My step brother is in himself furnishing the proof of everything that political critics of modernity have always argued: evil always prevails! I guess I should feel a little heroic about myself because I still manage to sit and study the pre-Socratic philosophers about illness and death while he is playing that loud vulgar music, but there´s nothing heroic about it. It is rather sad; one should be sitting at some world-class university discussing this over cappuccino with some beautiful young man, staring into the flatteries of his hair and cheeks, perfect nose, expensive coat. But no, the reality is very different: The room accommodates three and sometimes four… The district attorneys and one or two inmates, depending on the verdict for that day! And old TV set hangs from the walls that are painted creamy white, but especially color dirt and unwholesomeness, especially color disdain and poverty, especially carelessness and indifference to life and the world. Those are the colors my father does love. Most of the furniture and beddings were given as presents from other relatives that thought they may as well do some charity in order to mellow our miseries, and we had to accept them with glee, thanking their generous kindness, so generous as to dump their garbage on us. Some wooden frames with photos hang from the wall, with each one of the children; we all look quite alike in all the pictures. That is quite symptomatic of the fact that none of those photographs represent us in reality, they just stand in lieu of ourselves, of the people who we really are.
Back to the step brother: Aesthetics always loses, is always sent home, home to roost, and the mobs always win; that is the greatness of democracy, that the ignorant mobs can always win and stand out while the blood still fresh from the patriots drips out from their filth mouths. He is always going to win, precisely because there´s no philosophical or intellectual instinct in him whatsoever, he might as well just stand in the world in place of a mushroom. And that´s the secret of his great wisdom for life: No thoughts whatsoever. How odd, to listen to that trash while one reads pre-Socratic, and I wish trash were the actual word, but there´s no English word for that kind of music; the music is probably not the problem but the attitude of debauchery in the people who take pleasure in it. Last night was quite instrumental in writing which proves the point I´ve been trying to make so unsuccessfully: Intellectual honesty. Whenever one explores his own truth there´s always honest material to draw from, and not just the usual know-everything speeches that I too often write and that more often than that I hate; but writing about illness seems too daring and too dangerous, as if I were anticipating something, but the writing on the wall is there more visible than ever. Something I always find all too frustrating is to write without having all the references I need in order to complete my thoughts, it is like half-writing; it is entertaining to steal from so many books, but still it´s not enough… If I could enact Benjamin´s project I definitely would: A surrealistic montage, a book written entirely of quotations… I would definitely turn myself into the passive voice of advertisements. There always seems to be more material to quote from, and somehow it is not only about not being original enough (which is true!) but also the fear of being faced with the text that one himself writes and without the mediation of the historical tradition, without the interplay of citability. I think it is too dangerous an enterprise to venture into alone. I am not ready. Americans compliment me on my English – I wish I could believe them and not just think that they border on illiteracy; both the compliments and my opinions about my own writing are half-lies, and a half-lie is worse than a full lie. The full lie stands on its own and moves along crawling like a snake, but a half-truth is like a drunkard – sometimes it stumbles, sometimes it walks, sometimes it crawls. Now I am trying to remember which play was the one I saw in Tel Aviv in German at this Givatayim Theater. But I can´t remember any of it, just having met someone there. Could it have been something to do with Anne Frank? No. The reason why people should not publish everything they write is that they will most likely feel very ashamed about it one day. That´s what I think about my blog; funny how the life of a queer person dwells on such fragility – at an age when I was not supposed to do write, I wrote letters to friend-boys (an expression from Hope) at a time when I was supposed to write letters to friend-girls; and now when I am an adult and rather experienced or just simply cunningly failed in relationships, now most of the time I write letters to women when I should write letters to men. One thing is clear to me now: Men do not understand letters. One sole exception is Þór Einar but he is not beautiful, this I feel obliged to write out of intellect and not about of love and thus that is a completely different style of writing. I wonder if I ever wrote a letter to Santiago, because he was a man, whom I thought was beautiful and whom I loved. Now I remember that I do, I also remember that I gave it to him. However, I never knew what he thought about it because that was the last night I saw him, the night when I thought that I would just have the opportunity to love him, but no, instead, it was the last time I saw him, right after I had just spent the night with his first love. For a change, I don´t remember at all the content of the letter.
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