When did he begin to write? What a question! A Danish question, the poet says. The Dane is concerned with tasks and projects! With beginnings and outcomes! The Dane is a natural auditor, a bureaucrat of the spirit, the poet says.
And so a Dane, his Dane, his translator-Dane, his interviewer-Dane wants to know when he began to write! When he began to write … my God!, the poet says, shaking his head. When he began to write!
Is this what they teach you in interviewing-school in Denmark?, he asks. When it all began! When it began, as if there were a simple beginning that didn't carry with it a thousand non-beginnings. As if there was a yes that hadn't been shouted down by a thousand nos!
Have you any idea, Dane, of what it means to fail to begin? Or, just this: to fail. To fail, Dane, and from the first. To fail and have no idea of anything but failure, and your failure in particular, your dreadful, fact-like failure. You will fail: so the fact. You have failed, and you will always fail: so the fact.
Do you know what it's like for failure to bellow itself into your eardrums? My God, and to see only failure, your own failure, the world doing nothing but reflecting back your failure?
How he has failed, the poet says, but it's no use explaining it to the Dane. The Dane can have no understanding of the depths of failure. Of the extent of failure. Imagine a wall as high as the sky, the poet says. Imagine running against it, over and again. Running against, breaking yourself, and getting up only to run against it again, my God!
Imagine a corpse, waking up, lying there, still a corpse, and thinking to itself: I am a corpse. Imagine it: a corpse, already dead, but somehow given life, a little life, a life sufficient to lie there and think: I am a corpse.
How many times has he awoken and, lying there, thought: Is this it? Is this the morning? Is this awakening? Is this what I've woken into? Light everywhere? The indecency of light, showing everything? Showing his failure? Showing him as a corpse, and as nothing but a corpse?
A corpse awake and thinking: I am a corpse. I am a dead man. Why am I alive? Why doesn't someone kill me? Waking as if at the bottom of a chasm. At the bottom of a mineshaft, body broken, forgotten. Waking only to die. No: waking into the desire to die, to have done with waking.
Imagine it: to be horrified by time itself, the poet says. The continuation of time. The fact that a moment will succeed this moment. It's horrible! It's a joke, a terrible joke! Time says: kill yourself, and, I won't let you kill yourself. Time says: it's finished, but I won't let you finish. Time says: I will stretch you out along myself, along all of time. Time says: I will prolong your agony, stretch it out.
And meanwhile, moment follows moment. Moment lurches into moment. Moment careens into moment. You've got your head in the noose, but no matter. You've got the gun at your temple – no matter. You've turned on the gas, but there's still too much time. Too much time, too much space, too much light, it's all the same. It's the same each time, the poet says.
When he began! When he began to write! What a question! What a Dane! What Danish optimism! It's all finished: haven't you ever had that thought?, the poet says. It's all over, and a long time ago. Somehow it hasn't reached here, the end: haven't you thought that? Somehow it hasn't got here, it hasn't arrived.
The messenger was shot. The messenger shot himself. The messenger read his message and thought, there's no point and shot himself in the head. Or hung himself. Or put his head in the oven. The message hasn't got here. The message from the walnut-sized brain at the other end of the dinosaur's body hasn't reached your walnut-sized brain. The orders from the head of the army: desert, disband, kill yourself, hasn't got here.
And in the meantime? You live like an animal half run over. Your spine is broken, you flay about, but still you live. Dazed, you live. Concussed, skull broken. Bits of your skull beaten into your brain: and you're alive. Half dead in a pit, looking upwards: alive.
My God, what mockery: alive. What does God think, when he looks in your eyes?: Alive. Alive: this word spoken in bubbles of blood. Alive: this word mouthed by one whose throat was cut open. Alive: from the mouth of one half beaten to death by clubs.
There are days to get through, rather than live: do you understand that, Dane? Days like drawled syllables without shape. Days where one failed our slops greyly into another. Days that open like a gorge, plunging down and only down.
When did he begin, when did he begin to write? Begin – and to write: what a joke. Begin: already a joke. Begin …he'd never begun. Never raised his head. He's never lived in three dimensions. Crushed, he's only ever moved side to side like a snake. Broken, he never rose to look around. He's lived on one plane, pressed flat. He's only ever lived on one plane. No – only in a single point. In a single dimension. A point falling into itself, lost in itself. A little singularity, a black hole, devouring itself, tumbling into itself.
How do you paint with just one colour? How do you write a poem with only the word, no? Black painted on black. Spirals of black cut into black. The word, no, and another word, no.
Misery beyond misery! Suffering without sufferer. Suffering wandering in itself. A ghost lost in the corridors. I began to write: how could he ever use that phrase? It was last April when I began to write. I began to write ten years ago now: My God, how revolting.
If suffering was given life, if horror was given freedom, it was only to return to itself, spilling back. It was only to become necessity, to become fate and less than fate.
My God, do I think he's ever lifted his head? Even propped himself up on his elbows? Despair spread blackly like oil. Despair smeared. No release. No catharsis. It will not end well. Did you hear that, Dane: it will not end well. He laughs: it's not going to end well!
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