Is it possible to do nothing? To need no-one? To write about nothingness? Answer that with a glance from your window...
The novel as blank sheet. Art with its tongue cut out. Only then will Art speak the truth.
I'll get rid of my paperbacks and CD's... my TV, my excess clothes, my magazines... Live in a bare room, one lightbulb, a mattress in a corner.
At 7 A.M. i'll rise, have a cup of tea, set out for work.
At 5 P.M. i arrive home and heat up a microwave meal. Till it's time for bed at 10:30 i sit in a kitchen chair and stare into space. When i receive my paltry pay i pay rent and purchase food.
On weekends i sit in my kitchen chair and stare into space. The ideal life! No risks, crime, violence, no potential for danger, and above all no hope, no art, no poetry, no love.
What is the ideal, the proper function of a man? If the government, for instance, were to pry into a man's life what would its ideal be?
The ideal citizen i think should above all be productive and have a sense of purpose. To this end he should be healthy in mind and body, not given to excessive violence or lust, and unquestioningly accepting of every tenet and principle of capitalism.
The ideal citizen i think is lower middle class- so as to feel the occasional sting of poverty but not to be completely enmeshed in it- and should have social aspirations. He should be moderately centralist liberal in politics, steering clear almost instinctively of anything "extreme". He should like football, television, and nights out with the lads. University education? Probably but not necesarilly. What's important is that he should be a productive unit in the economy, pay taxes, and be obsessed with earning money to buy products. He should at some point (ideally when interlocked in a chain of pressures, economic, social and otherwise, which make him likely to continue such a level of "responsibility") acquire a partner and start to consider reproduction, to supply the state with further citizens. He should finance his twilight years with his own money privately invested in a sound pension scheme, and should die not after the age of eighty, quietly and inexpensively.
What is my problem with all this? Doesn't it seem reasonable enough? You get a degree of fun, entertainment, a modicum of fullfillment?
Merely that i reject it all. Simply that i detest and disbelieve it. I have no political or philosophical basis for what i say. It is an instinctive, clod-headed, clumsy aversion, having its basis in nothing more than spite and perverse boredom. Yet i reject the ideal citizen. I constantly buy products and enjoy (short-term) consumerism and yet in the same breath i reject consumerism. I reject making money. I reject marriage and the siring of bairns.
I reject it all out of sheer perversion.