Honest
Honest
“I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.”
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
I feel alone when there’s no one on Messenger at nights. Never wanting to talk, hiding behind the squat claret man, but still checking every four seconds in case someone’s called. Useless doing nothing, boredom rooted to a battered chair, treasuring the shimmering globe of his sweetness in the grooves of one delicate palm.
***
Honesty. I like to think it’s honest.
It’s an honest reflection of my worldview, a symbolic, heavily overwritten Eastern European film with yours truly in the starring role. It’s an honest reflection of the agonising knowledge that writing is secondary, that signifiers are inherently unstable, that I live a deferred existence, writing around a void. “A song is a beautiful lie” (Idlewild, ‘Self-Healer’). Unintentionally abstruse, it’s as beautiful as lying honesty can be.
He’s honest, searingly so, and in comparison I’m ashamed. For some reason, he feels the same.
***
Dishonest to intellectualise literary soundbites in homage to the Manics, yet, unlike them, fail to read the entire book. She spies Nietzsche by his bed, simultaneously shivering our spines. Eulogising Thus Spoke Zarathustra at sixteen, face falling as it’s bought. Never opened the tome.
Dishonest to swiftly alter ‘C.A.’, minutes before he reads himself. To affect, effect his view of me. I have to write it to have truly lived it, sometimes. This is written to be read. (“This then is a song. I am singing.”) I have become, I am a writer. The Other, as ever, forced into it. Always, helplessly, pushing slightly too far.
***
I cannot write without removing extraneous or mundane words. After creation, the important process is that of elimination, compression. So much of my life about revision.
Now, this astounding girl, whom I’ve never met but feel I could know (perhaps pushed past in the pub, waltzed by unknowing in the street), likes the way I write. The price is high, but the fact remains: “you know that you’re always meant to be like this; you know that you’re always meant to be.” (Idlewild, ‘The Bronze Medal’). Enough to go on.
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves
The way I feel today - 10 July 2004
Just seventeen - 17 March 2004
Roads to freedom - 25 February 2004
Confessions of a failed self-harmer - 25 February 2004
Manchester, united - 25 February 2004