Why I write

I write because the models offered to me in youth as instruments to understand the world appeared too geometrical. From my father, I learned that you had to win, but found winning an uphill struggle with a weed of a body in a town infested with the offspring of thugs. From the Oblate fathers, and the Christian brothers of Ireland and the Sisters of St Anne, I was informed that my state of spiritual perfection left much to desire, only to discover that they had a ponzi scheme of their own simmering. But, most importantly, as I left off with the visions of my original mentors, I began to surmise that the world, as it stood, was a marvellous, many-coloured universe filled with everything you could possibly desire and much more, if only you had the guts to say to yourself - I want that.

So, I threw away the prizes which my mentors taught me were the worthwhile ones - respect, reputation, career, everything! And I threw myself at the mercy of the world, and took my advice from the poets and the vagabonds and the losers festering at the bottom of life's rockpile. They all taught me the same thing - that you had to take the world as it is, that you had to figure it out, and you had to love it with all its imperfections. Everybody gets burned.

I write for the same reason as my masters - Cendrars, Philippe Djian, Rabelais and Henry Miller and Villon and Catallus and de Gourmont - to propose an alternative way of understanding the world.

The writing I offer satisfies nothing of the tenets of the creative writing schools, of the journalists, of the professionals - they despise what I write, and they sneer at the manner of its expression and the omissions of what their dogmas say are the only acceptable ways to express thought. Clearly, they are absolutely right in their assessment. I can never live up to their requirements. I am a pariah. I betray everything they stand for.

My writing is the writing of a pyromaniac. If you like standing close to the heat, you'll see the sparks flying in every direction.

Anything that doesn't suit me gets tossed out of my attic overlooking the North Sea onto the paths close by, and the Batavian winds carry the looseleaf sheets away and drop them into the canals of this polderized land.

I am writing to you, and I address my words to a memory of you and to something which you no longer are - as icons and figurines from my ancient past - I want you all to know that writing of the type I propose is the surest way to poverty and loneliness, but it takes you to the realms of your deepest dreams. I write with great affection as you all form part of the mosaic, and some of you are renegades of the earliest hours, when to be a renegade was an act of courage.

As for those of you who are confused by this missive, or by acts which are those of a crazed man - moving to China after Tianenmen, consorting with rogues and psychopaths and con-men, dropping a sparkling career at the drop of a hat and without a second thought, lay the blame for it at the doorstep of literature.

Rwanda & Henry Miller

Rwanda and Henry Miller

“The next day Father Seromba asked the people to collect the bodies, but they refused. Bourgmestre Grégoire decided to bring in the bulldozer to evacuate the bodies.”

This is an excerpt from today’s work, a little missive to be translated from Kinrwandan into English about priests who shuffle their female parishioners in and out of the presbytery, until one fine day, a group of Interahamwe show up at the refectory entrance in their white pickups, and in the wink of an eye the priest is leading the chorus to demolish his own church, and inside, 2000 of the faithful get to meet the god of their choice.

These days, it’s easy to think we should maybe just start all over again at square zero. Only problem is that nobody agrees on what square zero is. Many are lobbying for some form of cleansing – infidels, sexual deviants, smokers, Muslims, Jews, meat eaters – or in the case of the Dutch, your kitchen sink.

Miller wrote during a war, and feelings were running pretty high in the thirties and forties as well. Plenty of historical recrimination and place in the sun shite being sold. Religious freaks, and of course, the dictators all against decadence, while some of the great cabaret and expressionistic talents were putting on their midnight shows right from the belly of the beast – Germany during the rise of fascism. Maybe the rise of fascism is a necessary sine qua non for decadent art. Or in Hitler’s case, the reverse is true.

Miller was a Teuton, and like all Teutonic artists, he had a weakness for Jews and for Paris. Miller was the first German to surrender. His abdication was so complete that he conquered the world and the world never noticed. Oddly enough, after trials and tribulations of various sorts, he reduced his world view, becoming physically, spiritually and morally myopic to the point that his attention became fixed on some lice in his roommates armpit, and Tropic of Cancer was born. The world, as exemplified by the US Postal Authority, declared printed discussions of lice obscene, while another branch of the government continued bombing Dresden and nuked the Japs, ahem, excuse me our oriental brethren, a couple of times. Fortunately for Miller, what the censors thought obscene struck American GIs as the only intelligible language left in a world gone mad.

Miller, of course, understood that the world has always been mad. Devreux’s like that. I asked what his thoughts were, knowing that while his return flight from NYC taxied down the runway, a band of traveling Saudis, those wild and crazy Wahhabis, were getting the world’s closest close up view of the World Trade Centre on their way, ha ha, to paradise. And, even were kind enough to invite a few thousand stock brokers and secretaries along to meet the great Allah. Inchallah, baby.

“Ah, David,” said the great Devreux, “I haven’t lost a wink of sleep since the fall of the Byzantine empire”, implying and proving through the enigmatic, crackly, puckish Devreux smile of a Hunan librarian, that he was at the very least a thousand years old.