I am neither living nor dead. I am a name on a screen or a piece of paper, some words that you read and form an opinion about, fairly or unfairly.
I am a character in a story. You will not bump into me one day on the street nor at the library. But that is just one sort of Something that I happen not to be, one way in which I am Nothing as there are infinite ways for a thing to be Nothing.
If, for instance, you are looking for someone adept at playing the piano or a mind knowledgeable in engineering or a furry creature for snuggling or a social creature interested in empty conversation, you will be disappointed. I will be nothing to you—not what you are looking for.
But a Nothing may be a Something in other ways. By the event of you reading this and forming ideas (good or bad), I become Something real and useful.
Even if it is only myself that reads this, at least I may be useful to myself and, therefore, real—though it be only a sort of shadow of reality in the same way that when you alone witness a strange occurrence it only has a shadow of reality that would somehow be a greater, more real, reality if there had been another or others with you to witness the same event. If I am the only one to read what I have written, it is as though the reality of it (and hence my realness) was trapped inside a small bottle wanting but unable to escape until another person comes along and opens up that bottle letting its reality out into the open.
Basic communication and contact are ways in which we remind and reinforce one another and ourselves that we continue to exist and present new ways in which we might go on existing.
When you say “Hello” to someone in passing and they do not respond, you are hurt because you feel invisible, your presence did not register with this person, your existence has gone unrecognized.
You may find temporary solace in doing something, acting upon other things.
Make some coffee and drink it. Rearrange the books on your shelves by color and discover surprising new connections. Push the button for the elevator and let it come to you. Walk up the stairs instead and tire your legs. Ride. Ride. Ride.
But if your existence goes unrecognized for a prolonged period, your actions may grow more and more outlandish.
As a character in a story, I am Something. In the story in which I appear, I have a place and a use. The story would not be the same without me. I am Something thanks to the fact that I have a relationship to the events and the other characters in the story.
As a wanderer and as a rider of my wanderings in this story, there are particular properties which it might be considered safe to attribute to me, but you have no real reason, of course, to assume anything about the person that you think I am. Yet as you read more of these words, you will begin to attribute qualities to me regarding how I function as a rider, an observer, a thinker, a human being in general that you might pass on the street.
All of these aspects go some way toward making me a particular thing, Something—something that you construct for yourself to make me easier to place within your organizational system. You will not bump into me on the street, but I am not Absolutely Nothing.
I occupy now a particular place in your thoughts such that I may either be lighted upon or not, thought about by you or not. I hold a position which entails being involved in relationships with other things, persons, characters, ideas, or thoughts so that you might bump into me anywhere that you go.
But there is a dreadful aspect to being Something for, once a thing becomes Something, it is, so to speak, tied to being that Something.
A thing that is Nothing contains the possibility to become Something or to be realized as Something, but once it becomes Something or becomes thought of as Something it loses to a certain extent some of its possibilities for becoming other Somethings.
I am a character who is a rider. This makes me Something. Maybe I am a person who enjoys reading or talking about books or maybe I held for some time a mundane position that I finally left due to circumstances beyond my direct control. Or were they?
But what if I were to tell you that I would prefer to be a working astronomer? First of all, it would only be partly true—at one time, I did indeed want to be an astronomer above all else, but I found early on that I was not adept at manipulating the necessary instruments of an astronomer and that, while I enjoy and appreciate the ideas brought about by the work of astronomers, I do not at all enjoy the physical and mathematical processes that are the very daily work of the astronomer—that are, in fact, the very sort of thing I was hoping to be done with.
But you would not know anything about all of this from my being a maundering rider in a story.
And what if I were to tell you that books are not even my primary artistic interest? That I get more excited by watching a good film than from reading a great book? And who can deny that a mediocre movie is not only far more bearable than a mediocre book but often entertaining! But, of course, books are also of great interest to me. I sometimes dream of someday settling down somewhere that I might afford a large study to hold a diverse and interesting collection of personally curated films and books—though I may already feel that future self lamenting its preference for remaining in that room with worlds of artistic contact and no other and, from here, I mock that self for becoming such a caricature of a character in a literary world.
It seems to me that most people see the books and films that they enjoy as ways of becoming more and more like Something in particular, a particular sort of person whereas I see them as a way of becoming more and more like Nothing, a way of opening up possibilities rather than limiting them.
This is why I usually do not enjoy talking about them with people nor talking to people in general—readers, writers, astronomers, teachers, lawyers, or otherwise. When most people talk about anything, they tend to do so in a manner that limits the possibilities of whatever they are talking about. They turn a complicated or abstract matter into a concise phrase or statement with a pretty bow.
It is a clever trick, to be sure—to make Something of everything. Sometimes these tricks are even useful. But sometimes they confuse and mislead us enticing us as they do to think that this particular Something has more reality to it than the other Somethings yet to be articulated and which might never be talked about because we are too fixated on the normalized Something that has already become real and familiar to us.
I am a character, a rider, although you may find for various reasons another name to be more suitable for me, perhaps: “Remington,” “Hunter of Masks,” “Silver Nightrunner,” “Suspicious-looking individual, holding a large bag, leaning against one wall,” “Murderer in the prison-house,” “Missing Astronomer,” “Gardener of Stars,” “Hoaxer’s Brainchild,” “Man o’ war,” Of course, it should go without saying that these potentially preferred descriptions only become available by way of my activities as a rider, and unlike, say, a farmer or banker or politician whose descriptions as such are contingent upon farming or banking or political activities rather than, and sometimes in spite of, their riding activities that aim to be no more than a transparent sort of pointing at farming, banking, or political activities, my riding activities are the activity being pointed at in a manner that is anything but transparent. But what if I should anyway decide tomorrow that I no longer wish to be merely a character? Yes, tomorrow I might be a person that you could bump into on the street or at the library!
I will shed this nothingness and make something of myself! Yes, perhaps I will leave here before having appeared in the story as the “Unobtrusive Rider!” Perhaps I could even escape to be an astronomer after all!
I will cease to be Something in particular and become more like Nothing thus leaving the possibilities open to become other Somethings—perhaps: “Poplar in the Fields” or “Forgotten Paper Lantern of Curious Color” or “Cédar Gall” or “Jean Bosh” or “Stefen Kessel” or “You” or even “A House with No Inside.”
And what would the story do while I go off to be Something else? It would have to go on I suppose. Stories can always go on as there is no limit to the ways of using language, no limit to the ways in which we might say or reveal things, no limit to the Somethings that language creates and then endlessly manipulates, no limit to the ability of language to reveal the inherent Nothingness of all those Somethings.
I imagine the character of the rider would carry on regardless of what I do tomorrow.
But perhaps you will bump into me and know me or not know me, recognize me or not recognize me. That is, you may know me as me or as someone else, recognize me as me or as someone else. Perhaps you will come across a character in a story who wanted to be an astronomer but ended up a wandering rider who happened to know a real astronomer who disappeared one day.
Or perhaps you won’t see me at all. Instead, you or someone else will come across something that I have deliberately left in the places I have been, something that is meant for you or for this unspecified someone else that might mean Everyone—everyone who may or may not find something worthwhile in this exercise.
And yet, in the important (worthwhile) sense, I will not be there at all. In an uninteresting (not worthwhile) sense, I will “be there” but only in the usual (supposedly worthwhile) sense that most people mean when they say they “are there.” In the worthwhile sense (for my purposes, at least), I will not be there in the manner of two persons passing one another unremarked.
If you should come across me, perhaps you will ask how things are with my riding or at the library or the book store or the theater or the record shop or perhaps you have some information about this missing astronomer.
Or perhaps you will ask about what book I’ve been reading lately or about my opinion on the death of the novel.
And I will say that I do not know, I do not understand what you mean, only sort of what you are trying to mean. And I do not care. The stars are indifferent to astronomy.
But many people claim to know just what it means and they have an answer and provide many reasons why their answer will prove to be correct.
But they do not know, they cannot know, they just like to talk, or get paid to talk, to say things, anything, to get other people talking, talking about nothing, nothing important, perhaps to avoid talking about important things. People like very much to avoid talking about important things though they like to talk about unimportant things as though those unimportant things actually were the important things that needed to be talked about.
But now you are probably rightly wondering why I continue to talk about unimportant things while seeming to avoid the important ones. (But what good ever resulted from talking about important things anyway? Most of the important things that have been uttered are either misunderstood or else forgotten, buried. Only rarely does a person come along who is capable of reminding us what we have all forgotten, waking us up for a brief spell to what we should take care to remember. But do we? No, we forget all over again and so resume making the same circuitous mistakes though we might long remember and even revere the person who helped us at one time to recall what it is we have already forgotten! Such is our manner of not recognizing the important things.) But how can I help it when someone says something to me (and yet not to me who is not there at all) about modernism, postmodernism, or about any of the various avant-garde movements?
It will be something simple, something reasonable, something insightful even, something seemingly untroubling.
But we will, at that point, need the rider character or the librarian character or the library itself or even some broom tucked away in a corner of the library or some other entity composed entirely of language to push back hard against this temptation, insightful or not.
Yes, even a broom in a forgotten corner of a small, intangible library may show us that the process of organizing and ordering artistic (and other) activities is necessary from a practical standpoint—that it has its uses—but that such organizing and ordering is not what is primarily important about Art, that it can sometimes be a hindrance rather than a help in understanding and appreciating Art, and that thinking of ourselves as following these processes and thoughts to conclusions is largely to blame for the thought that the novel could die or that postmodernism is at an end. Indeed, the mistake is in thinking that our thoughts and processes have inevitable “logical conclusions.”
If the novel is dead or postmodernism is at an end, it’s not because they have reached their “logical conclusion” but because people have grown bored with certain activities and moved on to other ones, and at that point, the people concerned with organizing and ordering will have to decide in a “poe-tay-toes/poe-tah-toes” fashion whether the novel or postmodernism or whatever has died or is in the process of being transformed.
But, I know, you want to be important! And to be important, you feel that you must say Something—Something provocative, Something that is attributable to you, Something that will, perhaps, come to be seen as equivalent with you, and you, therefore, might also be seen as Something—Something important.
So you talk about the death of the novel as though this is somehow important, and if you talk about it as though it is important, then it will come to be seen as important.
Anyway, it is Something for you to do, Something to distract you from your inability to write something that isn’t boring and your legitimate worry that it is not important enough, not different enough, not rising above what has come before you because if it truly was any of those things you would not be worried about the death of the novel which might well be the death of you.
But you come back again and again to this notion of the death of the novel because you cannot focus on your own writing because you see it dying before you. You and all of the other writers who tell stories by utilizing language as though it was a lasso that grabs hold of things, pulls them into view, then acts as a magnifying glass so that we may more clearly see these things—or as though coming up with new stories is as simple as describing new sets of objects or focusing upon some group of people perceived as ill-represented—or as though writing a contemporary story merely involves incorporating the gadgets and technology of today and commenting on the appropriate topics of the time that are perceived as relevant.
You have something important to say about race, religion, sex, gender, computers, multiculturalism, consumerism, or capitalism. Your words form a steel trap in which to capture these things so that they may be transported down the one-way street to your readers who are, of course, expected to agree with what you have to say to them. But you do not even recognize your own folly! Oblivious that your writing undermines the very causes near and dear to your truest of hearts if there ever was one!
You write of the horrors of industrialization, you tell us of the dangers of rampant capitalism, you point out our continually increasing state of dehumanization. The ugliness in your writing is meant to be a mirror for the ugliness we witness daily in the world.
Is this writing of yours supposed to help us? Haven’t we heard this countless times before? Does it not merely make it all the easier to accept and acquiesce with slumped shoulders to what we must surely come to see as an inevitability?
Your pointing at these most common contemporary issues is the easy part. The difficult part is offering an alternative—something else for us to think about, something else for us to do—a different, difficult and more interesting path for us to take.
Are these horrors in some way avoidable? How? I beg you take a step off the ledge and find out!
And you! Yes, you there! I see you proudly snickering to yourself! You whose characters are mere chess pieces that you move around the board in order to achieve your goals.
I will be no such character with predetermined functionality and limitations! I will not allow myself to be used by someone making banal social commentary designed to nod the heads of some particular target audience of readers.
I will not be a protagonist who is “different” or “interesting” because of my race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, or preference for strawberry ice cream. This takes what ought to be given (that a protagonist may be of any race, age, gender, sexual orientation, ice cream preference, etc.) and makes it the primary focus so that the protagonist becomes limited, easily captured, instantly banal, only able to express itself as a thing with the emphasized attribute that supposedly makes it “different” or “interesting.”
You strangle freedom on your quest to make a particular point. You create variety of the most superficial nature, another cookie cutter insipidly and vacuously praising its own uniqueness, and, given the preponderance of this sort of writing (best-sellers and “literature” alike), it is no surprise that people should wonder about the death of the novel—cause of death: boredom.
Should ill-represented persons be included as characters in books and films? Absolutely. But the inclusion of such ill-represented persons is, in and of itself, only of social interest—not artistic interest. That is, what is interesting about such characters lies outside of the book or film—not inside (that is, we get to rejoice in the real world that such characters are finally in books and films rather than merely in the real world). Of artistic interest inside the book (or film) is what writers get words, sentences, and narratives to do (or what filmmakers get light, sound, and narratives to do). The inclusion of ill-represented persons is not an artistic maneuver but a real world/societal one (albeit an important one).
Books and films whose primary aims are societal will necessarily continue to be created. And this is fine. It is fine, that is, so long as they don’t completely overshadow books and films whose primary aims are artistic. To a person with primarily societal concerns, artistic works often appear unnecessary, superfluous, even useless—because they do not seem to this person to represent (what they think of as) reality. But the person who is drawn primarily to artistic works is not terribly concerned with how well they represent reality since “realistic” works are no more than tired followers of some well-worn tradition—this person is instead interested in artistic offerings of new poetic strangeness and beauty, the endless potential to dip into the unknown leading us down exciting and useful new paths full of promise.
So let there always continue to be someone who lets go in order to see what happens, someone who validly turns important Somethings (useful as they may be) into frivolous ideas that we might play with endlessly so that we may see the possibility and multiplicity of important Somethings by creating the very possibility and multiplicity itself with language and whatever else might be handy, someone who admits to feeling unsure of “what is important” and certainly has no idea what the Next Something will be or should be or even whether or not they are doing it, someone who allows room to not know what they are doing and, therefore, forces their words and sentences to walk from the plank of Certainty inviting them to partake of unpredictable adventures of their own, eventually returning to the writer, whispering vaguely in the ear so that the writer may feel the pliancy, a bending and twisting to the very breaking point and beyond in a transformation into Something else unforeseen, unexpected, exciting, and yet still true!
There are words like a haunting tune in which I might live for a time heading toward no known destination – words and sentences into which I might fall and be lost forever, my petty Will be damned!
It will not always prove successful, but one should applaud the attempt nonetheless. A failed attempt is better than submission to a horrifying mediocrity in which I am pushed along the smooth, solid surface toward a definitive conclusion.
I offer myself to other writers whose protagonists have no clear definition, no clear limit so that they might be free to express themselves with the unlimited range that language offers and so that writers might express themselves as human beings open to the manifold ways in which manifold questions might present themselves rather than as human beings of some particular, limiting kind set on providing overly concise answers to leading questions.
Let us sniff out the all-too-easy, smooth, false veneer of the work of a cookie cutter and say to this writer, “Away! You who worry about the death of the novel are the very ones smothering it! Go try your hand at something else: astronomy, perhaps!”
“Shut up with your ‘Just be yourself!’ and enough of your trivial ‘Be who you are!’ Why don’t you instead ‘Be who knows what’ and try to ‘Be something you have never been’ for a change!”
The notion that telling stories with words might be at an end because we’ve exhausted its possibilities is as silly as the notion that dreams are no longer interesting thanks to Freud, the Surrealists, and neuroscientists! Dreams are still gripping to us and the reasons why they are so might be a lesson for us all. Writing may still grip us if we allow ourselves to see its open possibility, if we allow it to take us to places we have not yet dreamed.
Ah, but I see you persist! You feel discomfort at text that makes its own rules. You dismiss or disregard nonsense in literature. You scoff at and feel cheated by writing that does not have a plan from the outset. You feel that nothing is at stake in such work, that it is not to be taken seriously.
But you are ignoring one of the greatest potential benefits of writing at all! Yes, there is an inherent inventive fun and playfulness and surprise involved. But if you do not dispose of your senses once your laughter or confusion subsides, you will find a sober poignancy.
The seriousness in successful nonsense and the importance of freedom from strict planning lies in the notion that nothing short of everything, including all of the things that we take for granted as certainties, is at stake. Indeed, a particularly vital notion of life itself is at stake!
Your worry is that of the person who is afraid to try something new, the person who can’t understand the point in abandoning our traditional agreements which you have come to rely upon, the person who merely shrugs shoulders at sentences that do not cohere in a mundane, “transparent” manner.
Instead of truly allowing something new to be created or just giving up, you lunge for newness by moving already-existent parts around into a slightly different formation in order to bring us closer to something rather than embracing the distance between somethings—which is to say that you do nothing New at all and often with an embarrassing pomposity!
You write in order to satisfy your need to exert control over something without realizing or caring that carefully controlling your writing and bending it toward a plan involves unconsciously following well-worn pathways winning you unconscious readers who you consciously or unconsciously wish to control.
Of course, letting loose of control and plans and agreements does not guarantee quality. There is a plethora of “avant-garde” art that is just as sterile and useless as that of the well-worn variety. It’s new and different but not compelling. Its creator strives so forcefully for uniqueness that our common bonds are completely forgotten and the work is rightfully ignored and left to dangle as a superfluous excess because it is something that nobody is looking for—not even people who are looking for things that “nobody” is looking for.
It could be said that what is sought is a compelling uniqueness, a compelling strangeness that both the aggressively avant-garde and the neglectfully well-worn lack. Indeed, they each lack a sense of life and so please move yourselves aside for yet another New Novel or, if we wish to be done with the word ‘novel’, a New Way of Telling Stories, a New Whatever, a New Openness, a New Distance, a New Nothing which, if it were a New Something, would already be a dead child for us to mourn.
Every New Something is only another excuse to continue forgetting what we should be taking care to remember. Please stop making these New Somethings, stop wasting time contemplating the death of whatever Old Somethings, whatever conventions are already dead, and stop creating more stillborn copies of them when you could, at the very least, be making failed attempts at some New Nothing, endless New Nothings impossible to replicate, unnecessary to mourn because they endure, are compelling, singular, unique, as close to us as anything is and yet remain forever out of reach leaving conscious readers yearning all the more for them.
“And what about you, Rider? Aren’t you now saying Something—Something you see as provocative, important—Something to gain attention?” you rightly ask.
And I respond: attention for whom? A character who is a rider but who might have been an astronomer? A person that you might bump into tomorrow who used to be or could be a rider in a story?
Who am I and what do I want? How should you be certain when even I am unsure? How shall you recognize me? How shall you ever come to notice me? My mark is my very invisibility. Where you are concerned, I am nothing: { }, not what you are looking for.
Here, where you make strides toward my world (with difficult footing and poor visibility), I am Something but still not enough of a Something to be incapable of seeing myself as Nothing. Here, where I may end up as a broom in a corner of the library. Here, where writing is for Writing rather than for publishers, editors, workshops or, probably, career advancement.
A human being cannot, in real life, escape the practicalities of the social structure. It looms, forcing an ever-present, all-directions tug-of-war upon all.
Writing that lassos a particular portion of the social structure either saddles language with the task of tugging at some portion or other of said structure with the aim of adjusting it (performing rhetoric/didacticism) or else it forces upon language the even more uninteresting task of being a magnifying glass meant to “accurately portray reality” (perpetuating the myth that this is the true role of language—of course, this is impossible because the final result of such an attempt can only be, at best, an instance of rhetoric/didacticism that is normalized or generally accepted by some relevant audience).
Additionally, these sorts of writers almost certainly write with a mind toward their own place in the very social structure that they write about. That is, these sorts of writers write in order to see what writing can do for their own selves with an eye on the advancement of their own careers or the advancement of particular social groups that they belong to or care about—writers who write in order to live, writers who write in order to express (even if the aim is the supposedly “inexpressible”).
There isn’t anything decisively wrong with this unless one is interested in writing for Writing, come what may. Writers who write for Writing write in order to see what writing can do in general. In this sense, writers of this sort are writing for Everybody (though their writing will ultimately be read by few). They are the sort of writers who write because they know neither how to live nor how to die. They are writers who aim to a certain extent to “unexpress the expressible”.
Writers who write for Writing might roughly be seen as similar to one another, but one cannot really group them together either because of their very uniqueness! These writers often feel lost in the social structure or mostly unattached to it. But it reaches out nonetheless and tugs sharply at them, crushes some of them.
The structure is indifferent, the structure which is a false structure because it isn’t really there because what we call the structure is really just the people around us and our conceptions of them and our conceptions of their conceptions of us. One hundred readers who read such a writer will place that writer into nearly one hundred different positions within nearly one hundred different structures turning the writer into nearly one hundred different somethings. I say “nearly” because inevitably some of those readers will more or less agree or some of them will bend to the will of the more dominant readers who have Something Important to say about this writer. But many of them (too many!) will see only the one structure (that isn’t there) before them and the writer as a particular Something in a particular place within it, tugged and tugging. And this is precisely how it occurs that writers who remind us of what we’ve forgotten are remembered long after we’ve once again forgotten what we should have remembered. Individually, most of us forget—altogether, there is still the hope to remember again.
But I am merely a character yet to appear in a story that most people will never read. I am free of your daily tug-of-war in spite of where you might decide to place me, in spite of whatever Something you decide to make me. I cannot see or fathom the structure from here.
Soon my role as the rider might be realized. But tomorrow I may be elsewhere and I do not know what I will be. Perhaps a false rider, a false astronomer, a false person, a false body, a false broom, false cells, false atoms, false probabilities, a false series of events, false sentences.
I consider myself an Ekleipsist, a pragmatist, an amateur, a speed bump, an alarm clock, but I have been described as a blackguard, a troll, a persona non grata, a pariah. To most, I am a nonentity, a nobody, an absence, and my writing has been hailed as “abnormal,” “unprofessional,” “unfamiliar,” “remote,” “irrelevant,” “unexplored,” and “not at liberty to say.”
Presently, I live elsewhere. But I will be here. I have decided to live here forever.
Perhaps you will see me, recognize me. Pay attention. Look around. Begin to recognize the cycle that you play at wherein each new Somewhere that you reach comes to be seen as just another Nowhere.
But if you should see yourself endlessly moving toward a New Nothing, do not be alarmed. You may even start skipping.
{ } VK Arkiv 