by J.W. Carey
But then, who says I must have a reason for writing? Why can it not be something spontaneous, something heartfelt and sudden and striking with the previously professed speed of an Obsessive-Compulsive Infatuation? I had intended to lash out at planned prose here, though, with the level of literary devastation I can bring to bear; it would be more like the semi-loving caress of a teenager releasing herself to supposedly healthy desires at a Year 10 dance, than the splintered teeth of the leviathan I would hope to emulate.
But Orwell said we have four reasons for writing, and to a greater or lesser extent, all writers possess these qualities. Whether it be the result of sheer-egotism, the aesthetic enthusiasm, a sense of historical impulse or some twisted desire to express some political proposition, they all suffer from one of these motivations. This tenuous, matchstick world in which we stride like rats and gods and the gods of rats, cannot handle anymore motivation.
He evaluated his own reasons for writing, at a level of self-reflection which would make a poor, failed imitator like myself visible for the charlatan I am, stating that he was a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth but that he had been forced into becoming some sort of pamphleteer, because his era was not a peaceful one.
No offence Orwell, old son, but if that is really the case and you could see exactly what kind of legacy that you have left behind you; you’d roll in your fucking grave, as though your abused skull were attached to a rotor. The last words I’ve heard you say told me to look out for the boot on humanity’s face. And, like some advocate of the party you warned us against, you commanded me, begged me with a voice unchanged in emotion, not to let it happen. You told me, that it all depends on me.
Ignoring the fact that, despite your genius and your apparent ability to view the future, you have no right to put such a burden on the shoulders of a simple, talentless drunk, of an egotistical maniac, with a personality forged around the rusting iron of my arrogance, I can only respond in one way.
I’m trying George. I really, really am.
* * *
‘That last one may,’ I heaved again, feeling the well of tears in my eyes, my left hand moving involuntarily towards my chest, fingers in the shape of talons digging between my rib cage, my right locked onto the rim of the bowl, as though the material could be bent if I forced enough of myself against it, as though I could alter reality by the non-existent, shaking strength of my arms. My hair hung limply around my face, framing my world into the merciless image of my own produce squatting like scum on top of the water. I felt the burn, the orgasm of my throat shooting out its load, resulting in a half-satisfaction, revolting in the sensibility that I could yet do more, that the petulant demands of my physicality had yet to be sated.
It didn’t matter. I knew the cubicle around me by now, the brief glance as I toppled from my upright position as the doorkeeper of my own privacy to the barely humanoid figure slouching across my throne, like an undeserving king wrenching a stolen metaphor from a desecrated stone, cementing the knowledge I had already foreseen. And, just like that ancient, proportionally fantastical monarch, I believed that fate had positioned me there.
But that is a coward’s excuse. It wasn’t fate that forced the poison on me, left me half-kneeling and sitting on a stained tiled floor. It wasn’t fate who wrote the moans emerging from my throat into existence with a flick of its overly-ostentatious type-writer. It wasn’t fate which had led me into the cubicle covered in the marks of civilisation, covering the natural, weakly plastic walls in crude drawings and misspelt poetry. It wasn’t fate that drew my eyes to the long paragraph, carved into the wall with careful hatred, the paragraph ending in the simple query ‘What iz Art?’
And, through distance and tentative materiality, through our grasp on the concept of distance, through our brief understanding of how it may be tricked and cheated by the desperately wilful, I did my best to answer him, this logical successor to Banksy.
Art is, perhaps, not as difficult to define as it should be. Certainly, you could ask anyone on any street and, forgetting for the brief moment that most people would think you insane, or a prime target for a mugging, and be offered as many different definitions as can be imagined. ‘Art is a process between the Artist and the viewer’, ‘Art is something with a deeper meaning’, ‘Art is what you want it to be’, or, as some clever self-assured Bastard always claims, ‘Art is indescribable’. I thought, for a long time, in ways similar to that, varying from each definition depending on the weather, the time and the questioner. Even the meaning I go by now will have no doubt shifted by the morning, warped into some supposedly original copy of a stranger’s idle thoughts.
Art is meaningless, and self-indulgent. It is weak and pathetic, it has been beaten and bruised like the woman on the bus until it was malleable, warping with everyone’s desires into the form that it believes will engender it to a reduction in torture. Like the sacrifice to the cage of rats in a room of blinding light, it abandoned any meaning it may once have possessed; it sold its integrity for a salve on its broken limbs and, instead, found a way to love our society, pandering to its every need as clearly as I do.
Art is superfluous. It is an excuse for mediocrity and for those who would pose themselves as unique thinkers, despite their simplicity, or for those who could be doing so much more than scratching half thought out metaphors on plastic walls in the midst of an urban sprawl.
‘Art is dead.’ I whispered to myself, or I would have, had the vomit not returned to blot out the blasphemous speech. ‘Art is dead, and we are its ghosts.’
I gagged on the thought, spitting out the last of the blackened bile from between my rapidly breaking lips. I slumped further towards the ground and, with a lack of awareness to put even Orwell’s animals to shame; I replaced my thoughts with a single utterance.
‘That last one may have been a mistake.’
* * *
We’re hitting out at some heavy subjects now, aren’t we? I say we, though I am well aware that you are involving yourself in this horror show with as little activity as can be achieved, but if we share the blame, you can hardly dub this an act of literary terrorism, can you? Or maybe it is because the dawn is, less breaking than piecing together those shattered pieces of a broken night, and, in my rising exhaustion, I need someone’s hand to hold?
Metaphorically anyway.
* * *
‘Art,’ I remarked as I returned to my seat, the word thrashing in my subconscious like some deep creature abruptly torn into shallow waters, once again interrupting the three, ‘like literature, demands a certain amount of interactivity from the viewer. But even that holds a curse, simply dubbing him, or her, the base title of viewer.’ I was becoming increasingly aware of their gaze, each pair of eyes locked on my forearm with desperate, almost pleading disgust. ‘Why do we differentiate different forms of viewer into sub-categories? Why does each medium require a different sensitivity? This cannot, of course, be submitted as fact for every variation of the given definitions of Art. I lack the,’ here I pause, almost as if falsified, to stress the point I struggled to make, to teach these three strangers, ‘the lyrical poetry to make a viewer smell the sight of a word, but I would hope they could at least taste the word.’
‘Why can we not hear a segmented piece of prose as though listening to a song, or read a song with the taste of the lyrics upon our lips, or touch the trailing strands of spoken word? Because that involves a particular lack of sensibility? Because these over-pretentious, barely completed thoughts of mine have been floated a hundred times before, by better men than I? Or are these actions impossible, simply due to the imposed confines of science, materiality and even Goddamn common sense?’
‘Y’know, that writer,’ I stressed the word, mockery thick like honey around my tongue, ‘that one I told you about, that writer who seemed to believe that creativity could be mapped out, could be written down like a recipe.’ My hand became an imaginary checklist, and I methodically began to strike aw
ay imagined letters with an over-exaggerated flourish. ‘A given amount of plot, a portion of narrative drive to knead and punch into the desired shape, the sweetness of human relations, mixed with the bitterness derived from the same, a dash of reference to greater works, so that the audience finds such arrogance palatable. A sprinkling of political or religious discourse, only a sprinkling however, anything more and it becomes sickly and difficult to swallow. A hint of character development, enough to make the consumer feel that the food is wholesome and filling, when in fact the sweetness describes the onset of a diabetic thirst.’ I snorted at the last, the sudden sound making my own head spin with the resultant lack of force and yet the throbbing of my conviction.
‘She said that we had to have a character whom we understood, one whom we would find relatable and would side with. No matter his actions, his thoughts, as long as he is capable of justifying them to himself, and his self-righteous knowledge of his role as the protagonist. Like the Bride and the Groom atop a tiered wedding cake, we need something understandable amongst that mass of ingredients; we need a point to begin with, to admire and state that ‘This! This is where our narrative lies! This is where we are!’ In the expression that was becoming synonymous with my disposition, I repeated my shrug.
‘Maybe I’m taking this cake metaphor a little too far; it is no doubt due to my naturally sweet and childlike disposition.’ I paused, waiting for the guffaw of idiotic laughter, and was almost surprised when the silence resumed after my lips locked together. ‘Anyway,’ I tilted my head back, ‘I’ll let that one lie, just like every other word which has emerged from my mouth.’
F. Scott. Fitzgerald
Alcoholism was never the malady I supposed it to be. That is not, of course, to refute the definition of an elevated content level as a necessity, as a malady but rather to scorn the dramatisation of such an illness. I assumed that, as an alcoholic whom aspires to the role of writer, or at least one of those bordering such a status, I would instantly emulate someone such as Hemmingway, downing whiskey after whiskey, each only serving to salve my troubled genius. Much like this romanticising of poverty, to be the starving artist, it is nothing more than a lie purported by insecure writers themselves, with some desire to make their own dull lives grander in the sickly glow of nostalgia. Even King was once asked if he drank, to which his only response was ‘I just said I was a writer, didn’t I?’ What a line! Pretty fucking funny, at least for a man of a semi-psychological horror mentality, but, to me, it is as scary as Cujo or The Shining ever managed to be. There was a lot I never knew about alcoholism.
I never knew it included vomiting on the previously stained floor of a public transport, of passing out in a stranger’s bathroom, only to wake up tired and broke, the entirety of my week’s funds flowing into the pockets of some skeletal barkeep, with a grin as acidic as the liquid in his grasp, in my hand, running down my throat. It is only when deep into someone else’s cups that I begin to realise what kind of existence I, for lack of a word laden with the poetic sorrow I would desire to convey, exist in. The physical space in which I inhabit could have so easily belonged to a more advanced variation of myself, to someone smarter, more gifted, someone who would be more than capable of providing a boon to our collected lives, opposed to this solitary hermit scrounging survival within this body, had they only been better at swimming through some judicial fluid as thick as jelly, sitting solid and tensed in a Creator’s womb.
Self-pity and abasement. I never know if these two are symptoms of the sluggish alcohol, reminiscent of the fat child in a foot-race, in the blood, or the crippled mentality of the drunk we see with his hands splayed around the glass as though it were the Grail, and the certainty of the knowledge that the liquid it contains is more valuable than that belonging to some oft-quoted Jewish hippie in desperate need of a razor, but fortunately possessing an amazing public relations team. After all, I imagine it is difficult to deny someone’s divinity when there is less than no reason why one should believe in the divinity to begin with. Arguments based purely in the mind can have no logical response, there can be no evidence brought before those confident that their weakness will create any new train of thought. The mind-railways of these folk are already filled with obsolete engines, lacking the possession of even novelty to support their maintenance on modern tracks.
Whatever, judging yourself by your pain, even if that pain emerges from the active idiocy of others, is never a solid idea; it is never a means of creating sympathy for this character I so desire you to find some relatable quality within. Of course, there must be heart-ache, heart-ache and blood in any narrative designed to maintain your interest and this time when I speak, know it is the author of the character’s destined fate, whether that be God, or the character himself, or some ancient foreign civilisation running the character through some impossible game.
There is heart-ache coming. As surely and certainly as this narrative is guaranteed to offer a satisfying resolution, heart-ache and blood prowl in the character’s future as though a modern-day equivalent of the knife, awaiting the whore in Whitechapel’s overly glorified past.
* * *
The bartender glared at me. Again. Somehow, I was starting to think he had some kind of animosity towards me. Maybe it was the fifteen minutes in which he must have thought I had exited his bar, that I was no longer the thorn in his side. Or, just maybe, it was the amount of time he had spent in the bathroom. Despite a lack of cemented knowledge around his secretive activities, I assumed that the rubber gloves and the bucket of gently sloshing water meant that I had, at some point during my urinary or vomit-based adventure, missed one of the twin targets.
Ah well, what else was he being paid for? He wasn’t helping prop up the drunken elders whom belong at the empty bar anymore, he wasn’t listening to their lamenting stories of such youths as I, of how we spat and pissed everywhere, of how we had no moral compass, about how we had been given an education denied to the generation that had earned the right to be called the greatest.
Stupidity is one of the many, many things I cannot abide. But stupidity in a sickening marriage with self-congratulatory dishonesty is perhaps the greatest ‘trigger’ to alcoholism. They may not have been present, but the absence of the old guard made more of an impact on my mental state, caught somewhere between self-obsessive emotion and unjustifiable logic, that their presence would have done. Whenever I had the confidence of the drunk, it never went right. Every opportunity I had to take when sober, I lacked the will and the wit and the eloquence within the borders defined in a drunken illness of my carefully Northern tongue.
Alcohol is a poison, and the illness, if your carefully prescribed dosages are kept within hazily-defined borders, is peace. If you stray from either of these divides, you may as well forgo the treatment all together, if you can. Less will not satisfy your needs, and more will only gentrify your brain, like some polished, ungraspable ball floating in acid. It is not an honest peace and, like every magical promise of religion since the first invention of the lie, it is ultimately meaningless and, if easily achievable, would certainly not worth the pursuit. Real peace is, simply, unattainable, even if we were to transcend to a state of eternal wisdom and geniality, with no threats, no fears, no fantasised horde knocking on imagined gates, would swiftly devolve into an even greater kind of Hell, than that which already stalks the mountains and forests, the oceans and the deserts and all the land caught in between.
I like the Pogues. Not just for Fairytale, though that is certainly the most well known, but for almost every song they have done. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, as an album, as an existential device for the advancement of both musical genius and lyrical emotion, is amazing. But to see McGowan now, to see him wheeled out like a decrepit replica, like a mock Santa dragged from the bar to keep the children entertained during a parody of stolen festivities it, in all honesty, does naught more than conjure another drink from my dwindling funds.
I wonder whether he has achieved peace,
in his gently tottering manner. Has he taken to the dream of drink and drugs and simplicity, or has it simply taken him? I would like to ask him one day, when in actuality I would stutter out a tentative greeting and his hand would shake in my trembling grasp, and then one of us would be gone. He, into a world I can only imagine in a mixture of loving dreams and waking nightmares, and me, into a world of grey, leather-coated, tweed flat-capped mediocrity.
* * *
Sobriety, for the second time that evening, began to run its crooked, sensible fingers through my hair, scratching at the thin layer of flesh around my malformed skull. I had, despite my professed apathy, felt a semblance of guilt at returning to my previous spot of emergence out into the chill of an undisclosed seasonal evening. It was probably a decision marred with both intelligence and stupidity, the bus stop I was directing my feet towards being one that is visited by those baby leviathans of modern transport far rarer than my original position, but it meant I was less likely to stagger into my own vomit.
It occurred to me, during that long walk, come stagger, which probably took me longer than I can recall, that if I were to beg forgiveness for my activities that night, exactly whom would I kneel before? When you vomit on broken paving, filling the canals like rotting water, to who would you address a grovelling letter? Could I sneak into the warren of Downing Street, slipping past incompetently unaware watchmen, rolling through irritatingly unbroken window panes, and leave a gently apologetic note upon the Prime Minister’s Fisher-Price politics set? Or do I genteelly wake him from his slumber, a hand gracing the edge of his shoulder, before I scream into his fluttering, uncomprehending eyelids?