One

 

c

Notes for the Famished

c

 

 

There would be hope today, if not for the inability to see past our own love of progress. Thus, do I present to you a progressive vision, continuing the tale of the one who acted so swiftly out of his own forlorn self-concept that he chose to ruin all future poesy by inaugurating, through the labor of his own self-made empire, a dispassionate itinerary of triumph. Ah, yes! now the serfs and the peasantry and the lords and knights: all these are united, finally, making their last stand in the walled city, singing of the triumph he promised to mankind—a triumph over the poverty of these languid “eventless” days (as some would have it), working against those grey brains who went indefatigably in search of a mind joined to the exuberance of some (any) spirit. But now, a joyous retort he offers to the would-be philosophers of today who make their abode in the High Castles of bureaucratic recompense, those known only to the mediocre hopefuls and desirers of glory and writerly fame, and thinkerly accolades.

 

Rejoice! oh ye of much faith, for with thine own true hands ye shall craft the verses that shall bring to ruin this false Temple, this joyless City that still looks for the caves in which its ancestors once dwelt. They find, in this City, neither gods nor men nor any spirit capable of hearing the call to poesy laughed forward from a dark age of bitter self-overcoming, that poesy that managed to make it all the way to the future of our long descent into a comedy of listless wanderers in search neither of time nor of the past (of any sort) … but in search of those whom they may call gods again.

 

I laugh and dance upon the laughter for your sake—ye who have the courage to escape and to breathe the air of the sweetest joyful wisdom held (though) in abeyance of them that seek their love of wisdom in tombs of scrutiny and in crypts of best practices. (I only see an ax and hear a hammer come crashing down upon their heads, and eagles and serpents come leaping from the vacant bodies they leave behind, as each sad utterance, foisted upon them by the lethargy of their institutions and their love of effectiveness, crawls into the clear light of the day to meet with a mere paper efficiency—their true posthumous joy.)

 

Here I present a scroll, poisoning them with a taste of sentimentality—but one searching, at least, for its living doctrine, a renewed life. It was found as the world found itself decaying. The ashes of this decay were the only tears this desiccated world could shed for itself in these dark times, when ruins triumphed over the progress of institutions and the cosmos as a whole seemed to let down a great yawn of stardust out of its mouth, to cool the burning sorrows of those who still kept alive the flame of wonderment within their breast.

 

It should be known, however, there was a hero who dared topple the last remains of those grey buildings, the clutter of ruined triumph, and who endeavored to scatter the fragments to the carousing wolves in the wind. And he sang, and his song became a great wailing, a howl that replaced all those of the beasts with their nightly moaning for nourishment. And he beheld, in the river he would have to ford, one filled with the blood of those who wrote through the dark times for those who made a mad dash for the light. And this is what he said, singing, sad, silent to himself but resounding through to the firmament that cried above him to sing and sing until there was no air to carry the song. And it was sung in part, one song that followed another as time moves aside to greet the epochs…

 

But no sooner as I began to read of this singing, the page languished as it seemed to be ripped from a book I would never know complete—a text, we should say, with no known or discoverable origin, but which seemed (if we had it complete in hand) fraught with the difficulties of a time that knows only that its works, its days, its prose and its people have come to naught, and therefore look no longer even for the dawn to bring a recurrence. I was promised these things, these discoveries; and when I came upon them, far above the subterranean cavern where I had been working, I was taken over by a sudden joy and wonderment—that of pure discovery. Those overseeing my work would (much later) log this in their memoranda as ‘fragmentary’, ‘problematic’, ‘obscure’—but then I moved within the house of fragments, problematically strewn about, obscurely tracing for me (at least) a comfort in the depths of the lives of those people I would never have known. My consolation was (I thought again and again) that I have been given a moment to simply reconstitute their portion of darkness, loneliness, and uncertainly—their own obscurity which knows where to rest, which takes them for its possession.

It was not hiding, nor was it waiting for me. It had found a great uncertain expanse within which to repose for a time. Eventually, I called out to it in slumberous tones, fumbling around for a place to set anchor, in order that I could myself sleep their sleep, and weep with their weeping. My eyes concentrated and for a moment—suddenly I was lost, their prose opening to me a galaxy which I would only see as a dash of blurred white against oceans of nothingness. I had come home, and found that the hero had already arrived. What would I tell them, above me? How would I be able to establish his place within a time he would have never known, a time given over to such speed that it replaced time with motion? I wondered, and then I read on, saying to myself … here, there be found A Hero Amongst Ruins, at which point I entered into the exuberance of this figure, and danced with his dancing eyes over such desolation as we could never know in the light of the present:

I triumphed, in the first Age. A triumph of negative identity. Could S— have been the first? Demonstrating the opposite thesis in order to demonstrate the insubstantiality of the belief in that very thesis itself, or, rather, its incompleteness; but still, he held to the requirement that it become fully justified.

I am ranging over the world, that portion of it allotted to me in my thin and marginal slice of time. I am ranging over the world in search of that negativity that brings me into a complete awareness of what there is to believe in: not this, not that. I am a force to you, my people—but a force that only knows the power of the avenging angles of the decadent. Whom are the soldiers roving silently across a desolated plain, finding those forms that have hollowed, dried, cracked—those things already on the brink of collapse? They are mine who tip those existing forms into the direction they are already leaning in, towards the setting sun, towards the west. They all fall towards the west, even despite the remains after the passover is complete. They move from out of the direction of a great silence, and move all things into that same direction, a single dimension of ruination. I am that ruination, a silent wanderer just completing a game left unplayed and forgotten atop a playboard baked dry under a hundred-thousand and one days and nights of abandonment. I am the last player.

 

I can thrive on negativity, and in this I suffer not for anyone else; not to release someone else from their personal illusions, but for my own self; to see illusion in action; to open myself, by this negative condition, to some portion of truth which stands silently behind and between each word or gesture (the twin springs of our creation).

 

In search of negativity—I am a night creature, a predator of brittle bones, voracious, insatiable, filled with one kind of passion which has no flesh or blood about it, a passion for beyond all this, where justification ceases and the silence of truth can finally be heard. Do we not make our last stand, you and I, alone, standing as one among no others?

 

I make my home in the ruins, assuring the crumbling foundations of a proper disappearance, a certain decrepitude that only mankind, human-kind, can, with so little effort, effect—achievement of a species. Creation without creating…

I seek nourishment from the decaying remains, or from hapless starry-eyed newcomers (always the young are the weakest, yet with the most delicious energy) ... anyone that happens into these ruins looking for renewal (a snarl that I have come to know enlivens only the most sentimental of their dull treatises, penned under the flickering light of artificial suns now long put out—a sentimentality, for “progress”, that always sours their brains). I show them the end, and navigate them to their demise, not giving them passage over and across a river replete with death, the stink of rotting corpses—but into the river itself! An usher ushering them into the chaos of that darkness of water known only to the doomed, now bequeathed through the testament of their desolated. This, you of much faith, this I tell you is my nourishment.

Thus do I show them the end, and take them to their demise, into an icy inferno, across another river that escapes all their myths, a black river of stony fragments. It is a river that once appeared to be a starry firmament above their heads, to which they would look, teary-eyed, for hope, but which now is simply the surface of their entombment—a sarcophagus of hope. They had once celebrated fragmentation; yet now they fear running aground on this their last, funerary riverbed. All the more, then, that they should know, and know well, the bottom! Somehow this concreteness of finality has a way of arousing in them a final choked ember of passion, to flame at the last passing breath…

Is it any moral failure of mine that only the thinnest pretense to knowledge motivates—should I not now be accounted truly vacuous, a very reactionary perturber? Even S— he had a method, if only written in his Soul. I, on the other hand, lacking soul until death overtakes me, I have only breath with which to combat them, and you.

As I beheld the parchment, it seemed as though I had been spoken to personally—not by a god, not by a mere voice, but by a word that echoed from beyond the Age that grasped me tightly and suffocated me; thus, I could hardly hear it, and so I could not then understand it. Who was this ‘you’? I certainly stood above this text; yet, I felt personally addressed. And I was shaken.

A second leaflet was found, sometime later, and I managed to find time to tie the two fragments, leaving them as pieces of a ruined story I did my best to leave in its found, fragmentary state. Another voice called to me, forlorn it seemed, searching, as if it had just awoken to the resplendence of grand notions but which failed to craft verses for itself (and itself alone: verily it could not seem to find its loneliness). That was their apparent theme—solitude of solitudes, the loneliness of the adventure of expression.

Like as I would wrap a child in swaddling clothes, I took this sad account of a sojourn into an interior home, desolated and ruined, as a triumph of another sort, and I spoke to myself the words … But A Hero, Too, of Interior Ruins … and here began my own journey inward, without notions, with a voice not of notional creation, flung free from these texts that seemed to liven the ink within which they had been expressed.

For one who does not have the gift, the pure gift of writing, yet who insists on its duty, without truly and utterly offering himself to it; and who nonetheless still yearns to find beauty with these marks—one who looks into, unflinchingly into a complex sky of changeable greys and blues misted by fog, which the spire sitting here before him juts triumphantly towards—, for him, so enamored with this object of love so potent, for him writing, and its perpetual commandment,—for him it is dangerous to the world, to him, to everyone.

Looking up into the sky, he cannot see it; he only sees a confusion of elements written already for him thousands of times before he ponders his text, elements which then do not cohere into that longed-for prize—the poem. Ah, then, the beached whale yields its interior prize to the witnesses of this inward desolation: the rotting innards of its own death, the failure rises, vaporous, intoxicatingly. And laughter resounds and leaps from the tip of the spire into the Empyrean stratum of envy the world already knew and has already expected. Where are the curators? Where the taxonomists? The taxidermists of would-be poets, philosophers, thinkers? Where in this Age of desolated triumphs do I stand?

Until, of course, such a yearning founded in such a lack, leaps onto the page to become a love poem, an expression that continues the pain of love, the desire to be loved. But by what? To be loved by the gift of poetry, that love that only a clear seeing can offer the writer (you who have chosen to mark this page with the anointment of your thoughts, you holy ones above!).

—and here I stood, baffled, taken away from myself, and put with an alien familiarity, something that disturbed not my own interior world but which seemed to blur the distant horizon that framed my procedures and that established the means of my own orientation within these ruined places. I pressed onward, into the thoughts of this voice, calling out to me—

But that clarity only waits for him, he for it, and in vain does his mind work to free it. It is all around him. (A temptation, is it not?—one to rival the very first which gave to us this terrible and wondrous labor, the labor of the wound of the word. My friends, rejoice!) But the words simply fail to emerge. Thus, he writes and the writing is the perpetual failure, the washing ashore of the refuse of the great seas of desperation that engulf the unsuspecting. O the pious amongst our numbers— pray they do find prayers, and burnt offerings, during their painful sojourning; friends—pray!

He only hopes, and a lifelong struggle is all that he seems to have—to have to offer.

Without teachers, only books, without effort, only wishes, does he dare sometimes to draw the pen across a blank page, looking afar, out beyond the storm that promises quietude and release.

What he desires most, it seems, is to work, hard, at this writing—won’t the glory and the prize of the poem, the poetry, simply follow without further thought? Will not labor alone suffice? Aye, the labor without the faith or the love or the hope—just the labor, the works (and long days) alone? Is it not simple as a simple trinity—work, work, work. The triple knock upon the shuttered windows of torpidity, the refusal of our monadic citadel to window the exterior light into your interior rooms? (Ah, but the reply comes quickly: the monad is the all without needing the light from another—my friends, this, this! is our prayer and our sacrifice).

They say “write, write, write”. This is true. Concerted writing, or drifting, ephemeral surges followed by languishing, stretches of dry time, reading, wanting, promising, lamenting, crying, fearing, refusing, hating, struggling, shattering illusions and constructing them one secretive delay after another?

Writing is not simply writing—it is alchemical, and without the correct confluence of forces, energies, woes, loves, sadness…

—now I felt sentimentality drifting into this exuberant struggle; would it smuggle this despair out in the night of dreamy hopes, I thought. An easy escape it would be, cheapening the pearls I found so tightly strung together. But the last word seemed to drift out beyond this night of sentiment, and reach an inward warmth that I knew because of the quickening of my own heart—

It comes to nothing. That is all he knows—and that’s all there is on which to write. And the writer is then brought over the sacred river which appears to many to be their salvific water but which is in fact a poisoned draught for their unknowingly languishing souls—having something about which to write. Ah, if one escapes the temptation to drink from these clear waters, then, in the same boat, one is brought to the final river, whereupon you are thrown right into a rushing torrent, filled with piranhas, and which then fills with your own blood. This is not having something to write about—it is writing which takes you for its nourishment, and consumes you, leaving your blood to feed an eternity of seekers…

He does not design, he does not plan; the pen is taken up to reflect, to return (even to insult the would-be designers and planners, the stylists, those who revel in forms and preforms)—to return what is inside back to its rightful owner (but is this not what our life amounts to? Borrowed blood, borrowed earth, a circle that imparts, nonetheless, a slight nuance, a repetition with a difference, for you, them, and generations of us all?). It is catharsis—and it may heal the writer by paining the reader. And so, the writer may be consigned to obscurity, if he does not pain with the special something a truly gifted writer possesses.

And so, he continues on his absurd journey, with his obscene gesture: to write despite his inability, his failure, his torturous and neglectful but habitual writerly pretentions—which you’ve had the misfortune of happening upon, just now.