The Germans have that much right, I said. A new concept is just a string of old concepts mortared together. A rule is a long word. Any formula repeated word for word is essentially the same as a word with its semic string of syllables. The ten commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, any cliché or platitude you can pull out for the purpose of denying the particularity of the moment. This is a problem. All words are generalizations, all names imply and promote a continuity that exceeds the reality. I’ve sinned several times already in this paragraph. The only other option is not to use words at all, live like dogs and cattle. The fence around this pen cannot be surmounted or undermined or gotten around. And there is no gate.
Poetry cannot shed its last atom of optimism. Beckett knew
this. All artists know this, though many are unaware that they do. It’s
inherent in all forms, all language, all manifestations of art. It has to be. Even
to eat is to have faith in the future, or hope, always at least a morsel of
optimism. How could art escape this? I’m going to make this; I’m going to show
it to you, ask you to read it, see it, hear it, eat it. It’s going to deny, try
to destroy, the absolute uniqueness and unrepeatability of this unique and
unrepeatable moment. (Nietzsche could not have been more wrong.)
To write—to create, even just to live with words, pictures, art—is
to assent to the belief that there exists a key to unlock the gate of this pen
that has no gate and therefore no lock. If I just say it right, you will gain
the insight that makes sense, perhaps only just a little sense, of this senseless
dream. What good could it possibly do to construct another fence inside the
fence that has no gate? Is it a quest for the delusion of Wordsworth: that
blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the
weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened? If so, then delusion is better than truth.
But who’s to say it’s not? To say it is or it’s not is to pretend to have
jumped the unjumpable fence, is to join in the delusion.
