've built your life, which is to say, the failure of your life, from whatever you could find. And what you've found! What you've stumbled across!
You chanced yourself into a library, didn't you? You read. You thought you were entitled to read. You snuck in when no one as watching, and there you were with all the others, reading. Reading like a reader. But unlike them, you had no idea how to read. Unlike them, fluent readers, turning page after page, you were only a would-be reader, a reader-pretend. You turned pages as they did; your eyes scanned the lines as theirs did. But what could you take in? What could you read, really read?
And one day - and what a day! - you thought you'd begin to write, too, didn't you? That was the next step, the most hilarious one. You thought you could write, that you were entitled to write. And couldn't you fill a page like the others? Couldn't you type, or at least perform a simulacrum of typing, your fat little fingers hitting the keys? It's a wonder you could type, with your fingers. What a joke! If you began laughing, you could never stop. You began writing, and you couldn't stop that, either. Logorrhea. Literary diarrhoea streaming down your legs.
You read, you thought, so you could write. But in fact, you could do neither, and were entitled to neither. You could not read – reading is alien to you – but writing is yet more alien. The ability to write is the most distant thing from you of all. You – write? But you did write, didn't you? Or you called it writing. You thought it was writing. No one else thought so, but you thought so, didn't you? For a while at least. For too long, but not forever …
A dresser crab, scuttling along the sea-floor. A crab, clothing itself in whatever was to hand. And what was to hand was the scholar's mantle, wasn't it? What was to hand was the library-ruse and the writing-ruse – my God, what a joke! But if you began laughing, what then? If you even started to laugh?
Lars Iyer's Blog 