Morning Passages

A self-image that reminds one of something that no longer is, the habit of the praying night falling prey to something oscillating between abandonment and genius, followed by the emptiness and noise of the beautiful mornings, the sinfulness of a precarious opulence filled with laughter and the stench of smoke blending in with a despair growing so weak, weak enough as to be converted into shallow nostalgia. Not the nostalgia of the years gone by or of the person transfigured into a postcard, it's more like the lust of the hours, of the previous hours, spent in an ill combination of antipathy and reflection.

One always wants to write, it's an eternal craving, an abject metaphysical object. Even the slowest moments, those free from rage and untouched by time, those moments feel like an overture, a different kind of writing so to speak. They're incomplete, shattered, wholly unfulfilled, a bad reflection on art, but how true essentially. It is only the absence of passion what makes them soar and grow into illness, deadened undertones, thin hues, invisible wasted hours. He re-reads himself, not absent from glee, not absent from contempt, but finds the words poetically dead, written for another time, succulent but too much inebriated. Not standing on their feet for long enough to shatter the mirror that reflects them.

Writing philosophy, you thought, what an obscene idea! A certain immaturity comes embedded with the thought, with philosophical ambition itself. The nights always a temple, a burden to relief, so ugly the mornings, perfect for oblivion, for deep sleep, unfit for conversations, completely deranged, impaired for truth. Devotion to philosophy alone is a form of vertical annihilation, one could possibly never write anything out of such self-defeating source. Poetics, philosophy, verbosity - it all works against the pursuit of truth that a writer is meant to convey, falsifies the source so to speak, tanning it with blood from another age, stealing whatever there is of life and thirst in the curious observation of the world. Real prose should be completely uninspiring, that's where its Messianic message is: the hatred for the step-mother, the stupidity of the brother, the failed love of the father, life in the village, the erotic encounter in dim light, the shadow of a man that this or that writer now is.

The selfless discovery, that pursued by science, the originality of philosophy, the claim of the exceptional, doesn't quite hold up for literature; that's why I entirely agree with the saying that the modern novel shouldn't be difficult to write at all. This easiness however is a bear trap, a cage, because there's a difference between poverty of language and deconstruction of expression: The language must be built up, step by step, in all its beauty, ecstatic in colors, opulent philosophical monster and then, only then, it must be slowly reduced to its minimal proportion in violent strokes. That's the only moment when modern literature happens, it is not something that you do, it's something that just happens.

There's more miracle than sculpture. Writing must live always outside of itself, it must be a pilgrim on its own skin, as if on Christian virtue, believing it's nothing but a loan less temporary than life, refraining from the use of existence as an actual word. It is that position of observation, even in the most personal and intimate matters, what can turn guilt into an absurd proposition to make on oneself, it's nothing but a philosophical trap, a semantic tribute to dead landscapes, to chemically dried fruits. Looking at a painting, that's to no avail when one's fishing for a trope; he's ought to await patiently the moment in which the painting grows legs of textile and they carpet the world, drowning the surplus of elaboration, saving the incidental detail, allowing the maggots to surface in majesty, overlooking the rotten body of the animal.

The imagination is a futile device, at a time when the tide has swept away the wild currents of the fictive characters that furnished the world with aesthetic independence; the barriers have been lifted in between the rivers and the cities and the oceans. The realities, political and historical, two words since ever forbidden in literature, run miles ahead of the most imaginative care-free childish mind, wrapping the ailments of desire and pushing them forward into a compunction, an obsessive absence of desire; the present, instead of rapid and beautiful, has turned into the ever so stultified image of events, unfolding without enough paucity to catch one's breath and begin anew as the pen demands. Art must be everything but silent, and pure thought, prolonged contemplation, too much time spent in the daily hour, have become forms of sin, forms of reckless silence, of muteness, incapability. Art must not sin, it must only sin without knowing. Knowledge, the curse of Eve, is already a treaty, an apology, an homily, and no longer the billboard in the train station turned into innocuous passion that is called in the other words, the modern novel.

A dead thing. Too quick to live, too quick to pass out.