You will never leave anything that remotely resembles a footprint,
much less a mark, in the rich soil of Western literature.
- The Editor
I lack talent. Take this sentence, it’s dying. Much of what I write sinks to the floorboards. Quite mad to consider that I’ve published three novels. Two. The third one never got out of the printing house. How I have done it surpasses explanation. Never have I told a good story, no genius plot to dazzle my readers. All but a jumble of impressions, often disjointed reflections that nobody would care to unravel. My style appeals to no one. I started by imitating my greats—Pynchon, Cortázar, Nabokov—but I did not even reach the heights of their toenails. So, I turned to my lesser greats: Camus, Orwell, Hemingway, and a bunch of US-Americans[1]. I wrote my first two books fighting the liberality of my graphomania by imitating writers with a simple prose line, though I was mediocre at that too. Lyrical, convoluted, and often incomprehensible sentences belie my determination to keep my prose lucid. I was stunned when the editor at Nord Dam, a leading avantgarde publishing house, accepted my first manuscript. Knowing him beforehand undoubtedly played a role—as is the incestuous way of the literary world—but he could have easily dismissed my first, feeble efforts to become a published novelist from the outset.
The first novel, a novella if you ask me, described a room. A person, of undefined gender (though any versed reader could detect the awkwardness of a penis-bearing creature), studies a room the day before he is going to die. The main character does not know he is about to die. The reader does, however, so I attempted to infuse every detail with absolute meaning since it was the last time this person would ever encounter all those things in themselves, whatever they were. My debut bestseller was, after failing to come up with a more alluring title, titled: The Room. It is a tedious read; few make it halfway though it is only ninety pages. Immediately after its release, however, two critics created a big buzz in a leading newspaper and in a small, but influential literary journal. I was hailed as a pioneer in the nascent school of Detailism. The concept caught on and the first edition—a measly 2,000 copies—sold out. Still, I would bet less than ten people finished the book. Nonetheless, there I found myself, riding the wave of Detailism, a style that thrives by dismantling the grand narratives the “tyrannical” past has enforced upon us.
When you are spearheading a literary movement, you should not shift gears more rapidly than the market can keep pace with. My second novel, also a novella in my eyes, is called Things; a short, unimaginative remake of that contrarian impulse to rescue literature from its “supercilious” heights. I just kept writing about things as they looked, felt, or behaved; while neglecting narrative in a sort of Husserlian kaleidoscope of impressions, with total disregard to any underlying logic that might explain why things emerge and fade in consciousness as they do. If I can persuade readers to wade through this kind of garrulous poetic labyrinth, the prospect of a fourth book remains.
The third one, which was denied entry into the world, carries this title: The Life of Objects. Of course, it’s not life as we comprehend it. It’s a poetic narration of life from the perspective of things, in non-linear fashion, so commonplace objects may appear for a brief moment in the book, before the reader is transported to another faraway location, where similar but unrecognizable objects are presented. Geography is lost, purpose is nullified, objects are portrayed as they exist in-themselves (as if they could exist elsewise) then lost from view without notice, as if below the world’s surface were a giant current of nothingness that creeps in and out of the horizon of perception to reveal things that are and certainly will be nothing. This last sentence exemplifies my incorrigible style: orotund, barely understandable prattle.
Narratives are inescapable, though. Take my first book. I had to place the descriptions of the room within the setting of a person dying in twenty-four hours. A storyline is implied, a barge to ferry words across the river of time. Always water. Can’t keep it out of my writing. Take the first sentence of The Room: “The surface of the bed developed naturally into a sea of ripples.” What a pitiful display of the mundane: a sea of ripples. When had I last even looked at the sea? Why couldn’t I have conceived a richer image? Like wind-brushed dunes. Or the corrugated skin of an elephant. That’s why I never dwell too long on an image. Subsequent attempts still leave a flavor of mediocrity in my mouth. Language can hardly transcend the world it emerges from. Woodlice will only bear woodlice. Language is the offspring of the world. But hold on a minute, could the opposite be true? Can the world be the offspring of language? The world as we know it, full of objects and relationships, which are defined semantically in the mind before they can be apprehended as such, can, after all, only arise once the underlying structure of language has solidified in the brain. It seems like hair-splitting—a classic example of armchair philosophizing. Often it is hunger that interrupts my reflections. Won’t ever amount to the title of philosopher, not with this appetite anyway. Briskly buttering bread for bedtime bite. Ah, an alliteration!
Clearly, I have yet to make much progress. That’s why I keep chaining myself—factually—to this desk every midnight for three hours. A sadistic act that yields scant Parnassian harvests. The harder I try, the more irrelevant all this seems. Truth be told, I never got the point of the writing game. To win the game you must follow the rules cleverly, breaking them strategically, only to reach higher up the board while pretending you’ve been playing it straight all along. I’ve given a lot of thought to the game’s objective. Validation, recognition, fame, success. Success is an emergent property of failure. That is, failure is the bedrock of existence. The awareness that you will ultimately fail drives you to fulfill bigger ambitions, even as you keep failing. You must fail repeatedly, to the point where you feel you can never get up again. Time, like a soft invisible balm, soothes your hurts. Memory forgets to remember. And you try again. Not necessarily learning from your mistakes as much as not caring if you fail again or how you plan to win. A callous heart, insensitive to the blows of fate, begins to conquer the world. The only catch is that you no longer sincerely enjoy your achievements when they arrive. I was a stone-faced Stoic at my first book launch. I yawn reading the good reviews of my books. I achieved a modicum of success, but my hunger for more eclipses any sense of satisfaction. When I finished the third novel, I barely had any desire to write. Or read. Life’s faint spark receded further into the emptiness. I stopped attending the intense psychedelic parties my artists friends were throwing. I gave up any idea of joining a circling session to tap into the unknown powers of the unconscious. I ceased traveling, meeting people, listening to mind-expanding podcasts. I found some joy in watching football, a weak delight when looking at passersby’s faces full of young optimism. But am I playing the game anymore? Not in the least. The image of ash keeps coming to my mind. The ash of paper. The cinder of fame. The smokescreen of success, hiding an aberrant appetite that the world can never satisfy.
When my friend died, I felt something. It was the first tentacle stemming as a tendril from death’s amorphous body. Death became a living thing, breathing behind my back. I became a Buddhist without understanding a single sutra or meditating a proper hour. My attention shifted from the outer to the inner. Watching each little sensation appear and vanish within seconds. There was only impermanence, I would think—and in those early days, I would get drunk, because what did it matter. Those were lively days full of purpose as I discovered the power of nihilism. I could write my doggerel with unbounded pride— “To work and create for nothing” —and laugh, as definitive as a Biblical commandment, but it came from Camus’s monumental Myth[2]. The absurdity of this finite adventure is plain and transparent for all to see. My dictum was clear: I will disappear ergo I must write. Life was obvious; the future spewed its futility like a volcano about to bleach my horizons with a coat of white ash. Drink, write, and feel above the masses because you’re staring Death straight in the eye.
Twenty years ago, I was on top of the world as I hung over—pun intended—an unfathomable abyss. Today the abyss has shrunk to the size of a pothole. Whether I notice the world's insignificance or not, what consequence does that have? I have broken through to a new paradigm: meta-nihilism. My friend would have never reached this standstill, he was the epitome of carpe diem. A far superior nihilist than I, while never once giving a single thought to life’s impermanence. He could drink deeper into the night, seduce bodies ad libitum, wake up without complaint though he puked into midafternoon every second Sunday. Women, men, children came to him to absorb his guileless zest for living in the moment. Like nothing mattered: money, girls, prestige. He would pay for everybody’s drinks until he reached a euphoria impossible to subdue. Then the show began. A dark flaming intellect scorched the soft edges of meaning. The “Midnight Sun from Iceland” —a terrible long-winded nickname that stuck for years—had reached the tropics.
His death was so poetic, beyond anything I could possibly compose. We were traveling in Nicaragua, drinking day and night, meeting girls, climbing up volcanoes, listening to Radiohead, discussing Vallejo and Parra, playing cards and guitars, dancing merengue, eating rice and beans as our only sustenance. We met a Spanish girl, Eva, with whom we both fell desperately in love after just a few hours in San Juan del Sur. A wild girl, with exquisite tattoos, breathing in more mota than air, curvaceous as a spiral of wind on sand. We paid an islander for a round boat trip and walked the island’s coast, waiting to be picked up before nightfall. My friend and I enjoyed our typical case of beers each as we explored the coastline, while Eva studied the fish, shells, and sea urchins. My friend was on to fate, how he believed there was no free will, that everything was destined to happen exactly as it did. He ventured further out into the sea, atop spiky rocks whose tips rose above the surface of the water like the heads of ancient titans queuing toward the horizon, while I followed him hesitantly. He had reached his euphoric state and was talking about the Tao of water (Watts), messages in the wind (Dylan/Shamanism), the superfluous complexity of consciousness (Cioran) and the cryptic endings of Kafka’s novels. Just when, from the furthest rock out in the sea, he began reciting by heart the last lines of The Castle, he was swallowed and never seen again, consumed by the sea, by the world’s appetite, by the dark unknown that hungers beneath the earth we know.
I lost touch with Eva even though we fell asleep that night in mid-act, my penis limp like a sea cucumber inside the drying shell of her vulva. We could not finish after we had just seen the biggest end of all. I continued traveling further north, increasingly disbelieving each word I read, dismantling any ideology that could have sent me to the frontlines of activism, reveling in knowing that pain and silence will gorge the feast of lived experience.
Naturally, for any recollection to be true, I need to remember accurately, retain some fidelity with the mode the events unfolded in—maintain, through memory’s sobering refraction, the mood we were in, the conversations we had, the meaning of what happened. I’m not sure this last part, especially, can ever be retrieved or properly expounded. Each time I replay the sequence of his death, something is changed, a bit is omitted, a new detail emerges, not to mention the bodily effects that thinking of the past can trigger. An anachronistic hard-on may bring me back years before that night at the beach, to women who extracted volumes of fears I had no idea waited deep inside me; or spring me forward to a much later date in Europe, when, as I was ejaculating inside a woman, I visualized the inertia of that fall into the lukewarm Pacific seawater as identical to the force of my semen against the walls of her uterus. That thrust clustered my sperm around an ovule and brought from uterine darkness the light of a child I would call my own, while my friend, the antipodal Midnight Sun, joyous in the throes of uncertainty, optimistic while lost in the fog of thought, descended from this world of light into the darkest of the dark.
you are a man of no talent, an abstract blob who writes poetic riddles, linguistic mirages that can be taken for anything by a readership that today can be as easily swayed as a weathervane.
It’s 2:58am, and shortly, I’ll be released from my self-imposed shackles. Nothing of true literary value in these pages. A whimsical ledger of thoughts as they skim across the paper-thin membrane of my intellect. This is not writing. This is not art. It is a form of wrestling, grappling with time, simulating a grand struggle with language inside the irreducibly eternal ring of silence. I’m exhausted, waiting for the final blow to knock me to the ground, an impact so definitive it will obliterate my last vestige of urgency to impose meaning onto the messy Pollock of reality. What’s that? More convoluted, overwrought images. But it is not only my inability to master the craft of prose writing that exasperates me. I cringe every time I observe how the absurdity of language disfigures reality.
Language is concealment. It hides The Great Enigma. What is The Great Enigma? It is the inscrutable Mystery at the bottom of all things, the Riddle that governs the universe. It is like a centrifugal force that keeps us running in circles, inventing cures, building higher, traveling faster, an impetus that will eventually drive us to develop an AI-controlled planet. Language can never apprehend that ontological desire coursing below the skin of events, that primordial impulse behind the thrust of evolution, the raw force that gives birth to both beauty and havoc, light and darkness, the Ying-Yang’s élan vital so intrinsic to nature, our nature, our urge to keep wading through the morass of
No need to complete what cannot be finished. That’s why I ought to keep things simple. Find a clean passage through the thickness of my obscurantism. To cease systematically squandering the strength of logic, blunting the once incisive blade of thought. I am bound to keep writing, it is 3:07AM and will not stop until I have the kernel of a new story: The lamp is almost invisible; we only see the illuminated objects around it. The pack of cards rests on the desk. The dust of decades has now become a new skin around the widgets of the Canon A-1 camera that sleeps below the lamp.
Maybe the hope is that if I bore myself to death this tautology of imbecility might cease.
Let’s have another go. The lamp stoops in a melancholy posture, as do I. We both stare at the dust as it settles over the 50-year-old camera. Analogue past, sidelined by a digital future. Oh my. I should have stuck with erotica. I was writing that for some time and even got serialized under the pseudonym Don Humbert H. in the local progressive newspaper. The story was titled “The Breasts of Wrath.” Hardly a winning title, it nonetheless had its fair share of readers. I tried to reach the level of high-brow erotica. Fortunately, the editors requested that I keep the language simple as possible—quotidian babble with few philosophical asides—such that the aroused reader could easily follow the mischief of my horny characters. Advice I took gladly so as not to completely embarrass myself with my absolute lack of literary prowess.
The camera’s lid has been lost for years. The lens is pointed toward a deck of cards that is yellowing around the edges. The motes of dust gravitate around the lamp’s light; when he stares without blinking, he feels like he is watching trillions of suns in their two-hundred-million-year treks around the core of a distant galaxy. He keeps the passport next to the cards. Ready to flee at a moment’s notice. His sense of imminent danger has escalated dramatically over the past weeks. Doom is around the corner. The radical revelation, known to earlier civilizations as the apocalypse, was about to materialize, spill over, like a wave of such potent change—we could only label it as a creative disaster. But he knew it would do more than kickstart a new promising beginning. The prophets of the ultra-modern, who claimed the earlier modalities of life would be changed forever for the better through a new social contract forged by enlightened humans, were delusional. He alone could understand the physics of the coming revolution. The latest chapter in humanity’s struggle would unfold as irrevocably as a trickle feeds a stream, a stream turns into river, river becomes a torrent, torrent expands into an irrepressible force that will burst the dam of our self-sustaining paradigms. The prophets call it the waters of wisdom washing over the forsaken land. The prophets could not foresee that, as he did, the flood would leave us in the mud of our ignorance. Havoc will ensue, the famished, unawakened folk will unite to fight the radical policies of the wise leaders. In short, the few awakened ones will be buried by their blind contemporaries. He knew it as certain as a semantic tableau and was therefore preemptively ready to flee the struggle before it began, to hide away from the renaissance of the future’s culture, the reform of our civilization that would ultimately end in bloodshed and misery—as all revolutions in the past had ended.
Midnight again. A new beginning. When I started writing I decided to do it on my own. The pride of youth. In hindsight, I’ve handicapped myself by not getting enough critical feedback, hindering my writing from evolving beyond the echo chamber of my own mind. Now that I’m in my mid-forties, I’ve considered starting from scratch. Join a creative writing class, maybe even take a bachelor's degree in world literature. I’ll fake ignorance and pretend to be a total beginner. Allow a teacher to purify the eschatological tendencies of my prose. I need classmates that will thwart my thoughts from blinding themselves in the skies of abstraction, I want the weight of criticism to stop these flights into abstruse illegibility. I could even use the mentorship of a classicist so they can help me recast ancient myths into novel poetic arrangements (by drawing me nearer to the sun's blazing truth, thawing the icy grip of my ego, so that my unfettered fingers can channel the rivers of verse into a singular, horizon-spanning masterpiece). Basically, I need to come clean, naked as an amateur dreamer that one day wants to write the next Gatsby or a 21st century Lolita. A dream that will be quickly squashed when they read my puny attempts at elevating the English language—a borrowed language—to the levels of High Literature.
Poetry could have been a better route. I wrote a few poems back in the day. They showed a bit more promise. I walk two steps
into the future. The scurrying mouse is a fiction.
This cloud tucked in
the sky
exactly like the idea
of death
when it is folded neatly inside your right pocket.
Death has always been in my mind. Even before my friend died. Suicidal tendencies tainted most of my teenage years. I can’t recall when the void first became palpable but one day it was there, beneath my skin, on the surface of my eyes, on my father’s moustache, in my mother’s melancholy, at the edge of my school desk, beneath the bed, in the substance of every night’s dream. Death diluted the world’s title of true existence. There was no joy left. The spectacle of life became a sort of sorry excuse to postpone the extinction of meaning. To achieve honors at school, exceed in sports, conquer the most hearts of the opposite or same sex, to learn how to play guitar; every goal had lost its gravity. I stopped smiling, not caring what others would say. Shaved my head and my right eyebrow. Stopped paying attention in class. I programmed myself to fail. Locked myself in a room that I kept as dark as the void I had discovered.
[1] I don’t call them Americans because America is an entire continent. Imagine a German proclaiming their national identity as European, to the exclusion of every other European. Here in Europe, we speak Hochdeutsch. We Europeans have faith in our Bundestag. Europe is the land of speed. Absurd!
[2] If I were to be imprisoned in a cellar by a fascist government and had the option to take only one book, it would be this one. Schopenhauer’s 'Essays and Aphorisms' would be a close second. If lost in the woods, I might opt for something short along the lines of Kerouac’s ‘Dharma Bums’ or even ‘Franny and Zooey’ from that real-life Bartleby. In the event of being adrift at sea on a makeshift raft, ‘Meditations’ by Marcus Aurelius would do me well. If I end up in a madhouse, I'd only read Clarice Lispector. If homeless, wandering barefoot in a city; I’d carry anything by Cortázar with me.
