Words.

I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Question
- ?

Stop.

He knows that he must not go on. He knows that he must go on. He knows. He knows too much. He knows too much to do anything. Caught. Stopped. Halted. Prevented. Stagnant movement. What does he do from thereon? He thinks. He forces himself to think, to imagine, to project. Future steps. Removal of obstacles. He knows something more than that. He knows what he can and cannot do. He decides. He chooses. He motions to himself. He closes his eyes and hears a voice coming to him in that darkness. Imagining things. Not just anything. Not nothing. Things. With possibilites and probabilities attached. He envisions and sees though the speaking voice.

You move forward. Fluid. Moving. Undecided. Opportune. You look backwards. Solid. Stagnant. Decided. You will accomplish your -.

Ça
C’est commencé,
ça continue,
ça va continuer,
ça continuera,
ça ne finira jamais…

Vavin
I stepped out from
the blue door onto
the pavement
with myself.
The early morning air was cold
and still.
Parked cars lined
the right side of
the road.
A lady walked her
dog.
Three people sat at
two seperate tables
in a brasserie.
A man walking, his head
tucked down into his chest.
A jogger.
The gentle purr of engines
and trails of white
exhaust
floated in the air.
I descended down the
stairs into Vavin.

Vladimir:
    Say, I am happy.

Estragon:
    I am happy.

Vladimir:
    So am I.

Estragon:
    So am I.

Vladimir:
    We are happy.

Estragon:
    We are happy.
    (Silence.)
    What do we do now, now that we are happy?

Vladimir:
    Wait for Godot.
    (Estragon groans. Silence.)

-Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot.

Nagg:
    Can you hear me?

Nell:
    Yes. And you?

Nagg:
    Yes.
    (Pause.)
    Our hearing hasn’t failed.

Nell:
    Our what?

 -Samuel Beckett, Endgame.

And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.

-John Milton, Areopagitica.

For my grandfather, who taught me how to play chess. 

It was they… Who put me here in this room all alone. I didn’t choose to come to this room all by myself, to put myself in here, and shut the door. All they wanted me to do was to write. They wanted me to write something original. But how could I do it? How could I possibly write anything? Everything has been written. To write anything else would be to rewrite something that’s been written before. And they talk about penalizing one for plagiarism. That is totally absurd. Penalizing a person because he can’t write anything original. Who are they to judge? Nonetheless I will try. I will try to write something that seems original enough so that they will be satisfied. Once in a while they do come into the room to take whatever I’ve written. In return, they give me food and water. Sometimes, when I do not write anything good enough, they beat me up. They get two big sized men, I think they must work as bouncers at nightclubs, and pound me to a pulp each time they think that my writing is not good enough. It’s as if the humiliation isn’t good enough. The quality of the food varies with my writing as well. At times it’s a good steak dinner, with mashed potatoes and soup. But most of the time it’s just plain porridge and nothing else. I’m given talcum powder for my own hygiene purposes, but then I put that into my porridge to make it taste nicer. I have to make do with the things that they give me. After all, I am at their mercy. It’s not that I like to write or anything, it’s just that I have nothing else better to do. Given my situation in life, that’s about the only thing I can do. To write, and to write, and to write, and to write, and to write. Ten pages a day, twenty pages a day, forty pages a day! And then they come once in a blue moon and take it all away from me. What do they do with it, I have barely any idea. Sometimes they throw back at me what I’ve written before, some of the papers turned so yellow and smelling musky, so much so that I wonder if I’ve ever written those before. But when I look at the handwriting, I do see some resemblance to my own handwriting, and conclude that I must have written these beforehand, a long, long time ago. On these returned papers there are illegible markings in red, under-linings and scribblings. These returned papers are of a lot of use to me. I burn them in the corner of my room when it gets cold on some nights. There is a window in the room, well, it’s actually more like a hole in the wall. There’s nothing to cover the hole, there’re no window panes, and so the wind blows through and creates this turbulence in the room which messes up all the papers, old and new. Sometimes I can see the papers flying about the room in a circular fashion, as if caught up in a tornado. Actually there is one way that I often employ to keep the wind from blowing in. I take the big table top that I write on and lean it over the hole in the wall. That partially keeps the wind out because it doesn’t cover the hole completely. The hole is very big. I’ve looked out the hole once, and saw just the sea. That’s all, nothing else. They often say that one can see the sunset or sunrise by the sea, but I can’t see any of that. I think my room must either face the north or the south. So when I close the hole partially, the wind hardly gets through and so the papers don’t fly about so much after that. I can rearrange my papers and sort them out properly. But the problem is, when I use the table top to cover the hole, I have no where to write. I’ve tried sitting on the floor, hunching over to write, but it’s no good at all. It’s no good for my back. When my back hurts, I can’t think of anything to write, and then I just write anything, which is bad for me because when I hand up whatever I’ve written on the floor, I can be sure of myself to get ready for the two bouncers to come back into the room for me. Do I ever cry out in fear when they come? Of course not. I never cry out in fear. I just stay silent when they take their turns to rain blows upon me. I take it just like a man. What’s there to be ashamed of. I don’t retaliate as well, because I do not believe in retaliation. There really isn’t any point in retaliating because it doesn’t prove anything. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Perhaps it makes a good excuse, but of course this saying isn’t appropriate here, for no one can say who is right and who is wrong. That’s when all of this becomes so subjective. They think that I’m not original, because they just think so, and I think that I shouldn’t be beaten because I feel that I’ve put in the effort to write something original. Everything’s all rewritten anyway, so I wonder why they make such a big fuss out of what I write, and having to resort to having me beaten up, starving me and what not. What they think is what they think, and what I think is what I think, which will differ so greatly all the time, although I believe sometimes we’re both on the same runaway train of thought. I’ve tried to write about my life before I entered this room once, and it only served to get me beaten up. They think that my life is not original. Well, what can I say, I was born to a father and a mother, I had no siblings, I went to school and got myself a proper education, and went to work after that. Then there were these neighbors of mine, a father and a mother, and a son as well. The two of us went to school together, played football together, and practically hung out together all the time, well, till he went his own way and I went mine. Of our childhood, I guess we both shared the same experiences, and I wonder if he’s ever written about them before, because when I wrote about my childhood, they came back to me throwing the papers in my face and shouted that they’ve read it before. But anyway. The most memorable thing that I wrote about was my music, the music that I loved: the blues. Even that, they thought was unoriginal, and you can tell what happened after they took away that piece of writing and came back to me again. I remember giving my own definition of the blues: a desire to keep the excruciating facts and episodes of inhuman experiences alive in one’s sensitive awareness, to grasp the jagged edges of these experiences so hard that one’s hand bleeds, and to rise above these encounters and trials, not by the solace of philosophy but by squeezing from it a rhapsody that is horrifyingly funny. Big words one might think? Well it’s not the education that I received that helped me in this definition. I had a thesaurus! I begged them for a dictionary at first so that I could look up meanings of words that I didn’t understand, so that I could find the right, and original word to include into my writings. Instead, they gave me a thesaurus, and now I can only find other words to replace the words that I intended to give. Meanings of words that I can never understand are now only assumed, gathered from the meanings of other words that my limited vocabulary has. Of course, that isn’t of any worry to me at all. I do naturally have this love for the blues, helps to tell me that I’m alive and that whatever happens, worse can happen and I should really be prepared for it, although one knows that one can never really be prepared for whatever that might happen in the future. Now I don’t listen to the blues anymore, but I do think about it, and that’s the most I can do. I can’t sing the blues because the two men will come in and shut me up. Sometimes at night I squat away in a corner far from the door and sing quietly to myself, and they do not come in at all. I sing from memory, because I can remember many songs, many blues songs. Everything that I do is from memory, or at least in some sense is part of my own personal experience, which is what others might have experienced before. Which person is ever so different from anyone else? One day I will grow sick and tired of this room and writing, and force my way out of this place. I might very well jump through the hole into the wall and plunge myself into the sea and try to swim away from them. I don’t think those two men can swim very well. They look so big and bulky, so much so that if they jump into the water after me they’ll probably sink like bricks. Another way in which I could get out of this place is to walk straight out the door, and tell them that I’ve had enough. I know, this is my own decision, to put myself in this room to write in the first place, and in some sense put myself at their mercy, but after when I’m fed up of it am I not entitled to leaving this place freely? After all, the door… is always there.