Dark

What would the world be without repression, without displacement, without contempt, without hatred, without anti-depressants, drugs, deviations – in short, a world with consequences, faced without any insulating weakness? A wandering conglomeration of despairing bodies that begs its outsiders to shoot each one in the face. Are we not more honorable a breed to deny all this, to part with the ways that keep individuals from facing the horrifying nakedness of their despair, even if this makes us depressed, though with enough will to live as to leave the shimmering possibility of honest happiness coming our way? Observe your actions and you will likely find a cover-up for something deeper and nastier that you feel at the back of your mind in moments of solitude, moments away from the dazzling transcendence offered by this world that seems now to specialize in the sensational – that nonetheless has a solution, and while this solution places you in the territory of truth, it is a territory that involves the unhappiness in noting the untruth that the world around you entertains – nevertheless an unhappiness with a sense of hope, an unhappiness with high-flying moments of enchanting euphoria, that when it grasps you at those moments you could never foresee, you feel as if you were the living Christ observing children at the serious work of being carefree.

My Own Bad Writing

I'm sure I would write ten thousand times more if I didn't think my writing was awful. It's as if every facet of my creativity is against using common words and phrases; as if there were not great writers of the past who wrote conservatively. The root of it is probably my perfectionism. How bad is my perfectionism? It took me approximately six months to find a computer that suited me; analogously, I cannot create unless I know it suits me, unless I know it is ideal. It was painful beyond anything I've experienced just to discipline myself to write first drafts as first drafts -- as the skeletons upon which I would return with a fresh mind and add the remaining parts. On the top of a novel I have been neglecting too long in writing there is, in size 48 font, Hemingway's great secret: "All first drafts are shit." The most severe aspect is that I expect myself to write as good as a few of the greatest writers in history; and I still am yet to find a book that I consider, as a unity, to be something written excellently. I demand an ideal of myself I have never seen in the concrete; this is my doorstep to insanity.

But an interesting thing happened just prior to writing this post. I had been for the last hour or so in a shallow depression over my own ability as a philosopher -- not so much my ideas as my perceived inability to present them adaquetely -- when I opened up this laptop, less than a week and a half old, and see extremely lightly shaded blotches at the bottom right of my screen. At this moment my unhappiness that was based on my philosophical abilities transitioned to something as silly as blotches on a screen; I did every possible thing to see if there wasn't an indention in the screen, and eventually I realized it was a momentary fix, something that happened when the screen had been shut a while and needed a few seconds to warm up again. I remember I felt happy; happy in the exact same sense I had been when I had solved much deeper problems in the past, such as the one that just yielded to the screen-related one. I have just proven the relativity of happiness; that happiness has no absolute external attachment. I have always felt this, known it intuitively, but now it has blossomed in a concrete example. I no longer wonder: is it possible that someone can feel the same unhappiness in not having ten dollars as someone else not eating? Yes, it is. There is an adaptation to happiness; what is at first bewildering and proportionately a cause of unhappiness may eventually, through repetition and expectation, become something of a footnote in the book of unhappiness. There are children starving in foreign countries; but there are also spoiled American adolescents -- there is no reason to think that their unhappiness is not the same, that the former cannot be happier than the latter.

Odd thoughts. In the last four or five days I have written approximately 5800 words, all of which are dedicated to short stories -- a new writing-form for me, inspired by none other than Kafka himself; prior to him I considered short stories to be the historical writer's warm-up to writing novels. But this simply isn't the case. One story was inspired by a horrifyingly beautiful dream I had about a love that promised something wonderful but never actualized; I awoke at 4am, and in the midst of having my thoughts drowned by melancholy I decided to use my pain as a means of expression, essentially a means of communication. Few writers know how to write about love without delving into woods saturated with emotion; I shall at least make an attempt to particularize the experience from my own standing. The whole story is evidence of the humor of God; I am also writing a short story revolving around a murder. And with both the words and feelings are flowing without any obscurity.

At so many moments I have the palpable feeling that writing is something foreign to my capacities; but I know that I'm a better writer than so many people I've read (which could be taken as a bit of circular reasoning: if I write like I think writing should be and consider a good deal of other writers to be subordinate to me, then those who I consider subordinate, in doing the same thing with their writing, can easily conclude the same with me). The thought that precedes my resolution to sit down and write often causes a revulsion in me, and no matter how hard I try to put forth my best effort, I still seem to fall short of what I perceive myself capable of. To read my own work is oftentimes blatantly impossible.

But eventually it will work out. Something will be published, no matter how tarnished the material itself is; people will approve of me -- there is always someone who approves -- and people will disapprove -- just like Stalin, who called Dostoevsky a "superlatively bad writer", or Tolstoy, who considered his writing to be immoral to the point of unreadable --, and I will naturally take the place of those who approve. The perception of my writing will thereby have the possibility of becoming colored with the admiration of others; and this neurotic self-contempt for my writing abilities will become a thing of the past. Or maybe I won't be published. Ever. Maybe the rejection letters will reach the ceiling; maybe they will reproach me for being didactic, pseudo-intellectualistic, flamboyant, pedantic. I could take life a lot less seriously. And maybe this is a goal that is within my power to reach now. Maybe this conviction of a calling is simply a delusion. I don't know.

Bad Writing

Writing today is excrement, and apparently convention has an appropriate diet. The essence of it is something of a stacatto presentation of ideas that smack very faintly of an attempted spirit of Hemingway, but unfortunately the one spirit that drank himself to oblivion, not the one that reinvented writing. Unlike prior to the 20th century, which was overwrought with a violent use of adjectives and adverbs, today's writers have entirely forgotten how to use such things; what is left is an oftentimes failed wit without sufficient explanation, no psychological depth, a sea of dialogue whose fish are helplessly dying, all clouded in words and word-phrases that a moderately educated American would use -- that is to say, something utterly boring and without inspiration or passion. Of all the writers alive today, of all the endless novels I have half-hopefully looked through, there is only one that comes to mind as being worthy, one that has rescued the present by holding with him a remnant of the past: Milan Kundera. His very name seems to the American to symbolize the obscurity the air of which his writing style breathes, and so much the worse for that, and so much the worse for this: his writing seems to a lazy subjectivity to be hedging the line of didactic philosophical thought, but nevertheless his Unbearable Lightness of Being, a work that centers on the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrance, is considered a contemporary classic, and like all classics, it is beginning to be forgotten. His present work I have heard nothing exciting about; he is the Czech reflection of his American counterpart, John Updike, who also has written masterpieces, who also has his genius obscured by a skyline of bad writing, sustained by very bad readers, very superficial emotional quips, and who seems to have melted under the pressure to be great without effort, rather than eternally noble with effort.

Two things this writing-community needs to regain its composure and actually entail the possibility of nesting a luminary in its midst: darkness and poetic prose. The incarnations I am thinking of go no further than Kafka and Nabokov, the former who was dark but conservative to the point of being poetic only in retrospect, the latter whose poetic beauty shone through every single word he wrote but nevertheless wrote on shaded grounds -- grounds with psychological darkness but without a darkness of environment that gave his characters the inability to fully reach the light of humanity. With Kafka one perceives the dark matter of one's soul that one would otherwise choose to neglect, sees and perpetuates the stare until he is exorcised of the demons Kafka masterfully brings to light; with Nabokov one sees everything from the commonplace to the particularly depraved through the lens of immaculate presentation, and one thereby learns to see the world, even in its nasty and decadent aspects, as something with roots, something that has a source, something that can be given greater attention and hence from which can be stolen detail -- for it is, after all, the details in life that ultimately make one thing different from another, memorable in contrast with another. Detail is why a man or a woman you have fallen for is not a body snatched at random from a pool of 6 billion that satisfies your desires for the simple sake of expedience.

The problem goes back to our revulsion for language, our ignorance of its capacity; our age has become too scientific, too positivistic, too statistical to ever play according to the rules of unbounded expression, and this all goes back to our education, where even the literature books are filled to the brim with superfluous historical information over the writer whose work seems to take a backseat. It would not be inappropriate to sit down an English major whose paths cross with yours and ask him a simple question: why this and not history? At least history is interesting because it has a broader context, because it contains information that transcends fact, information that is capable of edifying, not to mention information that is actually useful in making one appear interesting. This is not to say that the lives of the writers are boring, but only that without a little freedom given to the reader to actually enjoy his work, the writer becomes an abstraction, someone without blood, without spirit, without passion -- someone terribly like the person reading, and this can't help but be repugnant. Words become interesting only as soon as they magnify an experience penned by the author; without this they are only in the way. And authors today do have fascinating experiences; they only lack a flashlight with which to make them seen.

Goodnight.