So what did I believe in? I believed in Art. Poetry, to be precise. I was even writing the stuff myself. But I was too embarrassed to show it to anyone, or even to admit that I was writing it. I was afraid that people would label me as a pretentious, literary type. So I wrote in secret, as if writing was some shameful activity, like masturbation.
Even if I had been prepared to admit that I had literary ambitions, I was not sure how to defend my work against people who were as sceptical as I made myself out to be. I decided that, before it could be sent out into the wider world, my writing would have to be equipped with an elaborate system of defences. These could not be artificial, like the literary equivalent of the moat of a castle. That would be far too off-putting. They would instead have to be organic, that is to say, built into the structure of the work. I amused myself by imagining my work as some kind of plant, with beetle-like critics attempting to devour it - but being driven back by thorns, toxins or predators further up the food chain, which would paralyse them and very slowly suck out their brains. But all I succeeded in doing with each revision and refinement was to suffuse my work with an increasingly sour taste.
In retrospect, I should not have been surprised that these words, over which I had pored for so long, were greeted with nothing more than indifference. They were not even capable of provoking the wholly negative critical reaction I had been so afraid of. Publishers I sent them to returned them with polite letters of rejection (“Thank you etc... Always interested in new writers...... But not quite what we’re looking for at present.... Wish you the best of luck with placing your work elsewhere.....”). That is, if they bothered to reply at all.
Of course, you can always console yourself with the thought that you are simply “misunderstood” and “ahead of your time”. There are many illustrious precedents for this from which comfort can be drawn. But they were of little help to me. I became disillusioned about the ability of writing to achieve anything at all. Perhaps it had been effective in the past, but in today’s accelerated culture it was entirely dispensable:
My plastic bag
is just like all the others.
I put a flame to its corner:
it shrivels.
Shiny new complexion wrinkles into old age
in seconds.
An invisible fiery fist screws it up into a ball
like writing paper
it comes from the trees
and there’s always more
where that came from.
As you can see, I did not stop writing. On the contrary, my output increased. This coincided with the period immediately after I had broken up with Kay. Outwardly, I probably gave little impression of being hurt and tried to act as if I had taken it in my stride. But that was not how I really felt. My apparent aloofness was just a defensive posture – and our break-up had exposed just how much of a sham it really was. I decided that I couldn’t allow myself to be hurt like that again; I needed to rebuild my emotional shell so that it provided a real defence, not a fictional one. Rather than unburdening myself to friends, though, I resolved to keep my own counsel. I thought that if I talked it through with others, that would effectively be admitting that I still needed other people (and therefore still possessed the same vulnerabilities). But I realised that I had to get it out of my system somehow. So I decided to write about it. I discovered that there is a certain solitary pleasure to be gained from wallowing in your own misery. The activity of writing seemed to ennoble it, to elevate it to a universal level. It allowed me to delude myself into thinking that my feelings were the sufferings of a great and passionate soul with whom others would undoubtedly be able to identify:
everyone sits
fingering their broken light bulbs
their perfect shape
big frozen waterdrops
mute bells
only
snowflake acoustic
filament fragmentsskate
around the rim
fingernail clippings
held
in erratic orbit
everyone sits
Looking back on this now, I am struck not by the depth of my feelings but simply by the circularity of my own writing. It is as if I wanted to seal up the broken bits inside of me, just as the broken filaments remain sealed inside the glass of a burnt-out light bulb. Then I could shake the bulb as if it were one of those tacky “snow scene” paperweights, hold it up to my ear and listen to the broken bits of filament shifting round and round – without having to feel anything.
This was writing as personal therapy. But of what use was it to the wider world? I had turned into the kind of writer I most despised; someone who just wrote about themselves, as if their own problems mattered more than anyone else’s and the whole of society revolved around them.
Besides which, writing as therapy didn’t even work. It just made me feel hollow, burnt out, numb:
volcanic activity
made me
a porous person
now
a piece
of brittle
foam i
float
face down
in the numb ocean
So I resolved to forget about my ambitions to write. I put my energies into other things. I got a job with a publishing firm in London and tried to throw myself into the life of a young urban professional, joining the herds of miserable-looking commuters (who I never spoke to, except to ask them to please move up so that I could get on the train too).
This worked well enough for a time, while I was still young enough to convince myself that I would not end up like all the miserable-looking people I travelled in with. But it didn’t last. I knew that this wasn’t how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. As for what I really did want to do, I kept going back to those poems I had laboured over for so long and wondering if there was some way of getting them to see the light of day. They in turn looked back at me accusingly, demanding that I find a suitable home for them, where they could be properly appreciated.
As luck would have it, it was around this time that the internet first started to come to prominence. On the face of it, the internet is a self-publisher’s wet dream. Setting up your own website costs virtually nothing, but you have a potential audience of millions. With this heady thought in mind, I carefully typed in my work and spent hours trying out different fonts and page layouts.
I also began to create hypertext links between the different texts, which I thought would provide readers with interesting connections to explore. The more links I inserted, the more I became convinced that the poems possessed a mysterious, veiled coherence which I had previously overlooked. This, in turn, prompted me to develop new theories about their supposed deeper significance, which I took to be man’s relationship with technology (something I happened to have been thinking about quite a lot, owing to my new-found enthusiasm for the internet). I began to input pages of commentaries, linked up to the relevant passages – and out of these commentaries emerged a kind of statement of belief.
I attributed this manifesto to an invented character - a Swede called Jes Milensen, whose nationality allowed me to endow him with various stereotypical Scandinavian characteristics. The website included a short profile of him, accompanied by suitably mysterious, blurred photographs. Milensen, I claimed, had been a leading geneticist but had become disillusioned with science, feeling that it was advancing at a pace which outstripped society’s ability to cope with it. He decided that he could more usefully spend his time trying to help people come to terms with the effects of technology. So he abandoned science and turned to writing. Sadly, I explained, he had been killed in a car crash at the age of thirty eight – but luckily, his writings lived on.
Looking back now, I am struck by how closely the theories I ascribed to him mirror some of the preoccupations of Pete and his followers. Anyway, here - for the record - is some of what I gave Milensen to say (actually, there was quite a lot more than this, but I have manfully resisted the urge to include all of it here):
Being Scandinavian, I have a natural inclination to ponder the big existential questions. One of my favourites is why we seem to be incapable of being happy with our lot, even though, as a civilisation, we have attained a higher degree of physical comfort and sophistication than ever before.
I believe that the reason for our unhappiness has to do with consumer society and the accelerating effect of advancing technology. All our lives we are bombarded with aspirational messages, broadcast far and wide by increasingly powerful technologies, telling us that a better life is just around the corner if we would only buy such and such a product or brand – which is new, improved and better than the one we already have. This assault on the senses cannot be ignored, because the constant bombardment affects us subliminally, making it almost impossible for anyone to feel satisfied with their lot on a permanent basis. So life in this civilisation of ours becomes a series of minor disappointments, with things never turning out quite as well as we hoped.
This sense of hopes being dashed is exacerbated by our inability to predict the effects of technology on our lives. Things that we hoped would make our lives easier, like computers, often seem to have an unexpected downside. For instance, whilst computers have made some tasks much easier, they have merely accelerated everyone’s expectations of when the work will be finished – so instead of getting more leisure time, we end up spending longer at work.
It is as if things – or more specifically, technological things - are somehow conspiring against us. It is as if they resent the excessive human expectations which are imposed upon them and are constantly plotting ways of getting their own back. So life comes to seem like a series of petty dramas of betrayal and revenge, made all the more irritating by the frequency of their repetition.
Few of these disappointments are significant in their own right, but cumulatively, they all start to take their toll – and we are left with a feeling of generalised dissatisfaction about our lives. At the same time, we also feel guilty about it because we know that – compared with living conditions say, one hundred or even fifty years ago – things are better and we ought really to be thankful for what we’ve got.
So what is to be done? I believe that art can act as a sort of vaccine against this chronic sense of dissatisfaction. A vaccine is a small dose of a disease that gives the body a chance to develop immunity against it. In the same way, I believe that art should re-enact the process of minor disappointment that we are all doomed to experience. I see it as a return to one of the earliest forms of art, that of Greek tragedy.
In Greek tragedy, the hero is always crushed by forces which are greater than him. He may get to be King, but ultimately some great catastrophe will befall him (for example, he will discover that, by some appalling stroke of fate, he has married his own mother and is so consumed with self-disgust that he puts out his own eyes). The happy ending which he no doubt wished for himself is shown to be an illusion. This was supposed to induce a state of “catharsis” in the audience, which would allow them to be reconciled to their own inevitable mortality and fallibility as human beings. Hardly cheery stuff, I admit, but being Scandinavian, I like that kind of thing.
Of course, Greek tragedy evolved in an age when there were many threats to human life - disease, war, famine, natural disasters - and very little that mankind could do about them. Today we have achieved a fair degree of insulation against most of these threats, chiefly by manipulating the natural world through technology. The trouble is, this makes us think we should be able to use manmade things to achieve happiness as well - which is a far more elusive goal. Most of the time, our efforts will fall short of what we had hoped. Art therefore needs to deal with the micro-tragedies of our every day lives, rather than the macro-tragedies of the ancient Greeks. It needs to reconcile us to the fact that in our enthusiasm for new technology, we overlook its tendency to unexpected and undesirable side-effects - because now that technology is busily connecting everything together, it is more difficult than ever to foresee the precise consequences of one’s actions.
And what better vehicle could there be for these micro-tragedies than a micro-art form: the obscure and rather unfashionable art of poetry?
Ah, what magnificent theories! I can almost feel myself soaring effortlessly into the stratosphere, borne aloft upon a tide of false optimism about the anti-gravitational power of Art. But the sad truth of the matter is that I was simply engaged in an elaborate exercise of self-justification – a futile attempt to convince myself that I was doing something more meaningful than just filling up empty space with words.
Talking of which, let me return to the subject of the website. Predictably, it was not a success. You don’t get visitors to your site unless people know it’s there. This required a talent for self-publicity and an understanding of the intricacies of internet search engines which I simply didn’t possess.
Eventually, I gave up on poetry as a bad job and moved on to short stories, where I achieved a modest degree of success – initially at least. This helped to assuage my disappointment at the failure of the website. But having invested so much time and energy in its production, I couldn’t bring myself to remove it or to admit that it had been pointless. So I convinced myself that, whilst it had not achieved the public recognition that I had originally envisaged, it had served another, more private purpose.
The whole exercise had, I decided, helped me to come to terms with all the bitterness and frustration I had felt after my break-up with Kay, but had never really faced up to. By linking the poems to Milensen’s abstract ideas on art, technology and society, I believed that I had drained them of emotion and severed all connections with my own self. And by uploading them onto the internet and casting them adrift in the ever-expanding vastness of cyberspace, I persuaded myself that I had successfully banished them to another realm, where they could do no harm to anyone.
It may strike you as odd that someone who has made scepticism their defining characteristic should entertain such frankly superstitious notions. And of course, these beliefs conveniently ignored my earlier misgivings about the efficacy of art as personal therapy. But faced with the alternative – which was to admit that all my writings up to that date had been an entirely meaningless exercise – it was not difficult to ignore any arguments to the contrary.
Beliefs of this nature only collapse when something happens that is impossible for the believer to ignore.
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