Writing Degree-Zero

there’s no Other, there’s no reader, only chuckles, only bliss

I promised myself I’d be better this year, that I’d write something at least fortnightly, if not weekly, that my consistency would swell the waves of engagement and carry me to new heights, new shores. Here I am instead breaking my longest silence yet.¹ What’s gone wrong?

I didn’t, to be precise, resolve to become prolific at the very end of the last calendar year. My new year’s resolutions were more ‘actionable’: sign up to a gym (achieved), get a new job (underway), and to refrain from expecting my loved ones to make up for my own failings or at least to cease being wrathful when they don’t (improving). No, I had made this promise at the end of the first year of this public diary, this subscription stack, this weblog, on 10 May 2023. It was, in hindsight, vague, confused, counterproductive. For there’s a difference between writing and publishing: I’ve been doing plenty of the former this year, yet none of the latter, having been held back by printing schedules in a few cases; in most by my own censorious judgement. Writing, to me, is a risky endeavour, for there’s never a guarantee that its fruits will see the light of day. I am my own worst gatekeeper. Like in Kafka’s Kabbalah-spoof, the ‘Parable Before the Law’ in Der Prozess,² I don’t know the conditions of admittance, despite being at once applicant and guard. Reflecting on my own literary travails reveals the structure of the psyche to be a joke.³ I Am that I Am: God’s first response to Moses’ demand for an introduction contains the seeds of both ego and superego, the original Hebrew meaning both ‘I am who I am’ (ego) and ‘I will be what I will be’ (superego). Then there’s the excess beyond the fact (descriptive) and the law (normative), the antinomian world of the repressed, the subconscious, which is actually the decisive part, everything else acting a cipher to its frightening, its monstrous messages. I suffer from a surfeit of superego – I am my own father, my own Freudian trinity, divisus et imperatus sum.

The conditions of admittance to my own diary are murky. I stand, like the man before the law, in front of an open gate, obeying a man (myself) telling me I cannot enter. Contemplating this makes feel what Heidegger must have felt whenever he used the word Abgrund: I feel giddy. So I told myself, in May last year, to write more, thinking that would mean I’d publish more. But I didn’t resolve to do anything about the fellow stood at the gate. So I’ve been stuck for two months in my own Kafkaesque eternity, my own comedy-show of the soul.

But let’s leave this Jewish, late night atmosphere for a moment, and substitute its funny, Witz-y circuitousness for some perfect, Platonic spheres; let’s try to give an account of my absurd blockage. To be admitted, I think, the piece must have a rhythm, but also, if not an argument, then at least some expansive claim, some tantalising logical gesture. I love a good view, whether it be a landscape or a revealing Barthesian ‘gap’ in someone’s attire. If it’s a short piece, as most of my pieces are, then it must be a pleasure to write, it must flow out of me⁴ – I’m after all no hack, no distrest poet, there’s no ghastly pecuniary motive (yet); I write this diary to amuse myself, like a gentleman, like John Donne composing his superlatively clever poems to circulate among his friends, poems which enact mysterious syntheses of heaven and earth, faith and sex – works anathema to neuroticism.⁵ The pieces I’ve been labouring on and kept locked in my drawer have so far failed on all counts: formless, built on top of claims and arguments that seem to teeter on the edge of a claustrophobic banality, and – worst of all – composed from a sense of duty rather than for fun.⁶ There’s no sugarcoating it: I’m rather lazy, I don’t like to work a lot, though I have forced myself to toil for meagre results for many, many years. It was only recently, after reading Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, my favourite book, that I realised Goethe’s Faust, wicked and miserable from his endless studying, isn’t a role model.

I’ve not fully metabolised that work yet, which will inevitably take a long essay to accomplish. But I have realised something, perhaps relevant to it, in my recent, daily excursions to the gym and the swimming pool: the need for an aerobic foundation. This foundation is a comfortable pace which allows one to cover long distances effortlessly. For too long have I felt the vain novice’s embarrassment over the mediocre qualities of my comfort zone, so I’ve been sprinting when I should’ve been jogging, collapsing of exhaustion well before the finish.⁷ I have been demanding perfection, suffering from the conceitedness of the tyro who apologises for his failings by claiming he’s too good for this world. My recent sessions in the swimming pool have embodied me, taught me that real improvement happens, not by foolhardy overreach, but by a slow build-up of strength from a comfortable beginning. Against the inane mantra of instant innovation, disparaged by René Girard, exercising our bodies, as Nietzsche would’ve wanted us to, teaches us to think, first and foremost, inside the box and to enjoy ourselves in our comfort zone. That is the gay science, the Mediterranean life, where new discoveries and great feats happen as a result of fun – that adventurous, dilating force – rather than toil.

I’m writing to amuse myself: this shall be my literary foundation, a state of instant and unambiguous feedback, laughter and excitement unifying the warring Freudian layers of my psyche. I wanted to add, as a considerate gesture ‘and my readers’, but this would immediately instil the crippling, neurotic doubt which harasses the stand-up comedian. Writing degree-zero: there’s no Other, there’s no reader, only chuckles, only bliss.

Bring back athletic art! I can’t stand another pastoral scene of quietude, another sedentary portrait.

1. I did publish a review of Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990) in late December, and I’ve created a personal website in order to collect the growing number of pieces I’ve been publishing elsewhere.

2. I’ve always pictured it played as a skit, SNL-style, with a laughing track.

3. Freud quotes Jean Paul in his Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious: ‘Freedom produces jokes and jokes produce freedom’.

4. ‘23 September [1912]: This story, “The Judgement,” I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. […] The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water. […] The conviction verified that with my novel-writing I am in the shameful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.’

5. Freud, again in his Jokes, mentions two ‘favoured’ definitions of jokes among the Germans: the ability to find hidden similarities between things (conceit), and the ability to bind together, with surprising rapidity, many disparate things. Donne’s poetry is characterised by both, yet it’s not funny, not Witz-y but witty.

6. One ought is taken from Barthes, who was said to write something about everything he read. So I’ve been reading to write, without his ‘bliss’. Another relates to demands made by my œuvre and my inchoate public persona, having to claim certain topics as my own to strengthen my ‘brand’.

7. The distinction between aerobic and anaerobic exercise is particularly acute in swimming, owing to its constraints on breathing.