WoooEeee!
Let’s face it. What you do is fictionalize your own memory to impact on people. Yes you do sunshine. The fictionalising is for your sake and so too is most of the impacting under the guise, sometimes, of instructing and inspiring. Yes sure, but sometimes of loving or of seducing. Sometimes even of getting even or getting compensation- especially for life and death. Sometimes to rob and kill. Or getting a feeling of a safe middle place between contradictions. Or perhaps just innocently adjusting your projected personality and upgrading your culture for material benefit.
Those that can’t or don’t or won’t do this can be frequently defined by institutions as being nutsy outsiders and treated accordingly. You are warned potato head!
But with writing it gets spookier than that. First of all the memory is already a fiction written by your personality as a justification. Secondly the memory is twisted and distorted by desires and dreams as those in turn are turned around by the memories. Third, there is the clamour of all that culture outside yourself with its structures, official and collective images and either effusions and meshed filters or volcanic impingements and determiners smashing into your process of fictionalising. That is spooky isn’t it?
Spookiest of all is that as you make a fiction you find that all the narratives, not just your own but everyone’s and everything’s, are untrue and moreover that something else is trying to get out. This is dissonant and different. Do you let it? If you don’t it isn’t writing. It is the leisure industry or college, dream manufacture or propaganda in advance of some awkward unnatural act- when the point is that dreaming must end. It is always ending actually.
Wake up snot chomper!
There is a sleeping amnesia that governs every age. That is culture. With it the judges forget they were criminals. The rich forget their poverty. The smart forget their stupidity. It masquerades as sanity but it is in fact very unwell.
Its narratives seduce the desiring. The unfinished. You.
With it institutions take on characteristics of the unbalanced.
What is before your senses disappears constantly. What you remember is forgotten.
And (he then spake an aside)…..
Aside: America you have used weapons of mass destruction on your own people. You have shot your own dissidents. You are violent and have crossed borders with evil intent. This is what you have created your focussed, self referencing, gibbering projected and officially only acceptable culture to forget. This is your autism. It isn’t true autism like mine or yours. Autism in an individual is a way to cope- in an institution it is a stance- a danger to us all.
We won’t waste our lives in your nightmares.
And then he said: Piss off!
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1 comment:
Dear Blue Orange,
I understand the unease of all such people. They have probably found it difficult enough to recognize that their history, their economics, their social practices, the language that they speak, the mythology of their ancestors, even the stories that they were told in their childhood, are governed by rules that are not all given to their consciousness; they can hardly agree to being dispossessed in addition of that discourse in which they wish to be able to say immediately and directly what they think, believe, or imagine; they prefer to deny that discourse is a complex, differentiated practice, governed by analysable rules and transformations, rather than be deprived of that tender, consoling certainty of being able to change, if not the world, if not life, at least their 'meaning', simply with a fresh word that can come only from themselves, and remain forever close to the source. So many things have already eluded them in their language: they have no wish to see what they say go the same way; at all costs, they must preserve that tiny fragment of discourse -- whether written or spoken -- whose fragile, uncertain existence must perpetuate their lives. They cannot bear (and one cannot but sympathize) to hear someone saying: 'Discourse is not life: its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than He.'
Regards,
M. Foucault.
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