My
words will not bring hope, they will tell of a time gone. There will
be many, many testaments (my own amongst them) in that vein, telling
of a time, of a place, of a country; or telling not of time or place
at all, but of self and the sphere that self moved in. For the age
lived in then was Vanity. Whatever was going on, Vanity came through.
The Me was the story, not the events, the fates and fortunes of the
larger world. Vanity had been nourished and now it bloomed,
profusely. Blooms of every type: in image, in prose, in poetry, in
opinion and critique. Some of it honest, some of it made-up. Some of
it half and half. It was all there, including the lies one tells
oneself and the truths one doesn't want to see. And there too, the
inner journeys from the old to the new, from saying no to saying yes
to life, and vice versa. Of the out-there, of the closed-in. Everyone
had something to say and a creative way in which they might express
it. Art for art's sake. Art as therapy. Art as a vanity project.
A
spilling. A wound opened, which keeps re-opening, and so continues to
weep.
An
all-consuming need to explain you and who you know or think that
person to be.
A
self-promoting urge to communicate in word or images, still and
moving. We are the beautiful. We are the damaged. We are the
motivated. We are the disenfranchised. We are living life! And
sharing all that we do, which by the way may not be true. We are the
socially awkward, the socially lonely. We are not loving life! We are
the shamed and the ashamed. We are the ugly. We are the noughts, the
nobodies. We are the ghosts.
Ghosts
dance with words, tango with a pen, waltz around lettered keys.
Ghosts make money for other people. Ghosts make famous names more
famous. Ghosts produce the pages that make a book, a book that they
possibly wouldn't want to (if they could) put their own name to. It's
not what they would write, in the style they would write it, but what
they would write is, so they are told, not marketable; and besides,
nobody that writes, excepting ghosts, writes to live.
The
noughts, the nobodies don't. They live
to write. They live
to learn. They seek new ears, new eyes, new consciences for truths.
In words they expose and berate themselves, as well as that of
others, not to chastise but to recognise all that they are and all
that the world contains. There is no wrong or right. There are
problems, but they don't have the solutions to these, as they simply
make a study of what they see and, in words, whatever tongue they
express themselves best in, write how they see it, maybe manipulate
it and imbue it with emotion, that of anger or grief or love etc.,
even neutrality, a dispassionateness, by removing themselves from the
condition, so that their eye is cold, their tone practical, and their
ear deaf.
Distance
is often a necessary measure, for they cannot then be accused of
bias-ism, of favouritism, or of being over-invested – the reader is
encouraged to make up their own mind - though they will, of course,
have an opinion, though perhaps not the view that would be expected
from them, from other examples of their craft. Their view may not be
appropriate or socially accepted: it needed toning-down or toning-up;
it was changed by the edit, by the translator, so that what is
attributed to them has been hardened, softened or twisted, and is
therefore not what they originally expressed, what they had wanted,
or tried, to convey, but had now failed to get across.
The
noughts, the nobodies are frustrated by this. Because the simplest
language can be misinterpreted and the most convoluted
oversimplified. All meaning, all feeling lost. So, they don't share,
if they share at all, all they write, since it resists form, a
comprehensible form, and its language, too, would, if read, seem
foreign, to the present-day ear, the present-day eye.
Tomorrow
is their destiny. Some are born posthumously.
Picture credit: Der Weg des Genius (The Path of the Genius), 1918, Wenzel Hablik.
Inspired by Nietzsche: Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ.
Written March 2020.
