STATUS ANXIETY

Though I’ve been over most posts twenty times, they remain first drafts.

Worst drafts.

Why?

I’ve no editor proper.

GIVENS TAKEN

The unwritten intro to every article:

It seems to me…

The invisible extro:

But I’m probably mistaken.

Similarly, each statement might have been preceded by the words I suspect.

I haven’t done so.

I’ve omitted other qualifiers, too.

Every I think, I believe, perhaps, maybe.

As much for the sake of economy as style.

The ideal length for a blog post is 2,500 words, it seems.

I’ve laboured to approximate this.

Failed.

Likewise, every statement should have been tempered with a sometimes, occasionally, from time to time.

This might have prolonged its shelf-life.

But prevented it from flying off the shelf in the first place.

Why?

To engage the public one must indulge polemic.

Trade in absolutes, eternals, universals, transcendentals.

Though they’ll be deposed absolutely always.

To say anything is to reshape everything.

Excise this.

Exaggerate that.

There is method in this.

Officially, I don’t believe in anything.

So, the only way to make a claim is to fake a stand.

A pose.

Put on a show.

For one night only.

Become Ziggy Nietzsche.

ATTITUDINAL DECREPITUDE

I’d love to be trenchant.

To denounce, decry, damn.

Schopenhauer scoundrels.

Nietzsche nemeses.

But it’s not my nature.

(Because I’m not Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.)

All I have is doubt.

Doubt nothing more than this doubting.

And hope?

Every perception, abstraction, resolution is a hope.

I’ll never be sure –

Determine not to be –

But I have questions.

CONSISTENT INCONSISTENCY

The thoughts outlined in a post do not represent ongoing beliefs.

Consistent beliefs even.

Every article is complete and entire unto itself.

Should not be cross-read with any other.

Worse:

A claim made at the beginning of an essay may not accord with one in the middle or end.

In my defence:

‘I’m a million different people from one day to the next.’

Derrida?

Whitman?

The Bible?

Yes –

My game is Legion.

For we are many –

No.

The Verve –

The Verve wrote that.

ERRORS OF ERIS

Are these arguments?

Not logical ones, certainly.

Or logically ascertainable ones.

Here I claim Schopenhauer’s privilege.

Nietzsche’s droit de seigneur.

Or the reverse right that infuriated Russell:

Prima nocta or lasta nocta,

Nobody screws with these arguments.

Can’t.

They weren’t built-up by logical means.

So, can’t be demolished by same.

Why?

Logic is another trick of the sophist.

Protagoras’ last, perhaps.

RELUCTANCE RETICENCE

These are not everything that is the case.

Not anything that is the case, probably.

DISBELIEF IN BELIEF

But you can’t be a reluctant philosopher.

Deny that your ideas are truths.

Suspicions, merely.

Why not?

I’m responsible for what comes to me in the dark, I suppose.

Out of me.

Through me.

Haven’t I been used enough, then?

Do I have to believe it all too?

I feel each noticing, yes.

Felt it, truly.

But does that make it true?

First off, I can’t see my way to believing in truth.

And faith in epiphany –

That’s a hangover from religion.

The insistence that an idea that emerges unbidden is proof it came from some metaphysical realm.

And is, thus, unimpeachable.

What does it mean to believe in what occurs to you?

It’s raining.

I believe it’s raining.

What does the second sentence add to the first?

No more than Russell’s truth:

(It’s raining.

It’s true that it’s raining.)

As being isn’t a predicate, belief isn’t a proof.

It’s a certificate of authenticity.

That requires authentication itself.

An underlining merely.

Bolding.

Affirming.

This came to me, out of me.

And, you know what, on top of everything else, I believe it.

Think it true, too.

Is this any better than preceding a sentence with the truth of the matter is?

(Translation from the original politician: I think.)

Does it do any more than slap an I approve this message at the end of my own party broadcast?

Belief introduces a regress infinite as a Schoolman’s affirmation of God.

This thought occurred to me –

Came out of me –

And, you know what, I believe it.

But surely, hopefully, you believed it after you discovered evidence for it?

That’s the basis for your belief?

If you then say ‘I believe in this evidence’ what’s added to the pile?

It’s tautologous.

Tortuously.

I believe because I believe squared.

That’s no more than what philosophers call yaying or naying.

Saying: I thought this and also like this.

Believe this because I want it to be true.

People say outrageous things.

Does their claim to believe them also add anything to their contentions?

Do you accept any statement after I believe this is added to it?

SELF DISBELIEF

I’m not a missionary for these acts of faith.

Or, if I am, I’m their first unbeliever also.

A self-apostate.

Zealot who is simultaneously a heresiarch.

How can a man who believes in nothing –

Can’t affirm anything –

Confirm something?

EXPRESSIONS OF IMPRESSIONS

These are expressions of something rather than explications of anything.

Things I discovered in myself only when they demanded to be out of my self.

And on a shelf.

Like love of a particular piece of music, say, no one should conclude I’m claiming they’re good for anyone else.

For all.

Just for me.

Now.

They are psychological phenomena.

Not ontological ones.

Are they true?

Partially, occasionally, seemingly.

Never entirely, uniformly, universally.

CLAIMS DEPT.

Every claim is contingent.

A testing, prodding.

Not proving, asserting, affirming.

So, I reserve the right to take back every statement the moment it’s made.

Thus, they are less philosophical assertions than stand-up comedians bits.

If I had the wit, charm and courage of a Seinfeld, say, that’s what they would be.

Observations, if you will.

And if you don’t, jokes.

Linguistic objects you may laugh away or into.

Dismiss or mull over.

In short:

In one sense they make sense.

In another sense they’re nonsense.

IT HAS BEEN SAID

IT WILL BE SAID

Originality is another thing I can’t see my way to believing in.

I can only say that – unless otherwise stated – drawing from anyone else’s will is unintentional.

A sign of desperation, not venality.

We’re all Bedouin in this desert.

Suckers for succour.

So, dunk water-skins in whatever well we happen upon.

Against our will.

Trying to stake my own claim –

Find my own voice –

I feel as though I’ve been invited to an illustrious gathering by mistake.

Crashed one, rather.

Either way, all my heroes are there.

But the lighting is such that I can’t see them.

Not clearly anyway.

And the room is so small I’m compelled to sidle.

Draw in my shoulders.

Go up on tips.

But, no matter how compact I make myself, I keep nudging other guests.

Elbowing them.

Stepping on their toes.

‘Sorry! Sorry!’

IGNORANCE IS THIS

I claim special knowledge of nothing.

Least of all myself.

I pose questions only.

Ones that no one else has posed.

Of late at least.

With the same emphasis.

Volume.

No –

I can’t claim that even.

Couldn’t without having read everything written.

In every language.

EXTREME UNPREJUDICE

If you read a statement that sounds like a preference for, rather than a plea to not set against, forgive me.

It wasn’t intended.

TECHNIC IS ONLY TECHNIQUE

Joyce boasted:

‘I have discovered that I can do anything with language.’

If I felt similarly, my objective might be:

How to demonstrate this?

Having discovered that I can do nothing with language,

I scheme to disguise the fact for as long as possible.

What follows, then, is literary legerdemain.

STYLE TRIAL

The style adopted here was developed for a work of fiction.

An attempt to conjure the bygone by slowing time.

Suggest an unfolding present via the use of single sentence paragraphs.

Learning that large blocks of text were frowned on in blogs, I hoped it might work here.

Of course, it’s all over the shop syntactically.

But I hope it might possess a conversational quality.

Suggest an old geezer wittering.

Thought after thought.

This old geezer wittering, whispering.

I mingle metaphors abandonedly as a bitter mixologist does spirits.

Example:

Better to be a flash in a pan, then.

Even when you’re flushed out of it.

And on the way to the fire.

Stingy in my penury, I need my words to do double – triple – duty.

My first radio play – a stream of conscientiousness – was rejected with the rejoinder:

‘It’s more John Lennon than James Joyce.’

Knowing little of the Beatle, I was mortified.

Now, I’d be honoured to be grouped – even for the sake of disparagement – in the same phylum.

And late-Joyce is Lennon-like anyway.

Or visa versa.

Also Milligany and Carrolish.

WHAT ABOUT WHAT-ABOUTISM?

When I was a child, it appeared that I might have an aptitude for something.

Could scratch out identifiable representations of objects on paper.

I told no one in my family.

Classmates regarded this as a super-power.

My biology teacher too.

And my art teacher?

He asked me to pen the script for his latest 8MM movie.

Undecided which path to follow for my tertiary education, I plumped for art.

(Among a ragbag of subjects that embraced Eng Lit, French and Film Studies.)

Why did my new art teacher greet me so heartily?

I suspect he suspected I possessed my eldest brother’s protean talent.

I required one lesson to disabuse him of this hope.

He never bypassed an opportunity to convey his disappointment.

Committed for the year, I wasted lessons debating the talented students.

(It never occurred to me to switch to the subject I spent most of my free-time reading.)

One of them got my measure in minutes.

‘So,’ she said, ‘everything’s like everything else?’

This succeeded in shutting me up but good for good.

Why did it hurt so much?

What-aboutism was my natural mode of attack.

Is.

Then –

Don’t we all do as much?

WE MUST HAVE HEROES

When I say X, the greatest composer of all time, Y, the greatest playwright, et cetera, I’m positing personal preferences.

It may be possible to rate and weight the great on the basis of influence.

But not to gauge their greatness, per se.

Feel free to substitute names dropped with those of your own heroes.

COMPARISON EMBARRASSMENT

If I appear to compare myself with anyone of note –

(Michelangelo, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, Joyce – Jesus, I’ve gone to town already.)

I don’t do so with positive intent.

The opposite, rather.

An invisible even presages every association.

The desperation of a Christian – alone in their own night garden – who bleats:

‘Even Christ asked for the cup to be taken away.’

That is:

I associate with heroes to underline the great disparity.

And for the same reason a Christian does.

(The figure referred to is familiar.)

The allusion is apt.

My heroes are to me what gods are to many.