The five things I really looked forward to this year:

Beck, “The Information”: Shit.

The Mars Volta, “Amputechture”: Wank.

Tool, “10,000 Days”: Balls.

Mastodon, “Blood Mountain”: “Sleeping Giant” and “Capillarian Crest” will kick your arse so hard.

Mark Z. Danielewski, “Only Revolutions”: It ain’t no House of Leaves. It’s probably brilliant, but it’s also off-putting.

Thomas Pynchon, “Against the Day”: It’s Pynchon, but the kind you can read, without agony and sweat, so I can actually recommend this.

Somebody asked me about his [insert German word here], which is the fear of losing one’s soul to the detritus of existence. The kind that hints at the sadness of ideal vs. reality. I’d coincidentally just found my own answer that very afternoon, but it was too wet to show him any wise words. So these are them here:

“He no longer seems to have it in him to produce poetry of the kind he wrote at the age of seventeen or eighteen, pieces sometimes pages long, rambling, clumsy in parts, but daring nonetheless, full of novelties. Those poems, or most of them, came out of a state of anguished being-in-love, as well as out of the torrents of reading he was doing. Now, four years later, he is still anguished, but his anguish has become habitual, even chronic, like a headache that will not go away. The poems he writes are wry little pieces, minor in every sense. Whatever their nominal subject, it is he himself - trapped, lonely, miserable - who is at their centre; yet - he cannot fail to see it - these new poems lack the energy or even the desire to explore his impasse of spirit seriously.

In fact he is exhausted all the time. At his grey-topped desk is the big IBM office he is overcome with gales of yawning that he struggles to conceal; at the British Museum the words swim before his eyes. Al he wants to do is sink his head on his arms and sleep.

Yet he cannot accept that the life he is leading here in London is without plan or meaning. A century ago poets derangd themselves with opium or alcohol so that from the brink of madness they could issue reports on their visionary experiences. By such means they turned themselves into seers, prophets of the future. Opium and alcohol are not his way, he is too frightened of what they might do to his health. But are exhaustion and misery not capable of performing the same work? Is living on the brink of psychic collapse not as good as living on the brink of madness? Why is it a greater sacrifice, a greater extinction of personality, to hide out in a garret room on the Left Bank for which you have not paid the rent, or wander from cafe to cafe, bearded, unwashed, smelly, bumming drinks from friends, than to dress in a black suit and do soul-destroying office-work and submit to either loneliness unto death or sex without desire?… In the romantic era artists went mad on an extravagant scale. Madness poured out of them in reams of delirious verse or great gouts of paint. That era is over: his own madness, if it is his lot to suffer madness, will be otherwise - quiet, discreet. He will sit in a corner, tight and hunched… waiting patiently for his season in hell to pass. And when it has passed he will be all the more stronger for having endured.”
- J.M. Coetzee, “Youth”.

(Here is The Fear)
So now I think maybe, this is The End. It’s time to find a beach and smoke a joint and listen to The Doors at volume, and watch your horizons burn and your oceans turn to steam and your face melt off in your hands. Did you see how we got here? We were grazing in the meadow. They, who largely left us alone but always made sure the meadow was sustained and eternal, They who seemed kind, aloof, and benevolent, herded us into wagons. There were bleatings, but we were quietly cooed. Our journey ends in a gaping metallic void. We know it is The End, and we stamp and bleat, but we walk up the ramp, because that is The Way, and we’re never sure exactly what impulse drives The Way, but we need it, because confronting such tensions leads to implosion, and the herd must sustain. How strange that our sense of individual self-preservation isn’t present as a species?

So what we need now is a severing. We need a voice so vital and eloquent that it breaks through the knots of rationalisation and beholds a truth so essential that not even They can deny it. It can’t be said in simple terms. It needs to paralyse with it’s authenticity. It needs to herald a new direction in thought. To reverse complacency. We need William Faulkner. Fused with Bertrand Russell. On acid. Whatever it takes.

Dear Christianity,

I find peace in the idea that one day my body will rot into particles and atoms which will then be assimilated into the fabric of the universe. I like this idea more than I like heaven.

Cheers,

- S.Q.F. Bartleby

“Do not believe — and I am dead serious when I say this — do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.”

Phillip K. Dick, “How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”

Five minutes walk from Casa Bartleby, immortalised.

Read the storybook version of the Sad Tale of Cerpin Taxt by the racoonlike Cedric Bixler.

“Before it became clear to us what had happened, he was already too far out. We could do nothing. We only saw how the undertow was dragging him faster and faster away from the shore. Saw his futile and exhausting struggle to touch the bottom beneath his feet.

It was only blind instinct which drove him to try and save his life: in his mind he had cut himself off from reality. When, in spite of this, a flash of knowledge as to his situation forced itself upon him, he told himself that the rest of us were even worse off. And when we still took the whole matter so lightly - ! He would certainly still be clutchin this conviction at the last moment when the gurgling whirlpool sucked him down.

It had always been this way. Dependent like a child upon admiring affection, he had always taken uncritical friendship for granted, even with those who were indifferent or actually hostile. He had always acted upon this assumption, yet, in an unconcious effort to create friendships which perhaps did not exist, not without a certain compliance towards the interests of others, and, at the same time, a fear of a collision with reality which migh rent asunder his web of illusions. When things he had said were quoted against him, he denied having ever said them. And when this denial was called by its right name, he interpreted this as a symptom of his critic’s lack of mental balance: as time went on, psychosis became an eer commoner word on his lips.

Just what was it we felt when, for the first time, we realised that he had gone too far out ever to be able to get back?”

- Dag Hammarskjold, “Markings”

I go on about this now and then, but it came up in conversation with Azrael, and it’s such an important and wonderful speech, that I feel the need to publish it again. It’s William Faulkner’s acceptance speech for the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature.

“I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

I recieved an email today. It happened to contain the worst joke I’ve ever read. Even worse than the “ramen catholic” one. The Daily Illuminator says:

“(Illuminated News Service) After months of heated debate and repeated last-minute deadline changes, Iraq’s elected representatives have reached agreement on their new Constitution.

It will be 10.

Next up for discussion is Dexterity. Observers anticipate that consensus will be reached on 12 or possibly 13. The current deadline for decision is in March 2006. “