Four

 He could not help but, now decades later, cringe slightly at the vainly prophetic writing he tried to pen. It was to be a work of magnificence, surely—one set to reverse the progress literature had made over the course of at least four centuries. It would have been quixotic by resurrecting Don Quixote himself, but without the realist Sancho Panza. That was it really, wasn’t it? A new idealism that lacked sentimentality. And his writings worked—at those strange moments when his body was primed to conquer vast expanses of intellectual territory, that is, right before the morning bowel movement.

 

Life in private was a struggle; but when he didn’t stop to think about it, or when he relinquished his private life to the odd kind of living-in-public that life among his contemporaries afforded him (he lived in a very, very special Age), he was happy. That was the “simple life” alluded to in those more obscure passages. Ah yes, he thought (or rather, hoped that would be thought about him, and his fragmentary novella many centuries later)—my life is a living commentary on my prose. Or was it the other way around?

 

He did sincerely live inside his philosophies, his verses, his “musings”. They just amounted to a new understanding of the subjunctive mood. What was hard to understand was his absolute double-life in the matter, living the “simple” life as a kind of idealistic dream, a fantasy, all the while living this other sort of life which was actually fulfilling; yes, it was satisfying in a way he couldn’t actually express. “Write what you know” was the proverb that was beat into him from those capable writers, those writers of success; but had they read anything at all of deep insight? Or did they just write? He wondered constantly about this. I write in order to know! This was his reply—but the cynical one. Even more so was there a question that twisted this proper advice inside-out, which, at the end of his deliberations, managed to grind out a new proverb: “Know what you write!” This, he was now convinced, was what was actually meant underneath the stated wisdom. Yes, the implicit wisdom was always the greatest. Stupidity lived on the surface; true vanity was deeper than that! To be certain even of what you had absolutely no knowledge of; to walk a walk though you stumble and fall flat to the ground in your head—that’s worthy of the pen. That’s why it’s mightier than the sword.

 

But we must begin somewhere in the life of this our hapless, starving writer. We find him, as we find them all, in a gallery of self-portraiture. They are in need of fame, but victim of perpetual happenstance, which launches them into an oblivion of pure fantasy. Yes, the stuff of fiction to be sure, but not necessarily of the sort worthy to make the ultimate transition: from life to the page. Usually, the page bashes itself up against life, and slinks down into the swamp that awaits it, swallowing it up whole, never to return. I mean of course the perpetual plague of all creative-types (merest types) … hope. The hopeful artist is the dead artist. A zombie. Our artist was right, so very right in lambasting this the terror of the ancient Greeks. Life harbors it, clings to it even when there’s nothing to hope for. Keep hope bound up, sealed in its box, never allow it to show itself. He hated hope, but hope was a luxurious bath for him. And it is the famished that ultimately starve on a diet of hope, the undead feasting on the central nervous system of consciousness and life.

 

In the light of his open books, he sought refuge in the darkness of his mind. Writing was always the opposite of reading, which was the process of illuminating that which does not have its own kind of illumination contained in itself. This was the source of so many aphorisms that he chewed on. His favorite was the aphorism by N—, which read, in his heady paraphrase: they are stirred to frenzy, when they read; the tarnish that obscures their idiocy is rubbed away by the brilliance of books written by minds that, like brilliant suns against candles, erase the mediocre light that they bring to the sky. When he wrote, centuries of writing evaporated into darkness—and this is as it should be, he thought. I write to vanquish. All the writing of the world must vanish with each stroke of my pen, and each turn of the notebook page. It must be as if there is no writing, and has never been, and that you have to descend deep underground to find, through your archaeological wanderings, the first instance of writing. The writer who writes in order to resurrect their reading is the worst of them. He hated those writers, who were accounted some of the best. This made him into a crusader, he thought. But he was only a crusader of the subjunctive, a mood overlooked by all of them but which he secretly celebrated with every line, every verse and every hapless fragment of a work he sought to devise from the emptiness of his own soul.

 

It wasn’t so much that he spun great webs of deceit, either to himself or others. It was just that what he wrote were like ropes thrown into dark passageways, down great holes in the earth which led to nowhere—or at least not to anywhere anyone cared to look, or even contemplate. That’s where he worked best. This wasn’t about the brilliance of the undiscovered country that he harbored in his unpublished manuscripts, for he had no illusions about that. But this was the whole point for him: he had illusions—they were his, perhaps uniquely so. These illusions came to him and he added a bit of invention to them in order to help them out of their own form of obscurity; that was all. Midwifery. He was still stupid, but in his own way. He accepted that. And his growing collection of unpublished fragments of planned works and flashes of intention (for which he coined the terms “intentional” and “intentionalism”) formed a comforting basis of illusions that allowed his life to continue. Often he would say “somehow” at this point—but not today. For another possibility occurred to him. And it, as it always has done and always promised to do, strung him along. His very own Thousand And One Nights. And like that winding purposeless work of old, love was the string through the pearls. It was the only love he could know. He connected two beads, but had none of the brilliance of the beads themselves. Such was, too, his work: it could never attain to the thing itself, but was always an intention to become. This was the heart of his ‘intentionalism’. Whereas most (the “best”) stoked the flames of their work with the breath of others, and the sacred history of all the works penned before each of the writer’s penstrokes was carried as a beast of burden that labored behind and ahead of them, he worked contrariwise, like a part of the fugue only implied by the main subject. This was his own kind of brilliance. It was stupid, he thought constantly, but it worked. It kept him going.

 

What was satisfying to him he could not say, nor did he want to—he hated reflecting on that. He just plain didn’t know, not at all. He just thought it was like a reflex, or a twitching of the muscles. He was satisfied, content—at times. Other times a great raging fury bubbled up inside him, and when he went to the toilet, it would boil over. No paper. Simple things lacking led to simpler things exploding.

 

In his double life he was split between this contentedness and a profound discontent with most things (almost everything). That great darkness was also his. In the shadows, he always felt, and knew, that the world condemned him for a thousand crimes. The world’s eye of judgment hung over him in the most oppressive way, condemning him not to imprisonment (for it knew, he thought, that bars do not a prison make), but to awkward suspicion—a sense of wrongdoing that suffused everything, that was the rose-sweet perfume that surrounded all his sweetness, his loves, his interests—everything. In decades he would become embittered, and this was the joyful play that those children found around him, now old and even wizened, day after day.

 

He felt in his heart that he somehow had defiled their childhood, but he knew that this was not the case. Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d done something to destroy their innocence, or their supposed and necessary innocence. He kept them around—they who would never know the suspicion of sin that he had to take and bear upon his heart in perpetuity, when even his attempted confessions of blamelessness implied guilt (in that backward psychoanalytical kind of way). He always found them annoying but in a way that pleased him to be annoyed. That was the way it worked. A pact. A compromise with the native brutality of the human spirit, which stirred even in the “innocent”.

 

Perhaps this was also the secret to his loneliness, his sparkling, genius formula for being without another—nothing to hound you when you sit down to scratch an itch, be it illusory (for the page) or real (for infamy). Guilt, real or imagined, had a way of making you into a kind of wall, your own barrier. Not that there was anything in the center, or behind it, that needed protection; just a wall. Or maybe the center was just a great heap of ruined buildings, and the wall was put up in order to conjure the sense that there were riches and fabulous treasure within the great citadel. Surely that was it, but if this was really it, then it had already been figured, right? So then he could just relax, and be the wall he was without a complicated dialectical analysis. This was why he sat down to write, or do anything—so that this kind of complication bled away as his thinking relaxed and in flatulence, peace and stillness came upon him. That’s when the kids laughed so hard they had to run back home to change their peed pants. He could make them laugh like no other living creature could. One of the only ones in their lives who had that power. They would not recognize this until it was too late—until they woke up to realize the laughter had already been drained out of them. But still, he would not let them in, really. His guilt for nothing whatsoever prevented entry of any other soul save his own withered rag of a spirit, burned and burdened to hell. Like everybody else, he was determined to get to the bottom of this impasse, but, like everybody else, he put it off to another day, and on the days he made an effort, languished and stalled and finally gave up. It was what it was. It was him. It was there, and here, to stay.

 

He never had to open the door for them; they just barged in and took to running around and causing a commotion as groups of kids are wont to do, always. He was in the middle of trying to put together some pieces of work he found here and there in old notebooks. Anytime he was caught in the middle of something and disturbed from it, by anything whatsoever, he always found that the work drew him in even more. Like a Chinese finger-trap: the harder you were tugged away and out, the stronger became its grip. Anytime something else came up, precisely in that moment was when the power and force of his work grew. It was exponential, so that the slightest increase in annoyances led to the absolute most potent of desires to get back to that sentence, that paragraph, that grand conception brewing in the languid shadows of his laborious free time. He finally one day realized this, and capitulated to the fact, and soon reveled in it—the fragmentary nature of the resulting work long having ceased to bother him. When it snows or rains, it snows or rains; when it’s dry and hot, it’s dry and hot—nothing more to say or do about it. Just let it come as it may, he consoled himself like many a meteorologist. It’s just chance. The worst, he was convinced, are the ones who get it all backwards. And this was the great human tendency, he was absolutely sure of it: when it comes to work, effort, production, labor all that we do gets turned round and totally reversed—the order suits our vanity, not the reality. How many of them had gotten shipwrecked in the shallow waters of “effort” and “hard work”? he thought. The best and the greatest are lucky—just in a special sort of way. The whole work hits them out of nowhere; we knew this—they all know this and have known this for as long as there was this kind of spirit driving us to do what we do, from nothing. But the luck comes again when you can just dump it all out just as it came to you in the first place, or find the right kind of haphazard arrangement of the stuff to suit your own feeling—or to make it sound right. It’s universal selfishness. Blessed selfishness. The stupidest persons are struck with the greatest genius of works; they’re just not able to dump it out right. Or it’s confused with the trash of the world, something nobody wants, something that stinks, something that might offend or hurt or wound. Therefore we are the most vicious, our virtue is only the offspring of chance. Talent? That’s something you get from somewhere else—it’s not even yours. What’s yours is just the ability to move it, to dump it all out right, to displace. And this was why he embraced his own kind of stupidity and inability—it was an asset he could not gamble away in schools and workshops and the rest of the sharpening posts of the dull-witted, he thought. Talent is brute force. Skill, technique—all that was just refining and nuance. Some made that their art. Not him. Or at least that wasn’t the goal. He had no goals. He just did it, laughed, cried and did it more. And what emerged in decades was a history, a long tale, of this thing that could have been at one point something, but which was a string linking one flash of possibility to another, each unworked, unrefined, unfinished; an essay in delay. An ecstasy of the subjunctive mood. To keep the whole from becoming, somehow, more than the sum of its parts—to refute all ridiculous Hermeticism and to snuff out the life-fire of the Renaissance masters, all the ancients … this was his work, and the stuff of his days. Long and lonely, it all worked.

 

At least it might.

 

This day their clamor was pleasing in a way that inspired his thoughts, or rather brought back to him thoughts on that one particular piece of abandonment that hadn’t bothered calling back home in quite a while. There was an idea for a novel about … what was it about? he thought, but could not clearly recall. The kids danced and ran around his large dining table, then ran out into the backyard. A bit of quiet was all he needed. There would be a time when this would not be really disallowed, so much as it would simply not be of any concern, and wouldn’t in any case be under your direct control; and he thought about this as a possible point right within the present, a future-present. Or not the future, for he wasn’t particularly interested in dystopian novels. They always managed, he thought, to turn into commentaries on the crooked vision of their authors. It was that repressed core of the present itself that had a hand in creating a certain flavor of later times, times which would in turn be lamented from the precision-view of a much-distant future. Oh yes—I want the present!

 

So it was that one day, a very terribly bleak and gray day towards the end of the summer, when the autumn presses down even through the heat and humidity of this fading season, that he was overcome by something akin to a vision of the present. And it grew on him, for years it persisted, and finally soured. But it’s never really gone, is it? In the clamor of the kids’ play, he found the original spark that ignited his passion for this flash, for this seed buried in the present, whose pulsations kept the world moving and spinning and whirling through its crises and catastrophes.

 

All of it somehow wanted in—into you, inside you. Everything wanted in. And everybody wanted an in, somewhere, somehow. Just everything you looked at or touched or cried over or became excited at, or struck you or suggested something to you … all of it wanted in. It was like they figured out that there really was a final frontier as dreamt in those verses so long ago—a seed planted by one of us artists for all the world to see. (In his more fascistic moments, he raged against the artist, as all sensible thinker-types must, now and then, for some ideas just of necessity must be held back from common knowledge.)

 

The world, he thought, just became of late a grand and somewhat complicated working through of this truly final frontier, where we could still say that I have my own thoughts, and you have yours. A basic distinction and separation. So of course it was all attacked, first in verse, then in philosophy. But for the world, the whole world, to mount a sneak-attack on this basic fact of personal possession, and to rip open thoughts and invade them, in a brutal material sort of way—this was something just written in the clamor of the everyday. By brute mechanical force, by materialistic ingenuity, they would try to make out of us a true blank slate upon which anything could be written. First the elements of the biological—the basis of life—then the thinking that sprung forth from this bio-machine into self-awareness. So, the central idea of this one flash of intention of his was the Notion. It was something inescapable. It was the Eye that sees all. Yes of course god is dead; but we make God—well, some of us anyway. It thought directly into you, and you could steer this flow one way or the other, but flow and rush it did, always and without end. In a way, therefore, you could never know death, and life was a stream, incessant like the fragments of the ancients always said it was. But at least at some point you could have debated the point one way or the other, for or against, and considered an alternative (maybe). Here, what was debate? What was dissent? The irony in this was that it was what it always was: a movement of soul. But that was all there was, really. The greatest said this in one way or another: every thought has at its root a disturbance or perturbation of matter itself, and every such flexion implied some thought or thinking. But mechanically connect to the tissue and stimulate it directly in this way or that, programmed and monitored and let free and exposed for everyone else to respond to—the advent of absolute and instantaneous transparency: in this there was no dissent or difference; or rather, you in a way were dissent itself, differences multiplied to infinity—just absolutely transparent. If the secret of privacy and possession was a difference that was opaque or unrepeatable, or inimical to reproduction of any kind, then there was no longer such a thing. The tragedy was that nobody even feigned opacity any longer. It was a repressed idea-possibility, but yet, everything harbored a sense of the hidden. A strange kind of darkness was written all over their faces, a pervasive emptiness that no one had any words for. Notional happiness. Paper doubts, or two-dimensional dissent. Uninspiring unhappiness. Listless wonderment. Not a brave new world and no big brother—both were unneeded, and plainly so. When everything is “out in the open”, what was fresh air? Not even the undersides of beds, or the reclusion of the bathroom stall were exempt from their infinite transparency. It was just how everything got built, and everything was built to want what everything was being built with. So you had not only to build it, but to build into everything you built the desire to want it to be that way. So, if there were to be any kinds of alternative or dissent, then that, too, had to have this double-aspect: the thing itself, and the desire for it, both had to be determined, planned, integrated and woven into everything.

 

He called this novel Futurity. Which was ironic. It was not about the future. It was not science fiction, either. That sort of thing had died long ago, he realized; and he had come to hate that kind of writing, moreover. No, what was called science fiction had become a kind of repository for the actual, not the future-possible. As history grew into itself, what came to fruition were ideas set down into this repository, so that the future looked more and more like a historical unfolding of the dreams of the past: what the past wanted the future was condemned to yield. In this world that sprung from the depths of he present, it was like the future had been taken over by the past, and the present was the lobby between the two, where you just waited it all out. And his story took up the story—what in those ancient fables gets translated as history—of this waiting-room, which was the world swallowed up in the Notion. And he let himself go free into this world, which was his world, our world and your world, he said, boldly as he sometimes cried himself a new chapter or line. He addressed the you that he always knew would be, and always could be, hovering over his manuscripts. To invoke you, there, without it turning into a letter—ah, this was the magic of his prose. You are here with us, and you are taking time away from your life and devoting it to our adventures. This was the magic dust that speckled the carpet of his imagination. And of course, this had the virtue of also seeming to address the Notion itself; although this was technically, of course, impossible. Then again—literature is impossible. And this, he would come to see, was the point.

 

Amidst all this (and yes, there was a touch of desolation here in this world—not a dystopia, just the very literal “utopia” we have sought through our struggles with the reality of the material world, he said quietly to himself), there was his hero, whom we had the pleasure (or displeasure) of encountering earlier in our recollections.

 

His hero is this hapless laborer, a slave battered by the stupid and indentured to this world of happy transparency. Yet he is aware of it, and so our hero is like a gnostic soul in reverse: it is not he who has fallen into the evil world of the material, but rather it is the perfectible realm of the good material world that has fallen into the evil of this hapless hero who survives on the desiccated remains of lost souls. He has realized that it is the original, the heavenly and pure that must itself undergo the fall. And he endeavored to take it there.

 

His mind, his thoughts, were overweight, bloated with visions and ecstasies just as his room was crowded with numerous books—texts, pamphlets, folios, folders, manuscripts in haphazard (though to him perfectly neat) piles. He was surrounded, as surrounded as one could be—as if he’d been marooned. That’s how he carried himself, through days of indolence which seemed they’d never let up. He’d washed up on an island and soon gave up any attempt to get off, for his boat was wrecked and nobody would think to look this far out. So far out, but not too far out as to want death; just on the cusp of a personal kind of necromancy, but with enough to do (to think, to write) to delay the desire for death that partners with life every step along life’s tedious way.

 

This was the essence, the heart, of his hero, into whom he was able to pour, over a decade, his yearning for this something in his life, this burning desire that only yielded an intention. This work of his was pure intention, and it sputtered out, a page at a time—more dreaming than writing. That was the real substance of it, though, he thought over and over again: dreaming, visions, flashes … mere intention. The writing, when you sat down to do it, was also always caught, so utterly, in this transitional space—between some thing, a thing that had (it seemed) a life unto itself and the writing about it which was yet another thing entirely removed from it; so, the act of writing was like taking up a pickax and slowly attempting a very carefully planned and detailed excavation of a whole settlement of which you, as excavator, have never known or have lived in. There was something else beyond the pickax work of typing and scribbling it all down, and it was to this something else that the writer wrote in order to gain access. You never manage to get to the thing itself, however; you’re always talking about something else, transitioning, waiting around in a lobby, getting up after you think you hear your number called, going back to sit down, listening more closely—anything but the thing itself. This bugged him, and could have drove him insane. But he grew to accept this weird fact that writers are just rubber-necking it all the time; he decided that the best must simply yield to this fact, and let it emerge for what it was. That way, he could eventually get past it. And let it dissolve his grand intentions, and, of its own accord, lead him wherever it wanted.

 

Surely, this was also love. But was he also, then, free? No, but act as if you were—that was another aphorism that he always cracked open whenever there was any romanticism about love and freedom in the air, which there rarely was, of course. He had intended to write several essays on the subject, and actually managed a few paragraphs. Here you go—he handed himself the pages and began to labor over them, like he happened upon a treasure chest filled with rare and exquisite oddities from a time nobody could quite remember but which promised something wondrous—though nobody could quite say exactly what. It was filled with coinage that had long ago been taken out of circulation. That was exactly his expertise as a treasure-hunter. To discover to the world the discarded and abandoned methods, means and materials of exchange. His paragraphs, unpublished, were exercises in the futility of reinstating the obsolescent, the discarded, the unwanted or forgotten. His back hunched over especially painfully this time, in anticipation of recovering and reliving the obscurity it promised. He was joyful. And sinking back into his treasure-chest, he wondered…