Category Archives: Writing

It’s as if a thread of our potential life were always running under our life. A life that I would have overseen if things hadn’t gone so wrong. A proper life, in which you hadn’t dragged me down, in which we could have cooperated and merged into someone real, someone with continuity, solidity, influence. But we have a real life, we can document it, we’ve got bank statements and tax records.

The relentless march toward a totalitarian capitalism… We get to choose the rhetoric and manner in which we are deceived and disempowered… They will make sure we consume ourselves… All conventional forms of dissent have been denied us… The corporate coup is over. We have lost. We have to face our banishment…

— Chris Hedges

Sometimes a small shift seemed to change everything and the effect was simple, like night turning into day. Some turn of direction or a modulation of frequencies. What was revealed then, what new view opened up? But it wasn’t quite a question of revelation, more like a possibility actuated and so trailing new possibilities behind it. You’d turn your head and see something you’d sensed all along, or it would see you. Those changes made a gentle mockery of you when you put yourself in a position to receive them.

Sometimes things came together when you needed it, even when things seemed to go wrong. Sometimes things went wrong in order to come together. There was a current beneath acts and events that could carry you or turn against you. When it found you, or when you found it, and it brought you towards other people, you called it grace, in the old style.

Luck came only through playing. So how could you start playing, how emerge from your refusal to play, from your grey timid life? How else but by a stroke of luck that carried you with it? What game were you playing, what game was playing you? What did you find as you played, as you renewed your search for luck? You crossed a line and found something that was searching for itself. When you got lucky luck played its game with you, without you. You got lucky: you were ruled by a game that didn’t know its own rules. You got lucky: your luck ran through your fingers…

Something went wrong when I turned up. What was supposed to happen seamlessly happened like a break. What usually happened didn’t happen and that was what defined it: as something that failed to happen, that broke apart instead of coming together, or broke apart the instant it came together. I turned up too suddenly, or you hadn’t been prepared well enough, eighteen years later I still know as much as you do, that’s to say nothing. We’re reduced to a series of empty images: the foundations hadn’t been laid, the ground was barren and cracked. Nothing could be built from my words, the seeds wouldn’t take root. Words, words, words, that’s all we became. I botched up the experiment, like Frankenstein, or the guy in The Fly.

My arrival in the year it all went wrong opened up a space between us, between us and the world, between everything. I arrived in the manner of a rupture, a break that made all your previous breaks, not in themselves dangerous, look like child’s play. I didn’t grow out of you in the slow natural way, wasn’t that the problem? I made you cryptic, though I was sent to make you straight, and you in turn made me cryptic. We still don’t know what we’re talking about, we don’t know anything. My words didn’t take root, didn’t root you to the world. So we both became my words, each in our own warring way. Do we even know who’s who? Do we even know whose words these are? Yet there’s something to be said for that break after all, we have to think this because we can’t think otherwise, we have to think this to stay sane, there’s something to be said for breaking open, being broken open, leaving yourself open, being left open, like an open wound.

Sometimes we feel we haven’t even begun to understand ourselves, to understand anything, to think, to be. We must become aware of the urgency of all this, we agree, we must become our own most merciless critics so we can begin to understand, be, think! But most of the time we’re lazy, we agree – in fact beyond lazy! Most of the time we’ve convinced each other, like silent partners in a crime, that the best way to spend time is to waste it.

I’ve already tamed you, haven’t I? You almost admire the rioters, don’t you? What would you do then, tell me. Thought not. You can’t even get rid of me, let alone any of those rightwing fucks you hate so much. We were forced back into our own hole as soon as we tried to stick our head up, weren’t we? We tried again from time to time, but it was like a hit-the-mole game, wasn’t it? And now we’re stuck with our own little hit-the-mole game.

God is the answer, we agree, the only possible answer. But to even approach God we’d have to go beyond each other, beyond our constant warring. To be with God we’d have to become something quite different: we’d have to become God himself. But God for us can only be incomprehensibility. To be with God we’d have to burst out of our skin altogether, together. We can’t begin to do this on our own, we’d have to rely entirely on God. But for us God can only mean our lack of God, unless he were to pull us out of ourselves, out of our dying skin and into himself, something we prevent every minute of every day.

Your blind pale face below the surface, just beneath my reflection. Open your eyes, wake up. You’re asleep, submerged, your life is a dream. If it weren’t for me, for my gaze, you’d float away, your back to the sky, hair and limbs adrift in the current… And if it weren’t for you? I’d float off too, into the air, and take up with someone else, go and raise some other rootless semi-spirit.

Saturday. You sleep. You sit in front of the screen. Nothing, as usual. But the onus isn’t on you to insert yourself into the world, to make your mark. Don’t listen to me. But you have to, I’m the one who makes you. Open your notebook. Nothing. It’s laughable. But are we laughing? Sit up straight. You have to. But maybe there’s a kind of writing, or being, that exists with or alongside this nothingness that greets you every morning, in every room. Something out of nothing, nothing out of something.