REHEARSAL
DAYS
C'est là, défini, tout ce que je ne peux pas exprimer, ni même concevoir, parce que c'est encore trop tôt: tout cela qu'est négation, négation puissante et pleine, négation sereine, tout cela c'est là. C'est la part silencieuse de ce que je suis, c'est la part mort de mon être vivant. Impossible à dire complètement. Impossible à comprendre jusqu'au but, cet espace blanc, cette identité, sont dans ma distance d'aujourd'hui. J.M. Le Clézio.
An unending desire to finish with this; since my young
age, fifteen or sixteen, I have had a strong urge to commit suicide, and not a single day has gone by
without me thinking about it, the only unique lucid response against this rotten
world; And as time went by, the urge to end my life has become more and more
intense, and I had planned to make the final cut on my thirties; however, I'll be
forty-three in a month, and here I am, trying to explain myself with these
weary words, trying to depict this toxic ego as accurately as I can.
In the first place, I no longer aim for paradises, for nearly ten years,
I have decided to say NO to almost everything, even if I still spoil myself
with little illusions: a girl's ass or eyes, - I still need to be bound to a body – the newest developments in quantum physics, and hardly anything else.
Singular autism, stuck in this pretentious valley, caged in this sordid
country-prison; which has always been in the hands of butchers/beasts, where,
sadly, I was born, but hopefully I won't have to die in.
Absolute master, finally, of a definitive NO, NO to every nation-state, I
refuse to put one on my face. NO to any social interaction I never socialize with my
so-called peers, I stay away from places where those little shits show their
misery, their affected loneliness, and cheer one another for their irrelevant self-publishing;
Tiny devils shouting their mini-nirvanas; greedy opportunists gambling their
impudence in the ruinous literary circus, old trick without which they could
not prolong their despicable lives for one more day.
I even say NO to lovers' love, two people rubbing each other's shit
together, as if it were a big deal. NO to all kinds of occupations, even the
intellectual ones, except physics, but I'm not at all skilled in that field.
NO to any contemporary art, huge fraud. NO to my own tame poetry or that of
others, anemic music, dying light that nothing enlightens now. Contemporary
poetry is like porn, there is nothing new under the sun, and everything has
already been done.
I also say NO to useless belongings; I have no car, bed, (why would I
buy a bed when all that I want is sleep, the poet Robert Lax said once), wife, or
library at home; I always wear second-hand clothes, I don't even have a dog
licking my life, sucking it up, (Isn't it a little bit fascist to expect
another being’s unconditional submission? I'm talking about adults owners of
dogs.). And obviously, I don't think I'll have a casket when I die.
I also find the procreation of any human being an abomination, but long
live lust, I run away from the certainty of the daily mirror, as well as the
intoxicating paradises; I’ve finally reached the emptiness, not the Buddhist
one, fragile zenith; but one made of flesh, truly, vivid, without utopian ends;
Every morning, my morning, every night, my night, each starts an uncertain end,
plausible, a well-ordered untimed hell, alone, on my own, wearing a white
bathrobe, wishing not to be anything, or at least to return to the basic atoms,
and vanish, at last, into a black hole, the end of the Big Bang, which is just
our Big Bang.
It was foolish to divide us into national tribes, and link our identity
to them by waving colorful rags, our stupid flags (among others crap). We
remain attached to the noxious anthropocentric archetype, which main negative
side is overpopulation, a silly method to annihilate our own ecosystem. Our
cognitive development is so lethargic, and those in power are a bunch of tyrants
and clowns, so it is as if we are on the verge of extinction.
A largely monotheistic world (the paganism of fanatical Hinduism isn't
much better) that obstinately worships a sort of fascist king: Jehovah/Allah, a
phantom presence supposedly explaining everyone's destiny, whose obsolete
axioms are simply written verbiage. (No book is sacred) such neurosis (is how
Freud called religion) has no brought any benefit to the humankind. A world
that spends more than two million dollars per second on wars can hardly be
called civilized.
I have magnified the NO to extravagant levels, says everyone who hates
me, I can't handle fraternities, I’m always ready to go, not to share, I
despise all obligations; no one can count on me to shore up his or her existence.
I regret the death of an elephant more than any American loss in the well-deserved 9/11 attacks, for
example, or the devastating tsunami in Thailand two years later.
While I've always had greater empathy for the less fortunate (I wonder if
I won't end up like a hobo myself.) Than for the wealthy ones, a fact proves my consummate misanthropy;
with some regularity, vultures seeking for food, destroy the garbage bags heaped
outside my place, scattering its contents in all directions; I have felt
compassion for them, however, I chased away the vagrants who were doing the same.
I only feel empathy for children, their spontaneity, their frankness, I
see in them –certainly wrongly-the possibility of something new, but adults
disgust me very much, especially the very old ones, pathetically glued to their
bones, to their frozen dreams.
Depression is the psychiatric diagnosis, easy answer, a more precise cause
could be anosmia, which fortunately has been
with me since my early years, fortunately I say, because it has helped me to be
less vulnerable to historical-hysterical conditions; I have never been nostalgic
about the idyllic past childhood, the smell of my mother, the neighborhood, the
food; so, it was therefore easier to leave family, motherland, religion,
language, and without much effort, to get rid of the “cultural imprint”,
implicit in those pernicious institutions.
Therefore, I can live in any corner of the world, eat any kind of food,
speak several languages, but it has become harder to bear it, the carnival has been
over for so long, no more laughter, the worldly whims are gone for good,
goodbye to the girls' soft skin and their tempestuous tenderness, memorable fucks, so, now I'm a lonesome, a
trivial renegade; An ordinary mask hides a true nothingness.
Still, I'm tired of waking up every day, fed up with get up, but the city-asphalt
forces me to clean clothes and hair to tolerate the awful fate. I join the
crowd, gobbling every street; the small town repeated in each look, colossal
farce, used landscape, all I have to do is shut up and wait, time will
overshadow everything. I’ll take my last bones overseas, let them be beaten by
other winds, and when I turn sixty, that’s it, enough, the whole shit could be over
abruptly, with the exploding of my brain. But please, no formalities, nothing
more pathetic than the vulgar presence of a corpse, it would be great to leave none
behind; only worms are welcome to the closing charade; a finale without masses,
without muses, without priests, without any melodies. And the
"je ne regrette rien" quelle fanfaronnade !, je regrette tout.
The words that come from nothing and go to nothing and serve nothing, as we know and keep secret, the words to which we cling because our impotence makes us insane and our insanity makes us despair, these words merely infect and ignore, blur and aggravate, shame and falsify and cloud and darken everything.
Thomas Bernhard
The ambiguous challenge of creating a poetics that annul itself, is
almost an imperative for some modern poets; I have a similar approach, but the
intention is different; foremost, as far as I'm concerned, being a poet
certainly doesn't mean being a writer, someone committed to write an 'oeuvre’.
I still find it strange to evoke myself with signs that perhaps are too far
from my true self, why write then, I ask myself, how can I tell this dreamy
flesh, I am conscious of the minor truth that all literature of any language is,
it is therefore pointless to continue this forced prosody, knowing in advance
that the prolongation of the “coup de des” is only a linguistic artifice.
Poetry tells us incorrectly; but in the vigil, the vulgar ego tends to opt for
an aesthetic triumph, at the expense of the fullness of the experience that may
have preceded it.
Thus, it is not simply a question of the renewal of the inherited
language, of the modification of its syntax, with the false illusion of finding
an own voice, but the goal is to avoid any pronounceable alphabet, to tame the
haughty howl. I am striving for a tangible "page blanche," to a
silent poem, a wordless text, the aesthetic of the absence, the song of the
end. So, from now on, every gesture will be a laconic act and every writing a
solid failure, a no future. Then, I assume my paradoxical choice of being an unwritten
poet.
