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Story number one takes place ten million years ago and story number two takes place ten million years in the future. The problem is how to tell these two stories apart, how to know which is which. Story number three takes place now.
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Showing posts with label Past Present Future Etc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Past Present Future Etc. Show all posts
January 9, 2017
January 22, 2015
Past, Present, Future, Etc.
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[This text was originally published in The Coming Envelope Issue 8.]
1.
I read this quote from Chantal Akerman. She is speaking about Jean Luc Godard:
2.
As I write, cinema is a little over 100 years old and its relevance already seems to be fading. But perhaps this is only a lull, and some time in the near or distant future cinema will begin its second (or third or forth) life. Writing books, I have often felt that cinema has won, while literature has lost. That reading can never compete with the mesmerizing, dream-state of the screen. But I mean this only for others. For me, I have always preferred to read. In fact, more and more, I find watching movies or television almost unbearable. How can I feel such a strong desire to be contemporary, while simultaneously being so much at odds with my time?
To bring ‘reality’ into a cinematic work is more direct, more straightforward, then attempting to bring reality into a work of literature. You point the camera at a tree, film it, the tree is reality and that reality, at least partly, is now in your film. This might sound stupid, but I’ve always felt this simple fact has so much to do with the energy and allure of film. When I stare at a tree and attempt to describe it in words (something I have no talent for whatsoever), the tree is already filtered both through my own particular subjectivity and through language.
I have always been fascinated by the use of voiceovers in cinema. I see within them a slight anxiety that the image is not enough, that the moving image requires words to add context or generate narrative. The use of background music gives me a similar feeling. Of course, like theatre before it, cinema is an art form that can eat everything: music, stories, pictures, action, the past, present and future. Very simply, I don’t like watching films because I feel I am being manipulated, and that I am far too susceptible to it. I also feel manipulated by books, but never as intensely. It is so much easier to put a book down.
Literature has something to do with time, with changing the nature and experience of time. You spend four years working on a book that takes two weeks to read. You can also spend four years working on a film that takes two hours to watch. But, if its within a single take, three minutes of film takes three minutes to watch, while a single page of a book might take days or weeks to write. Both cinema and literature are ways of playing with time, but within literature I often feel a difference sense of time than the one that most often surrounds me.
3.
I am writing now in the lobby of a cinema. It is 10pm and I have just walked out of a film in the middle. My date is still inside watching and I am sitting here in the lobby. The film was Post Tenebras Lux by the Mexican director Carlos Regayas and it was very good, completely strange and unprecedented, but I had to flee, couldn’t continue. It was as if the stunning pictures in front of me were too hard on my nervous system, inducing panic. So many times in my life I have walked out of films in the middle. In the past ten years I have left in the middle far more often than I’ve made it to the end (and I of course don’t go to films frequently.)
Earlier in Post Tenebras Lux, there was a scene in which a man strangles his dog. The dog is off screen, you do not see anything particularly violent, just the yelps of the dog and a medium close up of the man hitting and swearing. I left just after a later scene where the same man had argued with his wife, stormed out of the room to go feed the dogs. There was a shot of the dogs in their pen just before the man entered. I thought it would be too obvious a choice, on the director’s part, for the man to beat the dogs again. Most of the film so far had been fragmented, one scene barely relating to the next. But the tension I felt at the shot of those dogs, with my nervous system already at its limit, was too much. This slight hint of possible (most likely mild) cinematic violence was too much for me to take, yet people watch considerably more violent films every day, and often seem to take pleasure in the visceral experience of conflict or gore. I am so far from being able to understand this difference I cannot even see it from here, sitting in the empty lobby of the movie theatre, watching the rather loud air conditioning blow a red, semi-transparent table cloth up and then back down over the legs of a folding table.
Post Tenebras Lux is a poetic film (at least the first half of it was) – random scenes of daily life, gorgeously shot, cut together so one is never quite sure how to place oneself in relation to them. As I watched, I had no sense of what might be holding it together. I feel bad walking out, would like to know what happens in the second half and now suspect I never completely will. I am wondering if there are any books I stopped reading in the middle then never picked up again. I have some memory of an Italian novel That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda that I don’t believe I ever finished. This must be twenty years ago. What’s strange was I thought it was an amazing book but couldn’t make it through. I often see it in bookstores and every time think about trying it again. I’m a different reader now, almost certain I would sail through it with ease.
And now it’s the next day and already I think Post Tenebras Lux wasn’t such a good film after all. In the second half, apparently, it became more narrative, with the dog-killer getting shot by a thief, his family rallying around him. The things I had liked about it, how fragmented and discontinuous it felt, now seem like mere formal constraints. On the level of content, upon further reflection, the film seems conventional, another story about a male jerk who is redeemed. Having not seen the entire film, I cannot think any of this with certainty.
4.
As I get older, there are more and more people I don’t particularly like. I spend a great deal of time wondering why this is the case, if it has anything to do with a gradually increasing bitterness that constitutes my inner life. What does it mean to not like other people? That I would prefer to spend the time alone? That I am threatened by them in some way? Or competitive? Life can seem so repetitive: I feel I meet the same people over and over again. And the people I have known for years so rarely surprise me. (I don’t know any of them particularly well.) I wonder if there is some connection between not liking people and not being able to watch movies. The people I don’t like claim to love watching movies, as does practically everyone I meet. Does this love encapsulate some key difference between us? Is their pleasure in watching movies, a pleasure I am unable to share, analogous to a more general, unbridgeable divide?
I find movies manipulative and I find people manipulative. I find movies emotionally draining and I find people emotionally draining. (This reminds me of the following, told to me when I was young to demonstrate a certain kind of logic error: fire engines are red, and communists are red, therefore all communists are fire engines.) All of this has something to do with being too fragile, too vulnerable, somehow not tough enough for the modern world.
5.
My last book, published in 2010, was called Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. There was a moment, before I started, when I thought of making it as a movie instead, but then realized I didn’t have the energy or will to make a film, to raise money, to convince producers and distributors, therefore decided it would work better as a book. Revenge Fantasies is about a group of activists who meet once a week to discuss politics. Because they are living in a dystopian near future, there is one rule for their meetings, that they are there only to talk, only to think together, and not to engage in any acts of civil disobedience or direct resistance, because they fear if they were to do so they might be kidnapped by the government, tortured, killed, that their families might come to harm or worse. I was thinking about Argentina during the disappearances, but also about the direction my paranoia reasonably tells me that much of the Western world is rapidly heading.
As I was finishing a first draft I suddenly went into crisis. What gave me the right to make a book set within an activist milieu, a world I’ve had few experiences with and know very little about. I felt I was writing something too disconnected from reality, my fantasy of an activism in which people got together only to speak about ideas and felt no concurrent pressure or responsibility to act. (Talking about ideas has always been one of my strong suits.) I had turned activism into a discursive art, one that played to my immediate strengths but in the larger world changed nothing. However, when the book was finally released, at least some of my fears were alleviated. A few activists I know liked the book, were enthusiastic about it, told me that for them, though absurd, the tone of the meetings rang true. I had captured some of the spirit of how things are organized, of how people behave in such situations, accurate enough, at times, to make them laugh aloud in recognition. I had fired an arrow in the dark and miraculously hit at least one part of the target.
6.
It is arguable whether or not it is possible to disentangle the idea of progress from the realities of industrial capitalism. Progress is the idea that things will continue to grow, to improve, etc. As has often been mentioned, we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. If we remove the idea of progress from our thinking, how does the future change? In some sense it almost disappears. There is no question that everything repeats, in cycles, over years and over centuries, and yet the idea of progress implicitly averts its gaze from this fact. When something repeats, it is never exactly the same: there is an element of how it was before and an element of difference. Progress focuses on the difference, tradition encourages the similarity. But I find myself imagining something else, more like alchemy, that mixes past and future as if turning lead into gold.
So much of my life, like so many artists in the early 21st century, circles around projects. When asked what I’m working on, invariably I’m always working on something I am only able to refer to as a ‘project.’ I have always known one of the things I like about projects is that they end. If you are in a band, and you don’t want to be in the band anymore, the band has to break up, but a project simply runs its course. A project is agreeing to work on a certain set of questions for a certain period of time. I have often wondered if a project is the opposite of activism. With activism you need to keep fighting forever, since injustice is never solved, it must be fought against ceaselessly. A project ends, while activism must keep going. Of course, each project is followed by another project, the next one. In this sense a project is mainly a way of compartmentalizing time. (Perhaps compartmentalizing it in a way that changes it from political or historical time, into a more apolitical, ahistorical modality.) A project will usually take a couple of months, a longer project might take a few years, but activism is measured in generations. For activism to truly shift society, each generation needs to pick up the struggle then keep pushing. This is clearly impossible without some larger, active sense of cultural memory.
I keep circling round and round this idea that what politics needs today is a different way of thinking about time, that the problem with Marxism is it was working towards victory in the future, while what we need is more like a victory of living together in mutual loneliness, a victory-in-the-present-as-future-that-will-never-come, which sounds frustrating, and probably is. But how to imagine this impossible present-future hybrid as not frustrating, as something good, something desirable, a struggle and strength worth having, as possible. Trying to imagine the things I am not yet able to imagine.
7.
I wish I were a better activist, a better citizen. I’m too defeatist. Whatever I undertake, I always have the overwhelming feeling it will fail. The one exception to this defeatism is art. In art, paradoxically, I often trick myself into thinking that failure is a kind of success. A ‘perfect’ work feels dead and sterile. (Also works that strive towards perfection.) For me, in art, it is only failure, imperfection, vulnerability that opens things up, makes them human, leaves room for the viewer or reader to enter the machine. I try to remind myself that activism too is about failure, is always incomplete. Sometimes I wonder if the only problem is that I like art, at times it still gives me energy, but I’m not particularly sure if I like the world. So much activism has a better world as its goal, so if you don’t like the world activism might reflect this desire to see it fundamentally change. What else do you have to believe, before you can believe that something is worth saving?
Perhaps I have an overly romantic idea of what activism is and means. In interviews, the artist Paul Chan has often stated that he tries to keep his art practice and his activism separate. The main reason he gives is that he wants his art to remain complex, controversial, full of ambiguity; and for activism to succeed you need to simplify the goal, so that everyone can agree, or at least agree enough to more fully work together, push towards the same objective in unison. The ambiguity of art rejects easy consensus, divides viewers, undermines clear solidarity. (Though solidarity is rarely clear or simple.) Activism requires the largest possible coalition to succeed, while art needs only one sufficiently passionate viewer.
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[This text was originally published in The Coming Envelope Issue 8.]
1.
I read this quote from Chantal Akerman. She is speaking about Jean Luc Godard:
You can see him excluding himself from the world in an almost autistic manner. For people like me, who started doing film because of him, it is a terrible fright. And the fact that the long evolution that Godard has been through can lead to this, almost brings me to despair. He was kind of a pioneer, an inventor who didn’t care much about anybody or anything. And that a man at this stage of his life isolates himself, should also be a lesson for us other filmmakers.And I wondered if the same thing was happening to me. I have been thinking so much about blurring reality and fiction. I feel it is important to do so, that it is our zeitgeist, but am never precisely sure why. Why is it important to blur reality and fiction? It has something to do with a lack of reality in our lives. Gilles Deleuze writes:
The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events that happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film.In using these quotes it is as if I were trying to bring a piece, a moment, of outside reality into this text. It is still writing, still words on a page, yet it came from somewhere else, not from me. It is as if I think quotations are a small chunk of the world.
2.
As I write, cinema is a little over 100 years old and its relevance already seems to be fading. But perhaps this is only a lull, and some time in the near or distant future cinema will begin its second (or third or forth) life. Writing books, I have often felt that cinema has won, while literature has lost. That reading can never compete with the mesmerizing, dream-state of the screen. But I mean this only for others. For me, I have always preferred to read. In fact, more and more, I find watching movies or television almost unbearable. How can I feel such a strong desire to be contemporary, while simultaneously being so much at odds with my time?
To bring ‘reality’ into a cinematic work is more direct, more straightforward, then attempting to bring reality into a work of literature. You point the camera at a tree, film it, the tree is reality and that reality, at least partly, is now in your film. This might sound stupid, but I’ve always felt this simple fact has so much to do with the energy and allure of film. When I stare at a tree and attempt to describe it in words (something I have no talent for whatsoever), the tree is already filtered both through my own particular subjectivity and through language.
I have always been fascinated by the use of voiceovers in cinema. I see within them a slight anxiety that the image is not enough, that the moving image requires words to add context or generate narrative. The use of background music gives me a similar feeling. Of course, like theatre before it, cinema is an art form that can eat everything: music, stories, pictures, action, the past, present and future. Very simply, I don’t like watching films because I feel I am being manipulated, and that I am far too susceptible to it. I also feel manipulated by books, but never as intensely. It is so much easier to put a book down.
Literature has something to do with time, with changing the nature and experience of time. You spend four years working on a book that takes two weeks to read. You can also spend four years working on a film that takes two hours to watch. But, if its within a single take, three minutes of film takes three minutes to watch, while a single page of a book might take days or weeks to write. Both cinema and literature are ways of playing with time, but within literature I often feel a difference sense of time than the one that most often surrounds me.
3.
I am writing now in the lobby of a cinema. It is 10pm and I have just walked out of a film in the middle. My date is still inside watching and I am sitting here in the lobby. The film was Post Tenebras Lux by the Mexican director Carlos Regayas and it was very good, completely strange and unprecedented, but I had to flee, couldn’t continue. It was as if the stunning pictures in front of me were too hard on my nervous system, inducing panic. So many times in my life I have walked out of films in the middle. In the past ten years I have left in the middle far more often than I’ve made it to the end (and I of course don’t go to films frequently.)
Earlier in Post Tenebras Lux, there was a scene in which a man strangles his dog. The dog is off screen, you do not see anything particularly violent, just the yelps of the dog and a medium close up of the man hitting and swearing. I left just after a later scene where the same man had argued with his wife, stormed out of the room to go feed the dogs. There was a shot of the dogs in their pen just before the man entered. I thought it would be too obvious a choice, on the director’s part, for the man to beat the dogs again. Most of the film so far had been fragmented, one scene barely relating to the next. But the tension I felt at the shot of those dogs, with my nervous system already at its limit, was too much. This slight hint of possible (most likely mild) cinematic violence was too much for me to take, yet people watch considerably more violent films every day, and often seem to take pleasure in the visceral experience of conflict or gore. I am so far from being able to understand this difference I cannot even see it from here, sitting in the empty lobby of the movie theatre, watching the rather loud air conditioning blow a red, semi-transparent table cloth up and then back down over the legs of a folding table.
Post Tenebras Lux is a poetic film (at least the first half of it was) – random scenes of daily life, gorgeously shot, cut together so one is never quite sure how to place oneself in relation to them. As I watched, I had no sense of what might be holding it together. I feel bad walking out, would like to know what happens in the second half and now suspect I never completely will. I am wondering if there are any books I stopped reading in the middle then never picked up again. I have some memory of an Italian novel That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana by Carlo Emilio Gadda that I don’t believe I ever finished. This must be twenty years ago. What’s strange was I thought it was an amazing book but couldn’t make it through. I often see it in bookstores and every time think about trying it again. I’m a different reader now, almost certain I would sail through it with ease.
And now it’s the next day and already I think Post Tenebras Lux wasn’t such a good film after all. In the second half, apparently, it became more narrative, with the dog-killer getting shot by a thief, his family rallying around him. The things I had liked about it, how fragmented and discontinuous it felt, now seem like mere formal constraints. On the level of content, upon further reflection, the film seems conventional, another story about a male jerk who is redeemed. Having not seen the entire film, I cannot think any of this with certainty.
4.
As I get older, there are more and more people I don’t particularly like. I spend a great deal of time wondering why this is the case, if it has anything to do with a gradually increasing bitterness that constitutes my inner life. What does it mean to not like other people? That I would prefer to spend the time alone? That I am threatened by them in some way? Or competitive? Life can seem so repetitive: I feel I meet the same people over and over again. And the people I have known for years so rarely surprise me. (I don’t know any of them particularly well.) I wonder if there is some connection between not liking people and not being able to watch movies. The people I don’t like claim to love watching movies, as does practically everyone I meet. Does this love encapsulate some key difference between us? Is their pleasure in watching movies, a pleasure I am unable to share, analogous to a more general, unbridgeable divide?
I find movies manipulative and I find people manipulative. I find movies emotionally draining and I find people emotionally draining. (This reminds me of the following, told to me when I was young to demonstrate a certain kind of logic error: fire engines are red, and communists are red, therefore all communists are fire engines.) All of this has something to do with being too fragile, too vulnerable, somehow not tough enough for the modern world.
5.
My last book, published in 2010, was called Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. There was a moment, before I started, when I thought of making it as a movie instead, but then realized I didn’t have the energy or will to make a film, to raise money, to convince producers and distributors, therefore decided it would work better as a book. Revenge Fantasies is about a group of activists who meet once a week to discuss politics. Because they are living in a dystopian near future, there is one rule for their meetings, that they are there only to talk, only to think together, and not to engage in any acts of civil disobedience or direct resistance, because they fear if they were to do so they might be kidnapped by the government, tortured, killed, that their families might come to harm or worse. I was thinking about Argentina during the disappearances, but also about the direction my paranoia reasonably tells me that much of the Western world is rapidly heading.
As I was finishing a first draft I suddenly went into crisis. What gave me the right to make a book set within an activist milieu, a world I’ve had few experiences with and know very little about. I felt I was writing something too disconnected from reality, my fantasy of an activism in which people got together only to speak about ideas and felt no concurrent pressure or responsibility to act. (Talking about ideas has always been one of my strong suits.) I had turned activism into a discursive art, one that played to my immediate strengths but in the larger world changed nothing. However, when the book was finally released, at least some of my fears were alleviated. A few activists I know liked the book, were enthusiastic about it, told me that for them, though absurd, the tone of the meetings rang true. I had captured some of the spirit of how things are organized, of how people behave in such situations, accurate enough, at times, to make them laugh aloud in recognition. I had fired an arrow in the dark and miraculously hit at least one part of the target.
6.
It is arguable whether or not it is possible to disentangle the idea of progress from the realities of industrial capitalism. Progress is the idea that things will continue to grow, to improve, etc. As has often been mentioned, we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. If we remove the idea of progress from our thinking, how does the future change? In some sense it almost disappears. There is no question that everything repeats, in cycles, over years and over centuries, and yet the idea of progress implicitly averts its gaze from this fact. When something repeats, it is never exactly the same: there is an element of how it was before and an element of difference. Progress focuses on the difference, tradition encourages the similarity. But I find myself imagining something else, more like alchemy, that mixes past and future as if turning lead into gold.
So much of my life, like so many artists in the early 21st century, circles around projects. When asked what I’m working on, invariably I’m always working on something I am only able to refer to as a ‘project.’ I have always known one of the things I like about projects is that they end. If you are in a band, and you don’t want to be in the band anymore, the band has to break up, but a project simply runs its course. A project is agreeing to work on a certain set of questions for a certain period of time. I have often wondered if a project is the opposite of activism. With activism you need to keep fighting forever, since injustice is never solved, it must be fought against ceaselessly. A project ends, while activism must keep going. Of course, each project is followed by another project, the next one. In this sense a project is mainly a way of compartmentalizing time. (Perhaps compartmentalizing it in a way that changes it from political or historical time, into a more apolitical, ahistorical modality.) A project will usually take a couple of months, a longer project might take a few years, but activism is measured in generations. For activism to truly shift society, each generation needs to pick up the struggle then keep pushing. This is clearly impossible without some larger, active sense of cultural memory.
I keep circling round and round this idea that what politics needs today is a different way of thinking about time, that the problem with Marxism is it was working towards victory in the future, while what we need is more like a victory of living together in mutual loneliness, a victory-in-the-present-as-future-that-will-never-come, which sounds frustrating, and probably is. But how to imagine this impossible present-future hybrid as not frustrating, as something good, something desirable, a struggle and strength worth having, as possible. Trying to imagine the things I am not yet able to imagine.
7.
I wish I were a better activist, a better citizen. I’m too defeatist. Whatever I undertake, I always have the overwhelming feeling it will fail. The one exception to this defeatism is art. In art, paradoxically, I often trick myself into thinking that failure is a kind of success. A ‘perfect’ work feels dead and sterile. (Also works that strive towards perfection.) For me, in art, it is only failure, imperfection, vulnerability that opens things up, makes them human, leaves room for the viewer or reader to enter the machine. I try to remind myself that activism too is about failure, is always incomplete. Sometimes I wonder if the only problem is that I like art, at times it still gives me energy, but I’m not particularly sure if I like the world. So much activism has a better world as its goal, so if you don’t like the world activism might reflect this desire to see it fundamentally change. What else do you have to believe, before you can believe that something is worth saving?
Perhaps I have an overly romantic idea of what activism is and means. In interviews, the artist Paul Chan has often stated that he tries to keep his art practice and his activism separate. The main reason he gives is that he wants his art to remain complex, controversial, full of ambiguity; and for activism to succeed you need to simplify the goal, so that everyone can agree, or at least agree enough to more fully work together, push towards the same objective in unison. The ambiguity of art rejects easy consensus, divides viewers, undermines clear solidarity. (Though solidarity is rarely clear or simple.) Activism requires the largest possible coalition to succeed, while art needs only one sufficiently passionate viewer.
.
January 4, 2015
Two year attempt...
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In my two year attempt to write a kind of strange, fictional-autobiography I now realize the block is very simple: I don't want people to know about my life.
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In my two year attempt to write a kind of strange, fictional-autobiography I now realize the block is very simple: I don't want people to know about my life.
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August 2, 2014
50 year fragment
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I had an idea. I would write a book and publish it on my 50th birthday. If I lived that long the mid-life crisis birthday would serve as a kind of deadline. The deadline came and went. It was going to be this book, but then I was unsure about this book and wondered if it could be some other book...
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I had an idea. I would write a book and publish it on my 50th birthday. If I lived that long the mid-life crisis birthday would serve as a kind of deadline. The deadline came and went. It was going to be this book, but then I was unsure about this book and wondered if it could be some other book...
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December 23, 2013
The Great Fire of Slander -- (yet another attempt at a new novel)
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About one year ago, I published an earlier draft of the first chapter of this book in a literary periodical called The Coming Envelope. (Not one year ago from whenever you happen to be reading this, but one year from when I’m writing it now. Today is December 13, 2013.) The version in The Coming Envelope was six pages, but I had edited it down from an earlier draft of thirty-six pages, an earlier draft that was also the beginning of yet another failed attempt at writing a new novel. This earlier, never finished, novel was also called Past, Present, Future, Etc., but I somehow had another title or nickname for it. I often called it, at least in my mind, ‘the slander book’.
There were three main ideas I planned to utilize in the writing of the slander book. The first was that it was a book I would decide beforehand would take me ten years to write. The second was that I would use it to slander all the people in my life who I didn’t like (which ended up being almost everyone.) And the third was that I would refer to everyone slandered not by their names but simply by using the letter X.
.
Ten Years
At the time in my life when I began the slander book, I had completed five books but only published three. (Published: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. Unpublished: Polyamorous Love Song, Rich and Poor.) Five books, to me at the time, seemed like enough. I prefer writers who write less, find writers who have written shelves and shelves of books to be somehow pompous or excessive. Another anxiety was that the more books you write, the greater the odds that the well will run dry, the formula become diluted. Perhaps I’ve always had the overly romantic idea that the less you publish, the harder the choices you have to make in terms of what to edit out, what you actually want to say with the relatively small literary space you have allotted yourself. The fewer the published works the more intensely focused and potent each one will be. So, in one sense, ten years was simply a way of forcing myself to write less books, to perhaps write more pages but then edit them down (much like the previous chapter was edited from thirty-six pages down to six.)
But, of course, the other reason for the ten year decision is it would be much easier for me to slander people if the result would be published not tomorrow but ten years from now. And as the book progressed, it would require more and more courage for me to continue slandering people, since the gap between writing and publication would constantly grow slimmer.
Finally, deciding beforehand that the slander book would take ten years to write was about the search for new ways of dealing with time. As mentioned in the previous chapter, more and more I feel that time is the problem that politics must begin to solve. To reconcile ourselves with the fact that we’re going in circles, and put this fact to better political use.
Slander
There has always been a chasm between my public persona and my inner life. In public, through the thick sludge of my social awkwardness, I try to keep things positive. To the best of my limited ability, I am warm, supportive, always searching for ways to keep going. But inside my head are almost only negative thoughts. In this dynamic there is some residue of my teenage attempt to reinvent myself, to not become a caricature, to avoid the self-parody that all depressed souls so easily drift down into. Instead of wearing black I would wear colours. Instead of always predicting the worst I would try to find the quiet humour in each new hopeless situation. In one sense, I feel I live my life in such a painfully dishonest way, and that I’m not doing my depression any favours by keeping it all bottled up inside. But in another sense, for some reason, and have been enacting this divide between my inner and outer life for so long that I barely notice anymore. Another way of looking at this dynamic is that when I behave in a depressed manner no one wants to hang out with me, while with my current personality, combined with a low level of artistic success, there always seem to be people swirling about. When I think about it, I have to admit that most of these people I don’t particularly like, but most of the time I don’t think about it. (Of course, at the same time I’m fooling no one. If you were to ask anyone who knows me, or anyone who has read my work, if I am a depressed or negative person, I am sure not a single one would hesitate to immediately say yes.) I don’t tell any of these people that I don’t like them, instead I try to be as friendly and kind as possible, but I’m sure many of them suspect. Then again, what’s the difference between liking no one and liking everyone?
So a book that would pour all of these repressed thoughts, insights and feelings out onto the page. Not as therapy (though I have no problems with art as therapy, often find it one of the most interesting strains) but as a way of having a different kind of intensity, a different kind of reality, of honesty, in my work. This, however, is not that book. (You can sense the residue of this earlier slander aspect in a line from the previous chapter: “As I get older, there are more and more people I don’t particularly like.”)
The Letter X
I wanted to be honest but didn’t want to attack each of these people by name. By calling them all X, I would turn almost everyone I knew into one many-headed monster of irritation, a monster ready for the sword of my literary slander.
.
I don’t think anyone will have any difficulty understanding why I abandoned the slander book. It was a project that could only get me in trouble and, with every new page, it became clearer to me that I was not nearly tough enough to deal with the eventual fallout or repercussions. However, now I am only on page eight of this new attempt at a novel and already I am full of doubts. Have I started writing yet another book about how misanthropic and negative I am? Is this really the vision of myself I want to put out into the world? Is it even accurate? I remember, years ago, meeting someone who had read my books, and her telling me how surprised she was, that I was nothing like she imagined I would be. When I asked her what was different, she explained that she was certain I would be far more harsh and curmudgeonly. She was surprised how much I smiled – I smile when I’m nervous and I’m almost always nervous – that I laughed and cracked jokes. From reading my work she had imagined almost the exact opposite.
There was in fact yet another, even earlier, version of the slander book (before I had the idea to call it the slander book), with yet another title. It was called I Want To Start Again, and began as follows:
It now strikes me that this earlier opening is also about time, this ‘wanting to start again,’ in fact it is the very conception of time I now feel we need to work past before a real possibility for emancipatory politics can gain ground. This wanting to start again – which I feel so strongly at regular intervals in my life – suggests it is possible to make a clean break with the past, when in fact it only possible to do the exact opposite: to keep going in circles, and each time we come round again, learn from past mistakes, build just a little bit more on whatever progress we managed to make last time around.
I am starting to believe in all this but, I have to admit, I still don’t really like it. As well, I have no idea how big the circle is. Will we come back around to a time before capitalism or only to the beginning of the unions? Or both at different times, different speeds, different cycles? Writing in this way I realize I can’t mean anything nearly so literal. I must mean something more like: the solution doesn’t lie in the future, doesn’t lie in the past, and there is no solution because we’re just going round and round, and knowing this might be the only reason to keep going, even as we crash into difficulties very close to our impending extinction. And yet I also try to imagine it differently, what if the ‘I want to start again’ was not a desire to make a clean break with the past, but rather a way to acknowledge rounding another bend of the circle, to say winter is ending, spring is coming, another year is done, what have we learned and what can we do differently, here we go again. This vague metaphor needs an anchor in reality. Or many anchors.
In writing about the slander book, a project I have started, re-started, abandoned and re-abandoned many times over, I can’t help but recall another book about an earlier book that couldn’t be finished (or perhaps couldn’t even be started.) Much like Past, Present, Future, Etc., The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubaud is two books, an earlier book also called The Great Fire of London that Roubaud was never able to finish, and the book he did eventually publish in which he recalls his earlier failed attempt, contrasting his memory of it with the reality of his current life, thoughts and writing. There is a silently bleak shadow that hangs over The Great Fire of London: Roubaud’s young wife had recently died and, perhaps to deal with his grief, he gets up early each morning and writes, always moving forward, never looking back, meticulously describing his actual working process as he goes. He writes:
And I’m also nervous that, as I write this, I am simply embarking on yet another ‘false start.’ But then, if I am working towards a new way of thinking of time, maybe ‘false start’ is simply another way of thinking there is nothing else to do but round the same circle again, each new aborted start another step in the same ongoing cycle. A few pages later, on page twelve, Roubaud writes:
Only moving forwards, never back, as a way to make sure that this time his literary project will not stall (as it had stalled so many times before), as a way of fleeing from the recent past, which held only heartbreak and, line by steady but almost illegible line, towards something hopefully more bearable. We move forward because we die, because those around us die. A different way of thinking time would suggest reincarnation, that we don’t end but rather come back, in different ways, different forms.
My idea for this book is that, as it goes, as it goes round and round the same questions and topics, these topics might begin to transform themselves into fiction and literature. I think of writing stories in which after we die we come back, in which time runs in circles and activism utilizes this reality in order to undermine capitalism, in which everything is alive and has agency. I wonder if it would be possible to write such narratives without becoming science fiction or magic realism, while retaining a direct connection my own, and to the readers, daily reality and agency. What kind of stories might these be? How can I get from slander, from my own personal struggles, to some larger grasp of how to get off this accelerating one directional highway towards greater dystopia and catastrophe? Or towards a sense of progress that shifts in many directions at once? What kind of circles should I be writing and why include stories? There’s the famous Godard quip: “A film should have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order.”
.
About one year ago, I published an earlier draft of the first chapter of this book in a literary periodical called The Coming Envelope. (Not one year ago from whenever you happen to be reading this, but one year from when I’m writing it now. Today is December 13, 2013.) The version in The Coming Envelope was six pages, but I had edited it down from an earlier draft of thirty-six pages, an earlier draft that was also the beginning of yet another failed attempt at writing a new novel. This earlier, never finished, novel was also called Past, Present, Future, Etc., but I somehow had another title or nickname for it. I often called it, at least in my mind, ‘the slander book’.
There were three main ideas I planned to utilize in the writing of the slander book. The first was that it was a book I would decide beforehand would take me ten years to write. The second was that I would use it to slander all the people in my life who I didn’t like (which ended up being almost everyone.) And the third was that I would refer to everyone slandered not by their names but simply by using the letter X.
.
Ten Years
At the time in my life when I began the slander book, I had completed five books but only published three. (Published: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. Unpublished: Polyamorous Love Song, Rich and Poor.) Five books, to me at the time, seemed like enough. I prefer writers who write less, find writers who have written shelves and shelves of books to be somehow pompous or excessive. Another anxiety was that the more books you write, the greater the odds that the well will run dry, the formula become diluted. Perhaps I’ve always had the overly romantic idea that the less you publish, the harder the choices you have to make in terms of what to edit out, what you actually want to say with the relatively small literary space you have allotted yourself. The fewer the published works the more intensely focused and potent each one will be. So, in one sense, ten years was simply a way of forcing myself to write less books, to perhaps write more pages but then edit them down (much like the previous chapter was edited from thirty-six pages down to six.)
But, of course, the other reason for the ten year decision is it would be much easier for me to slander people if the result would be published not tomorrow but ten years from now. And as the book progressed, it would require more and more courage for me to continue slandering people, since the gap between writing and publication would constantly grow slimmer.
Finally, deciding beforehand that the slander book would take ten years to write was about the search for new ways of dealing with time. As mentioned in the previous chapter, more and more I feel that time is the problem that politics must begin to solve. To reconcile ourselves with the fact that we’re going in circles, and put this fact to better political use.
Slander
There has always been a chasm between my public persona and my inner life. In public, through the thick sludge of my social awkwardness, I try to keep things positive. To the best of my limited ability, I am warm, supportive, always searching for ways to keep going. But inside my head are almost only negative thoughts. In this dynamic there is some residue of my teenage attempt to reinvent myself, to not become a caricature, to avoid the self-parody that all depressed souls so easily drift down into. Instead of wearing black I would wear colours. Instead of always predicting the worst I would try to find the quiet humour in each new hopeless situation. In one sense, I feel I live my life in such a painfully dishonest way, and that I’m not doing my depression any favours by keeping it all bottled up inside. But in another sense, for some reason, and have been enacting this divide between my inner and outer life for so long that I barely notice anymore. Another way of looking at this dynamic is that when I behave in a depressed manner no one wants to hang out with me, while with my current personality, combined with a low level of artistic success, there always seem to be people swirling about. When I think about it, I have to admit that most of these people I don’t particularly like, but most of the time I don’t think about it. (Of course, at the same time I’m fooling no one. If you were to ask anyone who knows me, or anyone who has read my work, if I am a depressed or negative person, I am sure not a single one would hesitate to immediately say yes.) I don’t tell any of these people that I don’t like them, instead I try to be as friendly and kind as possible, but I’m sure many of them suspect. Then again, what’s the difference between liking no one and liking everyone?
So a book that would pour all of these repressed thoughts, insights and feelings out onto the page. Not as therapy (though I have no problems with art as therapy, often find it one of the most interesting strains) but as a way of having a different kind of intensity, a different kind of reality, of honesty, in my work. This, however, is not that book. (You can sense the residue of this earlier slander aspect in a line from the previous chapter: “As I get older, there are more and more people I don’t particularly like.”)
The Letter X
I wanted to be honest but didn’t want to attack each of these people by name. By calling them all X, I would turn almost everyone I knew into one many-headed monster of irritation, a monster ready for the sword of my literary slander.
.
I don’t think anyone will have any difficulty understanding why I abandoned the slander book. It was a project that could only get me in trouble and, with every new page, it became clearer to me that I was not nearly tough enough to deal with the eventual fallout or repercussions. However, now I am only on page eight of this new attempt at a novel and already I am full of doubts. Have I started writing yet another book about how misanthropic and negative I am? Is this really the vision of myself I want to put out into the world? Is it even accurate? I remember, years ago, meeting someone who had read my books, and her telling me how surprised she was, that I was nothing like she imagined I would be. When I asked her what was different, she explained that she was certain I would be far more harsh and curmudgeonly. She was surprised how much I smiled – I smile when I’m nervous and I’m almost always nervous – that I laughed and cracked jokes. From reading my work she had imagined almost the exact opposite.
There was in fact yet another, even earlier, version of the slander book (before I had the idea to call it the slander book), with yet another title. It was called I Want To Start Again, and began as follows:
I want to start again. I want to write a book that has nothing to do with any of the books I’ve written before. This is the kind of book you write when you think you might soon be dead.
A book to make enemies, to take revenge on people who most likely don’t deserve it. Should I keep the names the same or change them? I will change the names. The world is small enough. Those who care about such things will figure it out. Gossip is a false mystery that must be solved.
A few seconds ago I felt confident I would openly slander people and now, still on the first page, I am no longer sure it is a good idea, this oscillation being so familiar it hurts.
I’m still on the first page and, already, I know I basically won’t slander anyone. And yet, still, I want to start again. I always want to start again.
It now strikes me that this earlier opening is also about time, this ‘wanting to start again,’ in fact it is the very conception of time I now feel we need to work past before a real possibility for emancipatory politics can gain ground. This wanting to start again – which I feel so strongly at regular intervals in my life – suggests it is possible to make a clean break with the past, when in fact it only possible to do the exact opposite: to keep going in circles, and each time we come round again, learn from past mistakes, build just a little bit more on whatever progress we managed to make last time around.
I am starting to believe in all this but, I have to admit, I still don’t really like it. As well, I have no idea how big the circle is. Will we come back around to a time before capitalism or only to the beginning of the unions? Or both at different times, different speeds, different cycles? Writing in this way I realize I can’t mean anything nearly so literal. I must mean something more like: the solution doesn’t lie in the future, doesn’t lie in the past, and there is no solution because we’re just going round and round, and knowing this might be the only reason to keep going, even as we crash into difficulties very close to our impending extinction. And yet I also try to imagine it differently, what if the ‘I want to start again’ was not a desire to make a clean break with the past, but rather a way to acknowledge rounding another bend of the circle, to say winter is ending, spring is coming, another year is done, what have we learned and what can we do differently, here we go again. This vague metaphor needs an anchor in reality. Or many anchors.
In writing about the slander book, a project I have started, re-started, abandoned and re-abandoned many times over, I can’t help but recall another book about an earlier book that couldn’t be finished (or perhaps couldn’t even be started.) Much like Past, Present, Future, Etc., The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubaud is two books, an earlier book also called The Great Fire of London that Roubaud was never able to finish, and the book he did eventually publish in which he recalls his earlier failed attempt, contrasting his memory of it with the reality of his current life, thoughts and writing. There is a silently bleak shadow that hangs over The Great Fire of London: Roubaud’s young wife had recently died and, perhaps to deal with his grief, he gets up early each morning and writes, always moving forward, never looking back, meticulously describing his actual working process as he goes. He writes:
And I am writing only in order to keep on going, to elude the anguish awaiting me once I break off, once I suspend their uncertain and awkward progression, in order that this new beginning, in the wake of so much anxiety and paralysis, won’t turn out to be merely a false start of the prose enterprise, object of my vain endeavours for so many years.
And I’m also nervous that, as I write this, I am simply embarking on yet another ‘false start.’ But then, if I am working towards a new way of thinking of time, maybe ‘false start’ is simply another way of thinking there is nothing else to do but round the same circle again, each new aborted start another step in the same ongoing cycle. A few pages later, on page twelve, Roubaud writes:
So then I write in this notebook, and each autonomous slice of prose figures here like a white paper band of sorts running with even stripes of black lines, closely written in a minute and almost illegible script (even I find it so on occasion!) between other lines, red or green, marked with dates (of composition), a numerical order, some sort of title. These red or green lines separate the black slices, each supplemented by a line of white. There are rarely any additions or corrections – infrequently, and for two reasons: the first being that I never move, as it were, backwards, and hesitate only mentally; the second, that any rate there is practically no space for corrections, because the lines are extremely dense (a good hundred or so upon a single page), full from one edge to the other, from top to bottom.
Only moving forwards, never back, as a way to make sure that this time his literary project will not stall (as it had stalled so many times before), as a way of fleeing from the recent past, which held only heartbreak and, line by steady but almost illegible line, towards something hopefully more bearable. We move forward because we die, because those around us die. A different way of thinking time would suggest reincarnation, that we don’t end but rather come back, in different ways, different forms.
My idea for this book is that, as it goes, as it goes round and round the same questions and topics, these topics might begin to transform themselves into fiction and literature. I think of writing stories in which after we die we come back, in which time runs in circles and activism utilizes this reality in order to undermine capitalism, in which everything is alive and has agency. I wonder if it would be possible to write such narratives without becoming science fiction or magic realism, while retaining a direct connection my own, and to the readers, daily reality and agency. What kind of stories might these be? How can I get from slander, from my own personal struggles, to some larger grasp of how to get off this accelerating one directional highway towards greater dystopia and catastrophe? Or towards a sense of progress that shifts in many directions at once? What kind of circles should I be writing and why include stories? There’s the famous Godard quip: “A film should have a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order.”
.
May 14, 2013
Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #3
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So much of my life, like so many artists in the early 21st century, circles around projects. When asked what I’m working on, invariably I’m always working on something I am only able to refer to as a ‘project.’ I have always known one of the things I like about projects is that they end. If you are in a band, and you don’t want to be in the band anymore, the band has to break up, but a project simply runs its course. A project is agreeing to work on a certain set of questions for a certain period of time. I have often wondered if a project is the opposite of activism. With activism you need to keep fighting forever, since injustice is never solved, it must be fought against endlessly. A project ends, while activism must keep going. Of course, each project is followed by another project, the next one. In this sense a project is mainly a way of compartmentalizing time. (Perhaps compartmentalizing it in a way that changes it from political or historical time, into a more apolitical, ahistorical time.) A project will usually take a couple of months, a longer project might take a few years, but activism is measured in generations. For activism to truly shift society, each generation needs to pick up the struggle and then keep pushing. This is clearly impossible without some larger, active sense of cultural memory.
I wish I were a better activist. I’m too defeatist. Whatever I undertake, I always have the overwhelming feeling it will fail. The one exception to this defeatism is art. In art, paradoxically, I can often trick myself into thinking that failure is a kind of success. A ‘perfect’ work of art feels dead and sterile to me. Also works that strive towards perfection. For me, in art, it is only failure, imperfection, vulnerability that opens things up, makes them human, leaves room for the viewer or reader to enter the machine. I try to remind myself that activism too is about failure, is always incomplete. Sometimes I wonder if the only problem is that I like art, at times it still gives me energy, but I’m not particularly sure if I like the world. So much activism has a better world as its goal, so if you don’t like the world activism might reflect this desire to see it fundamentally change. What else do you have to believe, before you can believe that something is worth saving?
But perhaps I have an overly romantic idea of what activism is and means. In interviews, the artist Paul Chan often states that he tries to keep his art practice and his activism separate. The main reason he gives is that he wants his art to remain complex, controversial, full of ambiguity; and for activism to succeed you need to simplify the goal, so that everyone can agree, or at least agree enough to more fully work together, push towards the same objective in unison. The ambiguity of art rejects easy consensus, divides viewers, undermines clear solidarity. (Though solidarity is rarely simple or clear.) Activism requires the largest possible coalition to succeed, while art needs only one sufficiently passionate viewer.
Yet what I like best about art is how communities form around artists, or works of art, they believe in. How you meet someone who loves the same book as you, and already you have so much to talk about.
So many of my ideas about activism come from a single book I read maybe fifteen years ago. (I am ordering it from the internet right now, to take another look, see if my memory is in any way correct.) The book was Soul of a Citizen by Paul Loeb, and what I remember most about it is the quote: ‘If everyone in your coalition agrees about everything, than you your coalition is too small.’ In this sense, Paul Chan is wrong when he suggests we need to simplify the goal beyond recognition. Or is it only that the more people you have on your team, the harder it will be to reach consensus about anything, simplified or otherwise.
Then there are questions of strategy. Questions of strategy must be the moment where consensus most frequently, most easily, breaks down. I promise that I’m not going to spent the next ten years writing about the fact that I plan to spend ten years working on this book, but it occurs to me now that ‘ten years’ is also a kind of strategy, a strategy to break down my defenses, to wear myself down so I suddenly, eventually, find myself writing things I would never otherwise write; like how in a documentary, if you film all the time, the subjects eventually forget they are being filmed, start to behave more naturally in front of the cameras. I read my own books and think: I put so much of myself into them, but there is also so much I leave out. (Yet maybe they are more ‘me’ because of what I leave out.) But this ten year strategy will not suffice, I need more strategies, so many more strategies, if the reader is to survive.
[Previous excepts: #-1, #0, #2.]
.
So much of my life, like so many artists in the early 21st century, circles around projects. When asked what I’m working on, invariably I’m always working on something I am only able to refer to as a ‘project.’ I have always known one of the things I like about projects is that they end. If you are in a band, and you don’t want to be in the band anymore, the band has to break up, but a project simply runs its course. A project is agreeing to work on a certain set of questions for a certain period of time. I have often wondered if a project is the opposite of activism. With activism you need to keep fighting forever, since injustice is never solved, it must be fought against endlessly. A project ends, while activism must keep going. Of course, each project is followed by another project, the next one. In this sense a project is mainly a way of compartmentalizing time. (Perhaps compartmentalizing it in a way that changes it from political or historical time, into a more apolitical, ahistorical time.) A project will usually take a couple of months, a longer project might take a few years, but activism is measured in generations. For activism to truly shift society, each generation needs to pick up the struggle and then keep pushing. This is clearly impossible without some larger, active sense of cultural memory.
I wish I were a better activist. I’m too defeatist. Whatever I undertake, I always have the overwhelming feeling it will fail. The one exception to this defeatism is art. In art, paradoxically, I can often trick myself into thinking that failure is a kind of success. A ‘perfect’ work of art feels dead and sterile to me. Also works that strive towards perfection. For me, in art, it is only failure, imperfection, vulnerability that opens things up, makes them human, leaves room for the viewer or reader to enter the machine. I try to remind myself that activism too is about failure, is always incomplete. Sometimes I wonder if the only problem is that I like art, at times it still gives me energy, but I’m not particularly sure if I like the world. So much activism has a better world as its goal, so if you don’t like the world activism might reflect this desire to see it fundamentally change. What else do you have to believe, before you can believe that something is worth saving?
But perhaps I have an overly romantic idea of what activism is and means. In interviews, the artist Paul Chan often states that he tries to keep his art practice and his activism separate. The main reason he gives is that he wants his art to remain complex, controversial, full of ambiguity; and for activism to succeed you need to simplify the goal, so that everyone can agree, or at least agree enough to more fully work together, push towards the same objective in unison. The ambiguity of art rejects easy consensus, divides viewers, undermines clear solidarity. (Though solidarity is rarely simple or clear.) Activism requires the largest possible coalition to succeed, while art needs only one sufficiently passionate viewer.
Yet what I like best about art is how communities form around artists, or works of art, they believe in. How you meet someone who loves the same book as you, and already you have so much to talk about.
So many of my ideas about activism come from a single book I read maybe fifteen years ago. (I am ordering it from the internet right now, to take another look, see if my memory is in any way correct.) The book was Soul of a Citizen by Paul Loeb, and what I remember most about it is the quote: ‘If everyone in your coalition agrees about everything, than you your coalition is too small.’ In this sense, Paul Chan is wrong when he suggests we need to simplify the goal beyond recognition. Or is it only that the more people you have on your team, the harder it will be to reach consensus about anything, simplified or otherwise.
Then there are questions of strategy. Questions of strategy must be the moment where consensus most frequently, most easily, breaks down. I promise that I’m not going to spent the next ten years writing about the fact that I plan to spend ten years working on this book, but it occurs to me now that ‘ten years’ is also a kind of strategy, a strategy to break down my defenses, to wear myself down so I suddenly, eventually, find myself writing things I would never otherwise write; like how in a documentary, if you film all the time, the subjects eventually forget they are being filmed, start to behave more naturally in front of the cameras. I read my own books and think: I put so much of myself into them, but there is also so much I leave out. (Yet maybe they are more ‘me’ because of what I leave out.) But this ten year strategy will not suffice, I need more strategies, so many more strategies, if the reader is to survive.
[Previous excepts: #-1, #0, #2.]
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May 8, 2013
Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #2
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Each of my previous books took me approximately four years to write, but I didn’t decide beforehand they would take four years. I started at the beginning and wrote until they were done. In retrospect, the fact that each took about the same length of time seems to have led me to the conclusion that it takes me four years to write a book. Yet this length of time is so arbitrary, rapidly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I put my mind to it I could most likely complete a book in a year (I have always written quickly), but I have already decided it takes four so, unconsciously, I stretch it out. What if I were to stretch it out even more?
It is this question of ‘deciding beforehand’ that pushes my mind into so many flavors of chaos. Pop psychology would nail me with fear of commitment. I am at the beginning, full of uncertainty: is writing this book for ten years even a good idea? will it lead toward breakthrough or mediocrity? will I stick with it? am I only over-indulging my most self-indulgent writerly traits? What does it mean to decide beforehand, what exactly am I deciding?
I believe, for most of the history of literature, a writer had every reason to believe it was possible that people would continue to read their books long after they were dead. Today you would be somewhat delusional to assume this with any confidence. It of course may happen, just as anything might happen, but it’s a bit of a long shot. There are so many writers, so many books, so little built to last. We live in a time when the future itself is a long shot, when human extinction, due to environmental collapse, feels like one of many very real dystopic possibilities. There is little well-reasoned confidence that the future will be better than the present, much evidence it will be worse. Of course, the world will still be here in ten years, but these ten years might also be an analogy for 50, 100, 300, 500 years into the future. What would it mean to write a book that you wanted people to read in 300 years? (I suspect it would be only a hairs-breadth away from writing a book you wanted people to read right now.) Today, a feeling of complicit ‘no future’ increases at a steady clip, yet perhaps this opens the possibility for something else. What comes after the future?
It is arguable whether or not it is possible to disentangle the idea of progress from the realities of industrial capitalism. Progress is the idea that things will continue to grow, to improve, etc. As has often been mentioned, we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. If we remove the idea of progress from our thinking, how does the future change? In some sense it almost disappears. There is no question that everything repeats, in cycles, over years and over centuries, and yet the idea of progress implicitly averts its gaze from this fact. When something repeats, it is never exactly the same: there is an element of how it was before and an element of difference. Progress focuses on the difference, tradition encourages the similarity. But I find myself imagining something else, more like alchemy, that mixes past and future as if turning lead into gold. It is not my plan to spend ten years writing down my random thoughts, keeping my fingers crossed they might be at least slightly profound. It is my plan, at some point over the next ten years, to start making stuff up, elements of fiction, stories that didn’t happen and didn’t happen to me. I still don’t know why this might be necessary. Is fiction only an insecurity around fact? Or around thought?
.
Each of my previous books took me approximately four years to write, but I didn’t decide beforehand they would take four years. I started at the beginning and wrote until they were done. In retrospect, the fact that each took about the same length of time seems to have led me to the conclusion that it takes me four years to write a book. Yet this length of time is so arbitrary, rapidly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I put my mind to it I could most likely complete a book in a year (I have always written quickly), but I have already decided it takes four so, unconsciously, I stretch it out. What if I were to stretch it out even more?
It is this question of ‘deciding beforehand’ that pushes my mind into so many flavors of chaos. Pop psychology would nail me with fear of commitment. I am at the beginning, full of uncertainty: is writing this book for ten years even a good idea? will it lead toward breakthrough or mediocrity? will I stick with it? am I only over-indulging my most self-indulgent writerly traits? What does it mean to decide beforehand, what exactly am I deciding?
I believe, for most of the history of literature, a writer had every reason to believe it was possible that people would continue to read their books long after they were dead. Today you would be somewhat delusional to assume this with any confidence. It of course may happen, just as anything might happen, but it’s a bit of a long shot. There are so many writers, so many books, so little built to last. We live in a time when the future itself is a long shot, when human extinction, due to environmental collapse, feels like one of many very real dystopic possibilities. There is little well-reasoned confidence that the future will be better than the present, much evidence it will be worse. Of course, the world will still be here in ten years, but these ten years might also be an analogy for 50, 100, 300, 500 years into the future. What would it mean to write a book that you wanted people to read in 300 years? (I suspect it would be only a hairs-breadth away from writing a book you wanted people to read right now.) Today, a feeling of complicit ‘no future’ increases at a steady clip, yet perhaps this opens the possibility for something else. What comes after the future?
It is arguable whether or not it is possible to disentangle the idea of progress from the realities of industrial capitalism. Progress is the idea that things will continue to grow, to improve, etc. As has often been mentioned, we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. If we remove the idea of progress from our thinking, how does the future change? In some sense it almost disappears. There is no question that everything repeats, in cycles, over years and over centuries, and yet the idea of progress implicitly averts its gaze from this fact. When something repeats, it is never exactly the same: there is an element of how it was before and an element of difference. Progress focuses on the difference, tradition encourages the similarity. But I find myself imagining something else, more like alchemy, that mixes past and future as if turning lead into gold. It is not my plan to spend ten years writing down my random thoughts, keeping my fingers crossed they might be at least slightly profound. It is my plan, at some point over the next ten years, to start making stuff up, elements of fiction, stories that didn’t happen and didn’t happen to me. I still don’t know why this might be necessary. Is fiction only an insecurity around fact? Or around thought?
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February 8, 2013
Excerpt from I Want To Start Again
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Dissatisfaction, alienation from my own body (and the bodies of others), boredom, an overwhelming sense of disowning, of not wanting, everything I have (perhaps as a way of owning it more naturally or subversively), anger and sadness, in great quantities, that seem to have no object or purpose, nowhere to go. These are the traits, the reasons, that convince me there is little point in writing about myself honestly. Who needs to read such things? Toward what end? But I have written all my other books and now it seems I have no choice. I am the only topic left. At least I can use my anger for slander.
The artistic life has convinced me that people mainly want to read inspiring stories. I don’t. In this fact I might well be in the minority, but I’m certainly not alone. There is most likely a way, or many ways, I could describe my life so that most would find it inspiring. There are so many ways to tell a story. In writing this, I feel such a strong desire to control how my story is told (perhaps after I’m dead, a moment which so often feels to me will come remarkably soon.) I don’t want others to decide what my life has been. I want to decide. Apparently what I most want is to portray it as slanderous.
The neurotic has the feeling that he wants something, can’t say what it is, and nevertheless is frustrated not to get it.
Critical optimism. Naïve on purpose.
I read about Quantum physics and think: this is scientific evidence that has found an incorrect solution. Something is missing, I don’t know what, but some of the basic premises through which the experiments are conducted and interpreted must be wildly incorrect. They do experiments, record results, yet because of some fault in their basic understanding they do not see what is actually there. Or they do see what is there but miss something else even more important. This is my feeling when I read about Quantum physics and I have absolutely no idea whether or not this feeling is correct. However, when read about Quantum physics I also don’t feel that I’m reading about myself. Am I the scientist who looks at the evidence (of my own life and experience) and comes to the wrong conclusions?
A friend in Berlin tells me about retrocausality. He attempts to explain it – I believe he was quite drunk at the time, perhaps I was as well – with an example: two particles are placed in a particle accelerator, traveling at speeds so fast, and yet variable, so that one particle is, in a sense, temporally ahead of the other one. One particle is in the future and the other in the past. When you alter the future particle, for example by hitting it with some sort of beam, it affects the past one. This experiment has been used to hypothesize that events in the future can concretely alter things in the past, that it is possible for a affect to occur before its cause. At least that’s what I thought when X first explained it to me. However, further research made it clear that retrocausality remains little more than a science fiction hypothesis, and has never been proven, experimentally or otherwise. At that moment I felt more gullible than usual. I always feel gullible. Yet things in the future do alter things in the past. Writing this book will change how I view my own past, and also how others perceive it.
There is one past we have lived, and another past we tell now. I have always searched for ways to reinvent myself. Some of the stories, facts and reflections I will be recounting are stories I have told over and over again, over the years finding better and more effective ways to tell them. One improves a story by selecting the sharpest details, choosing what to leave out and what to keep in, various gradations of nuance and timing. All of this happens instinctively, without noticing, most often based on the subtle reactions of the listener. And yet none of the stories would work if they hadn’t once actually occurred; if they hadn’t, more or less, happened to me. Many of these events were dramatic at the time, while others only became so gradually over years of recounting. Others find their first life here, as I remember things that previously had fallen away. This is something I thought I would never do, write about these events all in one place. In so many ways I’m against it. I hate thinking about the past and I hate nostalgia. And yet, like so many others, with every passing year I become unerringly more nostalgic, almost against my will.
A number of times I have watched some of the most brilliant artists I know shift, over a relatively short period of time, into some of the least interesting artists I know. I feel this process always has something to do with purity, with wanting to be pure, the purest.
[You can read one possible opening for I Want To Start Again here.]
.
Dissatisfaction, alienation from my own body (and the bodies of others), boredom, an overwhelming sense of disowning, of not wanting, everything I have (perhaps as a way of owning it more naturally or subversively), anger and sadness, in great quantities, that seem to have no object or purpose, nowhere to go. These are the traits, the reasons, that convince me there is little point in writing about myself honestly. Who needs to read such things? Toward what end? But I have written all my other books and now it seems I have no choice. I am the only topic left. At least I can use my anger for slander.
The artistic life has convinced me that people mainly want to read inspiring stories. I don’t. In this fact I might well be in the minority, but I’m certainly not alone. There is most likely a way, or many ways, I could describe my life so that most would find it inspiring. There are so many ways to tell a story. In writing this, I feel such a strong desire to control how my story is told (perhaps after I’m dead, a moment which so often feels to me will come remarkably soon.) I don’t want others to decide what my life has been. I want to decide. Apparently what I most want is to portray it as slanderous.
The neurotic has the feeling that he wants something, can’t say what it is, and nevertheless is frustrated not to get it.
Critical optimism. Naïve on purpose.
I read about Quantum physics and think: this is scientific evidence that has found an incorrect solution. Something is missing, I don’t know what, but some of the basic premises through which the experiments are conducted and interpreted must be wildly incorrect. They do experiments, record results, yet because of some fault in their basic understanding they do not see what is actually there. Or they do see what is there but miss something else even more important. This is my feeling when I read about Quantum physics and I have absolutely no idea whether or not this feeling is correct. However, when read about Quantum physics I also don’t feel that I’m reading about myself. Am I the scientist who looks at the evidence (of my own life and experience) and comes to the wrong conclusions?
A friend in Berlin tells me about retrocausality. He attempts to explain it – I believe he was quite drunk at the time, perhaps I was as well – with an example: two particles are placed in a particle accelerator, traveling at speeds so fast, and yet variable, so that one particle is, in a sense, temporally ahead of the other one. One particle is in the future and the other in the past. When you alter the future particle, for example by hitting it with some sort of beam, it affects the past one. This experiment has been used to hypothesize that events in the future can concretely alter things in the past, that it is possible for a affect to occur before its cause. At least that’s what I thought when X first explained it to me. However, further research made it clear that retrocausality remains little more than a science fiction hypothesis, and has never been proven, experimentally or otherwise. At that moment I felt more gullible than usual. I always feel gullible. Yet things in the future do alter things in the past. Writing this book will change how I view my own past, and also how others perceive it.
There is one past we have lived, and another past we tell now. I have always searched for ways to reinvent myself. Some of the stories, facts and reflections I will be recounting are stories I have told over and over again, over the years finding better and more effective ways to tell them. One improves a story by selecting the sharpest details, choosing what to leave out and what to keep in, various gradations of nuance and timing. All of this happens instinctively, without noticing, most often based on the subtle reactions of the listener. And yet none of the stories would work if they hadn’t once actually occurred; if they hadn’t, more or less, happened to me. Many of these events were dramatic at the time, while others only became so gradually over years of recounting. Others find their first life here, as I remember things that previously had fallen away. This is something I thought I would never do, write about these events all in one place. In so many ways I’m against it. I hate thinking about the past and I hate nostalgia. And yet, like so many others, with every passing year I become unerringly more nostalgic, almost against my will.
A number of times I have watched some of the most brilliant artists I know shift, over a relatively short period of time, into some of the least interesting artists I know. I feel this process always has something to do with purity, with wanting to be pure, the purest.
[You can read one possible opening for I Want To Start Again here.]
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December 27, 2012
I want to start again (possible opening for a new book.)
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I want to start again. I want to write a book that has nothing to do with any of the books I’ve written before. This is the kind of book you write when you think you might soon be dead.
A book to make enemies, to take revenge on people who most likely don’t deserve it. Should I keep the names the same or change them? I will change the names. The world is small enough. Those who care about such things will figure it out. Gossip is a false mystery that must be solved.
A few seconds ago I felt confident I would openly slander people and now, still on the first page, I am no longer sure it is a good idea, this oscillation being so familiar it hurts.
I’m still on the first page and, already, I know I basically won’t slander anyone. And yet, still, I want to start again. I always want to start again.
For me, over the course of a lifetime, five books feels like the right number for a single author to write. I have now written five: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, Polyamorous Love Song and Rich and Poor. (I have also written three others, a very long time ago, under another name, which I don’t count or think about.) I have written five books and therefore am done.
Yet writing these books has been a kind of therapy. Having something to work on each day, to struggle with, give focus, take my mind from my more terrifying, regular, existential mental habits.
I don’t think of my books as being for the benefit of my mental health. I think of them, mainly, as being for readers. To read, be provoked by, possibly enjoy. Five books feels like enough. It feels unnecessary to continue, and yet, obviously, I can’t quite stop.
There are people I want to slander, who I did not mention in any of my previous, more polite, more fictional, less neurotic, books. This is not a good reason to write book number six.
I have decided all those I intend to slander I will refer to as X. There are at least five or six different individuals, possibly as many as twenty, here all referred to as X. In this way it is a bit like I am slandering the entire world.
Of course, the real person I hope to slander is myself.
.
I want to start again. I want to write a book that has nothing to do with any of the books I’ve written before. This is the kind of book you write when you think you might soon be dead.
A book to make enemies, to take revenge on people who most likely don’t deserve it. Should I keep the names the same or change them? I will change the names. The world is small enough. Those who care about such things will figure it out. Gossip is a false mystery that must be solved.
A few seconds ago I felt confident I would openly slander people and now, still on the first page, I am no longer sure it is a good idea, this oscillation being so familiar it hurts.
I’m still on the first page and, already, I know I basically won’t slander anyone. And yet, still, I want to start again. I always want to start again.
For me, over the course of a lifetime, five books feels like the right number for a single author to write. I have now written five: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, Polyamorous Love Song and Rich and Poor. (I have also written three others, a very long time ago, under another name, which I don’t count or think about.) I have written five books and therefore am done.
Yet writing these books has been a kind of therapy. Having something to work on each day, to struggle with, give focus, take my mind from my more terrifying, regular, existential mental habits.
I don’t think of my books as being for the benefit of my mental health. I think of them, mainly, as being for readers. To read, be provoked by, possibly enjoy. Five books feels like enough. It feels unnecessary to continue, and yet, obviously, I can’t quite stop.
There are people I want to slander, who I did not mention in any of my previous, more polite, more fictional, less neurotic, books. This is not a good reason to write book number six.
I have decided all those I intend to slander I will refer to as X. There are at least five or six different individuals, possibly as many as twenty, here all referred to as X. In this way it is a bit like I am slandering the entire world.
Of course, the real person I hope to slander is myself.
.
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