Secret Pleasure, Secret Poison

.


Idea for a novel about two friends who both decide to become counterfeiters, one of whom decides to make counterfeit art while the other decides to make counterfeit money.

Working title: Secret Pleasure, Secret Poison



*



The first few pages:


For years I couldn’t stop writing about the oncoming fascism and then the fascism was here and I couldn’t seem to write about it anymore. Most of the people I interacted with on a daily basis didn’t know that capitalism was already over. I knew. Which might be one of the reasons I chose to enact my foolish plan. There were many contradictory and confused reasons.

The memory is somewhat unclear, except the fact that we were both drinking, me noticeably more so. I remember her saying: “I’ve always imagined an ongoing game where the purpose is to try to invent an art movement.” And I remember thinking: Why just a game, why not actually make an art movement in real life. And then, as if reading my mind, she followed up: “I mean, art movements were a thing that happened last century. I don’t think they’re really a thing that can still happen now.” And I thought to myself: “But why not try? Attempt the impossible. Rise to the challenge.”

That was the night I first had the idea. But I’m not sure if I told her then, or some other night. And I know she never told me. I had to find out through other sources. But then, much later, when asked, she replied that I could stop by some time to watch her work. It was even more specific: she said she’d be interested in having me there, sensing my reactions. By then we were both in what one might refer to as deep trouble. I’m not sure if she knew it more than I did, or if I knew it more than her, or we both knew so on equal footing. There was also a sense in which neither of us knew, our activities too seductive, the anticipation that you could have your cake and eat it too. (The French version of this expression is to have both the butter and the money for the butter. The reference to money brings us closer to the point.)

The dilemma that most concerned me was as follows: I hated money and I wanted money. Money isn’t real. It’s a fiction, a story. But money can do things that nothing else can. So in that sense – at the level of power – it has some sort of greater reality.

Art movement became code. “How’s your Situationism going?” she might ask, then a few weeks later she’d instead ask about my Cubism, and I’d respond by asking her about the Stuckists. (If you don’t know about the Stuckists, we’ll find our way back to them a bit later on.) There have been many art movements in human history, so we tried to keep it all spread out. I didn’t know all that much about the topic when we began. I had to keep reading up. I was often looking for things to read that didn’t add any extra stress to my already stressful life.

My stress focused on the idea I’d be caught. I tried to calm my nerves with the counter-notion that there were worse things in this world then being sent to jail. I wasn’t certain exactly what it would be like, didn’t do any research into the eventual reality of the experience, but I imagined there’d be things I could learn. Conversations with individuals I would never otherwise meet, exercise I’d never otherwise do, reading and writing. It might be dangerous, I certainly intended to avoid it if at all possible, but anything that occurred would also be an experience.

At the same time, jails are getting worse, fascist jails obviously worse than previous ones, which were already unbearably cruel. If I had a choice, I would choose to live in a world without prisons. But we don’t get to choose the world we live in, we only get to choose the world we fight for. So many of my ideas about the world, what it’s like, were from what it was like before, and I often have to think long and hard in order to understand or describe what things are like now.

Many artists feel their work does not get all the attention it deserves. Jealousy of other artists is perhaps one of the most natural part of being an artist. She responded to this common impasse in a unique way. She had a theory that the more she hid away, the more interest in her work would increase. That hiding and success were, for her at least, intertwined. It began on a whim with her not attending one of her own openings, then later announcing her absence in advance. Already there were relatively few photographs of her in circulation, and she then made a certain effort to scrub as many of the remaining ones, to avoid having her picture taken whenever possible.

Her work had a certain following, but she was far from famous, and there was certainly no one chasing after her for pictures. That she no longer made public appearances merited a certain degree of curiosity, and if someone decided to write about her they would often mention it in the opening paragraph. In fact, it seemed there was now slightly more press than before, and sales slightly increased over time, leading her belief that her theory was correct. Many still knew what she looked like, she hadn’t magically transformed into Thomas Pynchon or Elena Ferrante overnight, but there was, nonetheless, some new sense of mystery. When I thought of this aspect I was always intrigued. How it was possible to be both public and secret at the same time. How your art was directly connected to your physical appearance and biographical details, and interest in it could be influenced by how many of these biographical details you chose to release. How when people looked at your art, they were also considering it in relation to your life.

I saw her only about a dozen times during the years we were both fully immersed in our art movements. Most of these encounters took place in my visits to her studio, across vast swathes of silence as I watched her paint. Watching someone paint is almost an artform unto itself. At least that’s how I considered my approach to the activity, giving it my full concentration. Sometimes we spoke while she painted, but most of the time it was silence, and then when she was done for the day we’d eat together, not have a drink together (since I was already clean by that point), and speak of the things we didn’t allow ourselves to speak about with anyone else, the secrecy lending intensity to every word.

I first acquired the printing press under the assumption I’d use it to publish literature. Maybe there was a part of me that believed this. In retrospect, that lie was also the first of many, all the small and big untruths I engaged in once my art movement was well under way. Before I didn’t have much experience with lying. And what was surprising was how many lies were told at the spur of the moment, without forethought, because the situation required quick explanation, and the real explanation involved information it would endanger me to divulge. I don’t know if I’m lying to myself when I still think of myself as an honest person.

I don’t think I would have bought the printing press if I hadn’t discovered the secret room. The secret room was the discovery that set off the first domino. I had just rented an apartment slightly too expensive for me, all my belongings in boxes in one corner of the main room. I was carefully exploring the apartment, wondering how I was going to set it up and also how I was going to afford it. There were bookshelves built into the entirety of one wall, perhaps the main reason I’d chosen to sign the lease, since over the years I had accumulated a rather large quantity of books. For some reason I was pressing my weight down on each of the shelves, I suppose to ensure they were sturdy enough before filling them. I also ran my palm across each shelf, difficult to know what I was hoping to find, but to my great surprise I did make a discovery. A kind of hidden switch in the back corner of the very top shelf closest to the window. I was standing on a chair when I made the discovery. The entirety of the shelf swung inward on well-concealed hinges, and behind this section of shelving was another room about half the size of the main one. The hidden room was entirely cleared out. It was impossible to guess what it had been used for, yet it had clearly served some secret purpose. I brought in a chair from my freshly moved belongings, placed it directly in the middle, sat down, and gave my mind over to a single question: what use might I have for a secret room?

Let’s return to the night at the bar. Now I’m unsure if I remember the timeline as clearly as I’d like. Was that night at the bar before or after my discovery of the secret room? It must have been after, because without the secret room I don’t see how I could have conceived, in practical terms, starting out. But I also think there might have been a different timeline: that night in the bar, ending with her deciding to start her art movement and me deciding to start mine, followed by a period I put it all out of my mind, until the moment I was sitting alone in that hidden room and the idea returned to me. Now it had a location, and every art movement needs a location. Either way, what I do know is the secret room sat empty for almost a full year before I met someone who knew someone who was selling a printing press. I did some research. It seemed this model might be just the thing. The money to buy it came from a relative who had recently died. Intergenerational wealth seems to be the case behind every art movement.

I remember going to buy my first pair of gloves. This was also a time in which most currency was digital. There was something old fashioned, even quaint, about committing my efforts toward paper currency. I tried on one pair of gloves, then another, feeling what I was looking for was not fashion, but rather something that might become an aspect of my personality. When I was wearing the gloves I could think of myself as a different person, the person committing the art movement. The pair I finally chose were white, in the hopes they would leave behind no threads or particles of color.

The reason art movements (real art historical movements, not art movements as a euphemism for something else) were prevalent during the previous century, and not this one, is because political movements were prevalent during the same period. Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, Fascism (and in a different way Capitalism and Libertarianism) each had millions of passionate, organized followers who often reformatted their lives around collective practices for bringing their chosen ideology into greater prominence. A battle as to how society should best be organized. Many of the same people who were organizing politically were also organizing artistically. Or knew the people who were organizing artistically. Avantgarde artistic forms were made and fought for in relation to avantgarde political formations. To get out ahead of current artistic practices, and to get out ahead of current political limitations, took place parallel to one another and intertwined. The removal of the Berlin Wall is often seen as a kind of marker, both in time and in relation to tail end of an ideological shift. A moment when capitalism won the so-called Cold War and Communism was no longer generally seen as a viable option. And, it seems to me, art movements suffered a similar defeat.

At the same time, I have absolutely no belief in this way of framing these events. The former Soviet Union was never Communism, or at least wasn’t from the moment Stalin took control. And Capitalism won using only dirty tricks. The dirty trick of assassinating or overthrowing any leaders who didn’t tow the line and the dirty trick of giving certain people temporary “democratic freedoms” in order to dissuade them from amassing enough collective power toward Socialism and Communism, and then removing those freedoms when they were no longer required. Don’t go over to Socialism or Communism, they said, because we have these “democratic freedoms” that make our society so much better than any other, when such freedoms were only part of a temporary propaganda campaign for Capitalism that was never meant to last. Of course, it is Capitalism that is now in decline – perhaps a victim of its own success with no other world system to keep it in check. Unfortunately, Capitalism is now rapidly being replaced by Technofeudalism (or hopefully something better if we can summon the collective political will.) Art movements might return if radical politics also returns. If we can once again believe in its possibilities. Those possibilities were once based in the idea of progress, and since progress is a lie, we will need to find another basis. Things do not progress, they go in circles like the seasons.

Let’s return again to that night at the bar. Because it wasn’t just any bar. It was the place we went almost every night. As is so often the case, the times in which we did so were short-lived. There was a moment when everyone was there, then a moment later it was gone. Yet it was all so alive. We dreamed up ideas and schemes, most of which were completely forgotten by last call. Why is one idea forgotten while another becomes one’s life? It was a time of made-up names, so I’ll call her Sable. Sable and I saw each other many nights at that bar, with few in depth conversations. Mostly we just said hello. Or danced a bit. She’d tell me how much she liked a song moments before heading onto the dancefloor. (If I give you the song it might help with the year. And I’m not sure I want to give you the year yet. So, for now, the soundtrack will remain anonymous.) I like dancing but often shy away from it, I’m not quite sure why. The bar didn’t have a dance floor but when it got late they’d turn up the music and people would dance where they stood. We were young and thought it was our place. It’s only a few years ago, but now I couldn’t possibly feel any less young. Stress has aged me.

She said “I really like this song” and took a few steps into the middle of the room, merging with the other dancers. (Something else I might have not mentioned: the bar was tiny.) But a few songs later she was back beside me and we were commiserating about how hard it was to make money from our art. The idea that there was something noble or valuable in making art that might not sell seemed like an unused relic from a previous era. I remember I spoke about wanting to bring that idea back. What would it take to bring back the idea that things had a value which had nothing to do with money? She might have been interested in the idea but didn’t really see how it was possible. Even if you admired things that possessed an unclear monetary value, you still needed money to survive.

And then it was also a question of how much money. We were both able to make small amounts from our practices, but making enough to live from or show off was perpetually out of reach. She said “I know I’m smart and talented and good at scheming and good at networking. And I know there must be a way to make all that pay. But I can’t seem to figure out the formula.” Then she once again said “I really like this song” and shot back into the middle of the room amongst others who might have liked the song even more than her, if the intensity of their dancing was any indication. That night was a conversation that happened in stages, which might have been part of the reason it was a conversation that changed my life. Soundtracked by many songs that Sable really liked.

It seems to me that people today don’t have any particular interest in the experimental. The flavor of literature I had once most wanted to promote was literature that took risks with both content and form and strived to connect these risks directly to radical politics. But no one seemed interested. In producing small, beautifully printed editions, I learned a great deal about the printing process. And, at some point, I began to wonder if I could put this knowledge to better use.

I had heard that the art market was a good place to launder money. Sable was my only real connection to that world. My plan was simply to buy “wet” painting with forged money, then flip them for “real” money, selling them for not so much more than I bought them from young artists delighted to be selling anything at all. All of this rested on a rumor that my family was extremely wealthy, an exaggeration I did my best to encourage. My plan was, whenever possible, to buy directly from the artists themselves, leaving the galleries out of it. I was also planning to do so under a variety of fake names. As you will see, things did not go as planned. They rarely do.



.

Inventory of novels I recently started writing but couldn't finish

.


Over the past five years, while continuing to work on my final trilogy, I've also started writing a number of new novels that I just as quickly abandoned. (Each time I posted sections of them on social media, which is perhaps the main point.) When this has happened in the past, certain aspects of these unwritten books eventually end up in the book I do write, in both explicit and implicit ways.

I thought I would make a brief inventory of these failed attempts to see if, by writing about them in order, there is anything useful for me to learn:

Jealous Friend
A novel about an artist who is jealous of another artist. This is as far as I got: "Most of the time I don’t think about it. A year will have gone by, two years, three, and I won’t have considered the matter even once. But then there are other years that don’t pass so smoothly. This was one of those other years. It wasn’t anything specific that set me back on this once again wrong path. And this wasn’t anywhere near the worst time. But I truly thought I had let it go. So I was disappointed with myself, disappointed to find myself back in this particular mental space. I had escaped it before and would escape it again. But not quite yet. Then again, maybe there was something that had brought me here. A thought. Something that had occurred to me in a flash. Something I’d done to myself."

Jacob’s in a State of Decimation
Another attempt in a long line of attempts to write a fragmentary, autobiographical novel. An excerpt: "I chose the title Jacob’s in a State of Decimation because I thought it could be some kind of commercial suicide. It is a line from a Destroyer song. Because it is a line from a Destroyer song it seems only reasonable that the theme of this book becomes music. I really love music. In the past I have loved it so much I could barely bring myself to write about it. However, when I find myself in a state of decimation, music is where I go to help myself through." I was also thinking this could be a book imagining what my life would have been like if I had stayed in Toronto and never moved to Montreal.

The Fervour of the Newly Converted
An attempt to write a detective novel that takes place in a world without prisons. This idea has now appeared in many of my unfinished novels in one form or another. It has also had many different titles, including Desire Without Expectation (a title I've now used for many different unfinished books which will also be the title of my next published book forthcoming in 2027.). It often connects to the line: "To try, in some way, to break into my own writing style and damage it. To find the necessary balance between damage and healing. To more fully consider the many overlaps between making and unlearning." I also wrote: "A detective novel that takes place in a world without prisons, a detective novel with a twist and the twist is: there is no crime and no detective. A cross between a detective novel and a book-length poem."

Know Me Better Than I Know Myself
To avoid confusion, I am now calling this unfinished novel Know Me Better Than I Know Myself (though it was also previously called Desire Without Expectation) The short description I wrote at the time was: "Know Me Better Than I Know Myself is nothing if not hybrid. A cross between a diary, an essay, a poem, and a novel. This is not the book Jacob Wren set out to write, but rather the book he wrote in spite of himself. As he writes: “The world is a mess. And so am I. And so is this book.” And yet there are so many themes and (unfinished) stories." I often start writing these fragmented, autobiographical novels and then give up. I find them interesting for about ten pages but then get bored writing about my own life. Excerpts of this work were published in atmospheric quarterly, the International Times and a chapbook published by above/ground press.

One Yes & Many Know
A novel about an artist who decides to sell out. It was mostly just this one paragraph: "It would be like a Faust story, but instead of making a deal with the devil I would make a deal with myself. Up until now, I’d fully dedicated myself to art, and to living art ethically. But now something had changed. I was dissatisfied, and my dissatisfaction suddenly had a possible solution landing directly in the middle of it, as unexpected as a UFO. (Though hadn’t I always said: it’s my nature to be dissatisfied.) There was a success that had eluded me for as long as I could remember. Was my inability to achieve it due to some shortcoming in my work, or was it only because I’d never really tried? What would it mean to reach for the brass ring, and not stop reaching until it was fully in my grasp? I didn’t know but if there was ever a time to find out, it was now. I wasn’t planning to do so at the expense of anyone else, didn’t believe that would be necessary. But I was planning to focus on myself, on my own trajectory. A trajectory that was going to be convincingly upward. At all costs. This is what I began to repeatedly tell myself. What quickly became almost an obsession, taking over my life, while at the same time realizing I didn’t know much about success or how to achieve it."

The Biography
Inspired by people writing to me to say that the Luigi Mangione story reminded them of my 2016 novel Rich and Poor, this was going to be a strange kind of sequel. In it there is an author who's written a novel about a man who washes dishes for a living and decides to kill a billionaire as a political act. He is approached by a real life billionaire and asked to write the billionaire's biography. (I did finish the first chapter, which I think would work well as a stand alone short story, so I should probably try to get it published somewhere.) At the end of the first chapter someone kills the biography-subject-billionaire, and in the second chapter I was planning to have the assassin show up on the author's doorstep seeking shelter. I was thinking the rest of the book could be the author and assassin on the run. It seemed to me that all of this would work well, but I also felt I was writing a book I had already written, and I always prefer to try writing something completely different. One other thing: I was thinking of naming the author in the book Wolfgang Wren.

Grand Meeting of Failures
A novel about a group of people who try to start an art movement. But I quickly realized I had no idea what the art movement could be, and if it wasn't something convincing (or at least convincing to me) I felt the book wouldn't get very far. As well, I feel I write too much about art, and I find my books more interesting when art is only one aspect of the narrative (since in some way all my books are about the relation between art and politics.) There were also a series of art movements in my novel Polyamorous Love Song, and I don't really like repeating myself. Though there will likely be some kind of art movements in my future books, it's a topic I can't seem to stay away from.

Money Selling Poison
This was an idea from only yesterday. I posted the opening here. I suppose the idea was to write my own version of Catcher in the Rye. Two sentences from my notes: "The “phonies” don’t know that capitalism is already over." "Just to be clear, I know that “Jacob Wren rewriting Catcher in the Rye to make it more woke” is a completely bonkers idea." From the opening it doesn't seem much like Catcher in the Rye, more like a book about going back to school. I like the opening but, the more I think about it, the more I feel I don't really want to write about school. Yet I'm clearly not certain what it is I do want to write about.

Secret Pleasure, Secret Poison
A novel about two friends who both decide to become counterfeiters, one of whom decides to make counterfeit art while the other decides to make counterfeit money. I really thought this one was going to take, and maybe someday I will return to it. In the meantime, I posted the opening here.


*


Most of the above ideas lasted for at least a couple of weeks, but Money Selling Poison lasted for less than twenty-four hours, which is perhaps what inspired me to take this inventory. Try to figure out if there's any through-line running through all these different ideas, and if there's some way I can use this through-line as an arrow pointing me in the right direction.

This all reminds me of an earlier moment of my writing life, slightly over ten years ago, when I also began a series of novels that I started but couldn't finish. At the time I posted excerpts of them as follows:

I want to start again (possible opening for a new book.)
Excerpt from I Want To Start Again
Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #2
Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #3
The Great Fire of Slander -- (yet another attempt at a new novel)
My Apologies

And yes, someday I am thinking of taking all of these unfinished fragments and putting them together as some kind of book of unfinished books. But for now, I feel I need to keep writing new books, since some days it seems to me that writing these novels is the only thing keeping me sane (though it obviously doesn't keep me all that sane.)

Two final thoughts, things I've posted in the past:

Between writing novels, I attempt to start writing new novels, many false starts. Why does one of the starts eventually take while the others don't? Not a reason but a feeling. Mostly a feeling that I don't know where it's going but I want to find out.

Writing the first thirty pages of a new book and then completely abandoning it seems - if the frequency I have done so is any indication - to be absolutely my favourite genre of writing. (Though for many of these ideas it ended up being a lot less than thirty pages.)




.

Money Selling Poison

.



"I was feeling bitter and washed up so I decided to go back to school. Many people I knew were going back to school around that time. One foot pressing down hard on the brakes while, at the exact same time, the other foot presses down hard on the gas. To employ a driving metaphor, that is what my life is like. But I don’t drive. In going back to school I was hoping to at least lighten my foot on the brake. I was older than the other students, but apparently came across younger than my age, so the generational divide often went unnoticed or at least unremarked. Nonetheless I felt it. Some days it was the only thing I felt while other days I set it aside. Each day I got up and went to class. I had decided to take all of the classes in the hope at least a few might interest me.

I was also trying to make friends. Trying to figure out how to access my charm. I knew, in certain situations in the past, I’d been charming, but could I do it here at school and on purpose? It was, in many ways, a time of starting over. The school itself was a rather unusual place. It prided itself on how few students were admitted, falsely aligning scarcity with value. Yet this falsehood had also worked on me, since the reason I applied for the scholarship was in the hope of spending time amongst people who were more brilliant than those I’d previously known. In the hopes that being accepted might mean I was also one of the brilliant ones. Since there was always some part of me that believed I already was (alongside some part of me that painfully doubted this fact.)

The acceptance email was formulaic yet meant I could afford to attend. Questions concerning money were the main reason many were deciding to go back to school, their decision contingent on funding. A dreamed of few years of respite from the harsh realities of low wages, of underpayment that subsidized a few more yachts and mansions for the ever-growing ruling class. Every year there were more mansions which meant more tent cities. I didn’t honestly think I’d end up in a tent, but I also wasn’t anticipating any great, undeniable success lying in wait for me along my future path. Like many people at the time, I found it difficult to imagine a future path. School would be a way to postpone the question, the inevitable, not indefinitely but for two full years. A band-aid solution I was hoping might unlock a more substantial one.

You might be surprised to hear that my charm did not immediately rise to the challenge. But everything in this life is a work-in-progress."

- From another attempt at an opening of a new novel, this one tentatively entitled Money Selling Poison



.

many false starts

.



Between writing novels, I attempt to start writing new novels, many false starts. Why does one of the starts eventually take while the others don't? Not a reason but a feeling. Mostly a feeling that I don't know where it's going but I want to find out.



.

the first thirty pages

.



Writing the first thirty pages of a new book and then completely abandoning it seems - if the frequency I have done so is any indication - to be absolutely my favourite genre of writing.



.

Story number one...

.



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.



.

My Apologies

.



This book is not reality. No book is reality but this book especially so. Things that happen in reality are often extremely obvious and just as often utterly counter-intuitive. This might also well be the case within the pages of this book but this fact for some reason does not bring this book any closer or farther away from the reality which it is not. Even as I write that this is not reality I have to admit to myself that I don’t actually know what reality is, I don’t know what freedom is, if it is something I want or something I’m only afraid of. I don’t actually know how to change anything but suspect so many things so deeply must change.

When I think what exactly is the problem, I always, almost immediately, have the opposite thought: that there is in fact no problem. There are social climbers, people of unfortunate integrity, people of great efficiency and others who are able to generate so much space around themselves. There is as much devastation as we can bear and there is always more. There are so many problems and in the same way there are none. There is a fairly specific idea I wish to express as well as a fear I might never exactly get at it and also a fear that I might yet do so badly.


+ + + +


In one hundred years it will be 2222. That is the first side of this mirror. On the other side: one hundred years ago it was 2222. This year has been chosen at random due to its repetitive beauty. The iconic year 1984 was famously chosen by reversing the last two digits of the year it was written: 1948. But this book has all taken so long that I can no longer guess when it began or finished. I have already missed the year I wanted to catch, perhaps in the same way that one misses the future when you try to predict it, or the way one has already missed or forgotten the past. At different moments we are different creatures, or not, I don’t know. Or I do know, what I don’t know is if this is the most helpful or useful way to describe it. There might be a more simple way: at different moments we are different, from ourselves and also from others, also from the other that is the self. There are others and others and others and others, and all of them are also us, if you want it, or if we try. I’m the other and everything I do is adding others.

Guilt is conservative. We are all implicated in more ways than we will ever know but shouldn’t feel guilty. We should be angry, must become open to an anger that experiences possibilities everywhere, that opens towards genuinely other ways of seeing our predicament and where it might first or most crack.

Most of the changes that might concern the contemporary reader took place many ages before my time. One of these changes concerns the fact that time is no longer so carefully measured, therefore I can no longer accurately state how long ago each of these changes took place. But knowing how many years, decades or centuries have passed since a given event no longer seems of primary importance. More immediate concerns dominate. Another change: the further in distance one travels the less it is possible to know. There might be other places, on this continent or further, living as we do or living in completely other ways. We don’t know. Some have set out to find more but either found nothing or have no way of sending their findings back. Very few set out. We live here, in the ways that we live, and find other ways of travelling, movement both more and less precise, each movement an echo from somewhere else. In writing this down, in this way, I am directing my energy towards maximum clarity, whether or not you notice or noticing means anything. The steps taken that brought us here are steps we all took together.


+ + + +


Clarity, to speak clearly, to convey what I experience in ways in which it might timidly be met by your experience, neither one overpowering the other, in which reality might shift through and within this meeting. The year 2222 has been suggested, but closer might be 3333 or 4444. We are in the future which is also a past. This is the thing I’m most trying to understand, the trance I wonder if I’ll ever be able to properly express. The repetition of a single number, three or four times, or five, is a way of suggesting other, more confusing, repetitions. But when you experience them they are actually not confusing at all. They are timeless. I wanted to write something completely different than I’d written before and instead I’ve hit this dead end that doesn’t yet know in what way it may or may not be the future.

Here, when we travel we transform. That is a kind of trick, where you trick yourself to experience other sets of knowledge, becoming a meeting place where diplomacy might occur, in the same way these words might become a meeting place between you and some shade of exhaustion, the exhaustion of the reality which this book is not. Every trick has a place to hide and a truth on which it might snag.


+ + + +


We don’t count the years but we do count each other. There are about two hundred of us not including children. This writing is a trick, a trance, a song and a game that at least all two hundred can play. It is a book in a room. You go into the room and you write in the book. You go in alone or with others. You take turns writing or you write together. You read what came before or you start from scratch. When the book is done we will read it aloud and then start again. We have made a life for ourselves that we now want to share, speak as clearly as possible, also further mystify. Later I might edit it, or I might not let you. This might be one book or it might be many. It is not reality.


+ + + +


I did things that I knew were wrong. That I knew were wrong as I was doing them and that I still know are wrong today. Why did I do them? I actually believe I know why, know why with such an intense precision that as I think it cuts me in two. Yet each time I formulate these reasons they fall short. There was a meeting. I believe all of us were there, everyone I’ve ever met and everyone I’ve ever known. At the meeting I was asked to explain myself. I was told first I must change, then I must apologize to each of those I hurt, then they must each agree to forgive me. Over time I must continue to change. At any point I could be asked to leave and never come back. All of this was explained to me before I was allowed to explain my reasons. But of course there was no true need to explain it. I had been at these meeting, been a part of them. They do not happen often and I had not been to many. But I had been, and as I was doing the things I knew were wrong I also knew that this was the possibility. That there would be another meeting, I believe only the third or forth in my time, and that I would be its sole focus.

As I started to explain, those around watching and listening with such muted intensity, I hear my own voice as if it were a voice from somewhere else carefully speaking to me. The voice is saying that something came over me, a desire or a terror,



[Unfinished.]



.

The Great Fire of Slander -- (yet another attempt at a new novel)

.



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.”



.

Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #3

.



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.]



.

Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #2

.



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?



.

Opening fragment from 'Speaking These Lines for the First Time'

.



A performer stands alone on stage reading a text from a screen in front of them. It is a different performer every night but the text is always the same. The performer has never seen the full text before. For each line that appears the performer has a choice. They can either say the line on the screen or replace it with a sentence of their own. It is a kind of game they are playing with the writer but it is an extremely difficult one. The writer has all the advantages and the performer has only the adrenaline of the real time encounter. In many ways it is completely unfair to the performer, and at times we will definitely watch them squirm. (Perhaps the most honest pleasure of theatre: when something unexpected happens, when something goes wrong.) However, in the end the performer will prevail.

Speaking These Lines for the First Time is a game about freedom and unfreedom. What does it mean to use the freedom we have in our culture: on stage, in the media, in our daily lives. We say in a democracy we are free but often our options to utilize this freedom can feel extremely limited. Is the stage a place we can make use of our freedom? Is the media? The internet? The text that appears on the screen will playfully, but also sometimes cruelly, navigate within the labyrinth of such questions. At times the text will throw the performer soft balls, giving him or her easy opportunities to replace what is written with his or her own honest convictions. It is a game in which the first rule is that you read what is in front of you and the second rule is you can break the first rule at any time. But if you break the rules does it actually change anything? And if not what would?




Section One

For the next hour I will be reading sentences from the screen in front of me.

The sentences will be divided into four sections.

In section one, I will be reading sentences that I have seen before but have never spoken aloud.

Section one is, mostly, an explanation of what will be happening here tonight.

After that, the work begins in earnest.

Because – in sections two, three and four – I will be reading sentences I have never seen before in my life.

For each sentence that appears I have a choice.

I can either read the sentence as it is written.

Or replace it with something I would prefer to say.

When I am saying something different from what is written, you will know I am doing so because what I say is not what appears on the surtitle above my head.

I can also choose to say nothing and stand here for a moment in silence.

All of this is a kind of game I will be playing with the writer.

In this game, the writer has the advantage.

Since he knows what is coming next and I do not.

Much like in Las Vegas, the house always wins.

Or how, no matter which political party you vote for, the government remains the government.

No matter how I try to intervene, the text is still the text.

I can change things within it, but it will continue on regardless.

At times, the writer will make me say things I couldn’t possible agree with.

Such as:

“Former Nazis make the best teachers and parents.”

Or:

“When you commit suicide you bring yourself a little closer to God.”

And I will have to decide whether to say them or not.

These are of course statements the writer doesn’t agree with either.

He is trying to win.

What exactly he is trying to win is unclear.

He is putting words in my mouth that might make me feel foolish, vulnerable or confused.

By putting unexpected words in my mouth, he is trying to make my performance more real.

Our lives are surrounded by things that we might describe as “not real”.

Television, movies, photographs, advertisements, the internet, pornography, etc.

One of the reasons we might wish to go to the theatre is to see something that feels more real.

More real than television.

More real than photographs.

More real than advertisements.

You get the idea.

I am really here, standing in front of you.

I am really speaking each of these sentences for the first time.

The way this text is written it is very difficult for me to intervene.

This is much like many other things in the world.

If I wanted to change something in the world that I think is wrong it is also very difficult.

Much like if you, as an audience member, wanted to change something in the performance here tonight your options would be limited.

You could stand up and walk out.

You could yell something.

You could run up on stage and do something unexpected.

However, none of these things are likely to alter my performance in any significant manner.

Much like my own interventions in the text are unlikely to greatly alter this evening.

Unless I were to start changing every single line.

To say something completely different each time.

Which is not the game.

Which is not what I have been asked to do.

Of course, there is not only the matter of what I say but also the question of how I say it.

However, on this point as well, because of the straightforward manner in which the sentences are written, there is limited room for play.

Limited, but within limitations there are always possibilities.

If I say something with sarcasm it might mean the opposite of what the writer intended.

Or if I make the “crazy sign”, moving my finger in a circular motion directly next to my head, I might imply that what the writer is saying is crazy.

There are likely other options along these lines.

As I continue to play the game, and get into the swing of things, it is possible my options will increase.

When the writer writes isolated statements he makes the game easier for me.

If the sentence doesn’t directly relate to the sentence that came before or after, it is much easier to replace it with one of my own.

To demonstrate, what follows is a list of twelve isolated statements.

“The first world thrives off the blood and sweat of the third world.”

“Life in the Western world is wonderful.”

“Poor people can still live lives filled with meaning and joy.”

“The internet is more democratic than television.”

“Life is short, seize the moment.”

“People’s misdeeds are generally caused by insecurity.”

“People will behave differently in different situations.”

“There would be no crime if there was no poverty.”

“Greed is not natural.”

“Listening to me say these things is a waste of your time.”

“I like things that are evil.”

“This text is far too didactic.”

To further assist me, when the writer believes he is writing an isolated statement he will place it in quotation marks to indicate that I might attempt replacing it with another sentence.

But, of course, I can also attempt replacing sentences that are not in quotation marks.

Isolated statements occur frequently in our society.

For example, one of the strategies employed by television news is that each of the different stories are presented as if they don’t directly relate to each other.

This makes it more difficult, rather than easier, to make sense of what we are watching.

The news presents not a coherent picture of our world, but a series of seemingly disconnected facts.

What would the news look like if it instead tried to present a more coherent picture?

If it tried to link the various news stories together?

If it tried to show how the various news stories relate to each other?

If you use this as an analogy for my task here tonight it creates a paradox.

When the sentences I say are more isolated from one another it is easier for me to intervene.

And when the sentences are more connected it is more difficult for me to intervene.

Unlike the news, where the lack of connection between different statements makes the world we live in seem more incoherent, in this game, a lack of connection between statements makes the game, for me at least, more empowering.

However, this is true only if we assume that it is more empowering for me to say my own sentence rather than the one that is in front of me.

Which is by no means clear.

Since what is written might very simply be more interesting than anything I am able to come up with on the spot.

This is another way in which the game is extremely unfair to me as a performer.

But I am brave and stubborn.

And will persevere.

Now that we have explained the basic premise, we will listen to a song for approximately two minutes.

It will give me a moment to catch my breath before we continue.

[A song plays for two minutes. During this time the performer can do as he or she wishes.]




Section Two

As previously announced, I am now reading sentences that I have actually never seen before.

And, as was explained in the previous section, in this task I have a certain degree of freedom.

Freedom is a strange idea.

One might think that one can only be free in a pure sense.

That freedom means having no responsibilities or connections.

But, in fact, one can only be free in relation to rules and restrictions.

There is no such thing as pure freedom.

To be free is not to be able to do whatever one wants.

To be free is to be able to change the spoken and unspoken rules that one exists in relation to.

In this game I can change some of what I say.

But it is unclear whether or not I can change the rules.

For example, if I were to stop reading, and spend the rest of my time on stage dancing, would that change the rules?

To change the rules is always difficult.

It takes time.

And if it goes wrong it can result in complete disaster.

Totalitarian states are an attempt to completely change the basic rules of how society operates.

They do so through violence. By force.

Changing the rules through solidarity is even more difficult.

As well, one person’s freedom is often based on another person’s unfreedom.

The fact that I am free to stand here on stage and speak is based on the fact that you are sitting there willing to listen.

Which is another way of staying that you are not free to speak.

If everyone here were to speak at the same time it would be chaos and my freedom to speak would be canceled out.

So my freedom to speak is based of your lack of freedom in regards to speaking.

Of course, in a sense, you are all free to speak.

But the rule we have all agreed upon is that I speak and you listen.

My freedom to buy a cheap pair of running shoes is based on someone else’s unfreedom of having to put together those running shoes while being paid a very small amount.

However, both my freedom to buy the cheap running shoes and the child’s unfreedom to put them together for a low wage serve another purpose.

To make money for a corporation.

My perceived freedom and the child’s obvious unfreedom work together to create profit.

Profit is what occurs when some people make more money because others make less.

A billionaire could never become a billionaire in a world that was fair and reasonable.

But, of course, life isn’t fair.

When we say life isn’t fair we are also, in a way, accepting the unfairness of the world.

By believing the world is unfair we also create the conditions for unfairness to occur.

Unfairness begins at birth.

Some people are born:

“More attractive.”

“Physically stronger.”

“More intelligent.”

“In wealthier countries.”

“With richer parents.”

These people will, in general, have an easier life.

People who are privileged are rarely aware of the extent or origins of their privilege.

Most people in this room fall into this category.

The things that really upset us do so because they remind us of things in ourselves we don’t like.

If I am upset that the world is unfair, it is also because I am nervous that I am unfair.

Or that I directly benefit from injustice.

Guilt is conservative.

Guilt is not connected to action but to inaction.

Guilt says: I am doing nothing, but it is all right because I feel bad about it.




[Unfinished.]



.

Excerpt from I Want To Start Again

.



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.]



.

I want to start again (possible opening for a new book.)

.



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.




.

Stories I started but couldn't finish.

.



1.
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 be dead soon. A book to make enemies, to take revenge on people who most likely don’t deserve it…



2.
I don’t remember exactly when I started calling it The Pinocchio Syndrome, this: I want to be a real boy / I want to be a real novel thing. I don’t want to write strange, experimental, impossible to categorize, novel-like-things anymore. I don’t want to be marginalized like that. I want to write a real novel with real characters and a real story that will be taken seriously by the literary world. I think every writer of difficult-to-categorize fiction struggles to some extent with The Pinocchio Syndrome (along with the exceptions to every rule.)



3.
I am fascinated by the novel Mount Analogue by René Daumal and, more specifically, but its ending. As is well known, Daumal died in 1948, in the middle of writing Mount Analogue, and the books ends mid-sentence. The last line is:

[...]

I have often wondered if it would be possible to end something I wrote mid-sentence, not because I had died, but for some other reason.



4.
I have been thinking so much about solar energy, about how much of what I read, especially from a mainstream perspective, seems misplaced. When I read that we will not be able to generate enough energy using solar and wind, I feel they are completely missing the point. The points are:

1) That these new, sustainable technologies will force us to use less, will demonstrate – on a real, lived, experiential basis – that resources are renewable but not infinite.

2) That there is more autonomy, and less greedy profit, in a decentralized power grid.

3) That the many exorbitant expenses of polluting the air and water are simply not being factored into the standard calculations. Environmental devastation is expensive on every level.

But it is mainly the first point I obsess over. Let’s say you have solar panels on the roof of your house. Each day, you will use only as much energy as these panels generate. When it runs out you go to sleep and wait for the sun to come up tomorrow. The energy is not infinite, not available twenty-four hours a day. There are limits and you learn, out of necessity, how to live within them.

This, for me, is the main lesson of sustainable technologies. They would force us to live differently, to be aware of daily limits, to find solutions that acknowledge real limitations. They do not make life easier in every way. They make life harder in some ways, ways that force a fundamental shift in how we see the world and our place within it. I also suspect that working within a series of concrete, reasonable limitations would bring along with it a kind of reality and even joy.



.