Goodbye, Ironman Tate. Goodbye, Vicious Abundance.

What is a writer? He writes for readers, but what does “for” mean? It means intended for them, a writer, he writes to his readers just as he writes “for” readers. He also writes for non-readers, that is, not intended for them, but “in place of them.” So “for” means two things: intended for them and in their place. Artaud famously wrote, “I write for the illiterate… I write for idiots.” Faulkner also wrote for idiots. That doesn’t mean so that idiots might read, or the illiterate might read. It means “in the place of” the illiterate. I write “in the place of” barbarians, I write “in the place of” animals. And what does that mean? Why does one dare say something like that? I write in the place of idiots… the illiterate… animals?

Because that is what one does, literally, when one writes, when one writes, one is not pursuing some little personal matter. Dumb asses! It’s an abomination of literary mediocrity in every era, but particularly quite recently, that makes people think that to create a novel, for example, any little private matter suffices, any little personal affair, one’s grandmother who died of cancer, or a love affair, and there you go, one can write a novel! What a disgrace to think such things! Writing is not a private affair. It’s an act of throwing oneself into a universal affair, be it a novel or a piece of philosophy… writing necessarily means pushing language and syntax... up to a certain limit, the limit that separates language from silence, or the limit that separates language from music, or the limit that would be the wailing, the painful wailing, the painful wailing….