My Struggle

“The critical reading of texts always resulted in the parts being deleted, so that was what I did, my writing became more and more minimalist. In the end I couldn't write at all. But then I had a revelation, what if I did the opposite? What if, when a sentence or a scene was bad I just expanded it and poured in more and more? After that I became free in my writing. Fuck quality, fuck perfection, fuck minimalism. My world isn't perfect or minimalist so why should my writing be?”

“Concealing what is shameful to you will never lead to anything of value.”

Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Struggle: So it's that awful feeling of being ineffective and insignificant, wanting to perform on some bigger stage and not making it, not having the depth because all the time you measure the value of the day on how well your digestive system worked. Did your bowels move freely, did the discomfort or dull aches and pains come to much, is it over. That was it, there was no intellectual challenge. Of course if one came up you'd stifle it with some pallid and ghostly piece of garbled ignorance and dull expression and hope to God that the would do, to parry the blow away and wish for no more oncoming questions or challenges, but I had some brilliant ideas once, I know I did.

So you know that feeling when the idea does come your way, that bright light, growing into something, forming up, making sense of itself for the first time. Like witnessing a birth that's nothing to do with you but you, as a spectator cane see everything, detached and then from that viewpoint you can own it and adopt it and run with it. That's the best part of surrogate creation. Not doing anything at all but just being there so that the thing lands in your lap, you see it for what it is and go with it. Trouble is once these moments dry up they are harder to recognise it becomes a chore. The effort to pull through new stuff becomes a chore.You go looking in some twilight place, you search but there are no clues, it's a trial and a frustration. Like some fairy tale plot where the quest unfolds becoming steadily harder as each painful task is accomplished. Meanwhile on the sidelines the snipers line up to shoot you, never to kill for that would be too kind. They're just there with their pot shots and dismissive comments and enlightened suggestions to wound, to draw blood. It's always about the repulsive power of some stinking blood from somewhere. Paying a price in blood. Religions and disease and life forces all summed up in your bullet wounds and scar tissues. There they are, taking aim already.

I'm at some strange crossroads but without a credible soul to sell, just a ragged ghost that's played out and weak. No devil in his right mind want's me today, there are younger, fresher models lining up on the barricades and refuge camps, on the campuses and in the gyms and glittering canteens of the third sector. He'll have their throats for sure and ravage them like a wild dog. They don't understand any of that yet, such is the power of their educated positioning. But that wont last. So I'm invincible but ineffective, I'll take no one down, I'll just produce a stream of warm, unhealthy air that’s somehow dodged the purifying effects of the system. People will be put off but nobody will actually be hurt, that's important. An old obsolete weapon pointed at the sky with a marzipan warhead and a faulty guidance system. Start the revolution if you will but my life force wouldn't strike a match on a Molotov Cocktail and I could hardly suck an e-cigarette to get it going. It is irritating to get older and more tired.

Refection is for Narcissus: I was trying to look back on myself.  I do it from time to time, to make sense of things like being in a living dream where you can move objects and people, memories and events and get them finally sorted out and in the right place. That's how everybody should approach old age. It might take some strong and as yet undeveloped drugs to achieve this but I'd sign up for the treatment. Ideally it would also tackle all the prostrate and rattle and hum troubles that perplex and annoy. Life's good quality would return, in an unreal way of course but who cares for reality. Reality: a dull series of unending and unedifying debates about things that seldom get progressed generally ending wars of words or as a last resort violence and terrorism. Then some cycle of regret and repair kicks in, there is a short period of enlightenment then the whole stupid process starts again. I cant be bothered with that. You'd think some clever academic would have mapped out a decent diagram by now and would be hawking it around the colleges and so influencing the bright young things just to a) go back to nature or b) just devour all  in their path. There probably are too many active voices on the planet right now. A filter must be applied.