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Dennoch einsam dunkest du dir; in schweigender Nacht hort
Dein Weheklage der Fels,
Hölderlin
The daemon knows — but daemonic knowledge always gets caught in the filtered out before it reaches the main stream of culture; especially now, journalists drown out the poets and philosophers. There are no intuitions anymore, only ‘facts’; there are no forms of counter-knowledge, no discursive modes of resistance — only graphs, data-points… neatly encapsulated recommendations. Knowledge must be made daily, produced fresh like bread; whatever doesn’t fit the factory parameters of infotainment must be discarded, and is discarded. We’re left with white bread, the husk of vitality discarded.
The last thing I want to do anymore is write novels — which was always the first thing I wanted to do; ‘Literature’ proper feels like a dead end, a joke. “It’s not like I wanted to write them,” Beckett said about his own books. My own impulse to create, formalize, enhance seems more like a deformity than a sign of special grace or talent. I feel like destroyed expression.
“What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it heaven,” the German poet Hölderlin wrote, presciently. The state of New York, or more particularly, the city-state of New York, the land of Cuomodaddy, has begun to resemble a kind of liberal hell to me: an abandoned husk where meek people scurry from programmatically ‘safe’ social activities back into isolation. The safety we’ve created is not safe: it deforms us, pacifies us, disarms us, turns us into perfect subjects of technological surveillance.
