Here I am

Here I am, I am not drunk but I’ve been drinking again, and as always I feel compelled to put pen to paper and write. The motivation for this seems perfectly clear – I don’t know if this is an objective standard or if this is just an aesthetic prejudice of the age, but I feel that alcohol impedes the stops and starts of the thinking mind, the mind that paradoxically kills the pure, direct thought. I feel, when I’ve been drinking, not that my thinking is better but rather less muddled, like an overgrown forest after a flash fire. It's not more alive, in fact it is by definition less alive than the thorny, natural mess it once was, but at least you can see light between the trunks, count the trees. A cleared forest can be apprehended in the mind in a way that a fully grown forest with its million species of insects and millions of newly unfurling leaves never can be, shifting and brambled as it is like a brain.

The search as always is for the thought that strikes to the core of somebody, yourself maybe but better someone else. It would be expected here to complain that a cruelty of the universal order is responsible for our cleverest thoughts to appear weak or confusing to others, and those with which we are not satisfied to be perceived as (at best) a fragment of genius. Are we so blind to ourselves? What is responsible for us being our own worst readers? It would make sense, in a world in which we are spared pain, that someday we should gain a hard-won objectivity, an ability to see our words as others see them. But this can never happen. A mother can never be objective about her child – she can be unreasonably proud, or unfairly cruel, but the perspective can never be the same as that of the neighbour across the street. I think that we can either write for ourselves or write for others, and only one party can ever be satisfied with the result. For a writer this is no choice at all, since he must either sacrifice himself or his audience, and is thus doomed to some kind of defeat. It’s a winless enterprise, really, and in spite of the terrible options we have we do it anyway because the alternative is still far, far worse. We are bodies spinning in space, held tenuously together by a faint gravity, and shouting soundlessly at each other because the alternative is to be silent, to not speak and only spin absurdly in our shared proximity.

…

My fingers are numb. I see people standing around me, talking, staring at a screen that flickers, renews itself with numbers that speak delay and anticipation. They are beautiful and glow inside their own private spheres. I think: orbit. They shuffle obliquely around a central grain, the wide vibrato of electrons in a space so vast it may as well be empty.