This day, something inspired me…
Was it several months of rest and relaxation; the mad, bad election of Donald Trump; a feeling that the world is lurching right, and wrong; the threat of new walls and borders; the angst of an aging man in a new world order; an emotional first trip to Venice, the first city I remember wanting to visit; the inspiration of the International Architecture biennial; the gentle profundity of I, Daniel Blake; or, Jeanette Winterson’s mesmeric retake on The Winter’s Tale: whatever the reason, I both wanted and needed to write, much more than I needed to read, or to be read.
Read, read. Where past and present collide.
Unread. Where past leaves present behind in a chasm of miscomprehension. How do you unread? Can you unread? We seem to be in an age where unreading might be useful. There is too much to read, so much will be unread. If you could unread, would you unknow? It would be good to unknow. Some things. Some things are better left. This train of thought, perhaps.
It’s not a question of going somewhere. If you have read this far, then a word to the wise. Stop. This text is going nowhere. You can see that the trains of thought are random, unedited, unskilled. This text is best left unread, may have better been left unwritten. But it’s audience of one needed to write, to read, to be unread.
The web. Social media. The dominion of the private made public. Where better to leave the unread. To rot. To disintegrate pixel by pixel. To flash momentarily across a million screens and be resigned to digital oblivion. To add homage to the billions of unread texts, pointed and pointless words, deep and embedded meanings, trite and trivial questions, quotes and requotations, copies and appropriations, words without end… ah men. It was the working class white male what won it for Donald in the Mickey Mouse elections of Tinsel Town. My class, my creed, my age.
What better way to stop a locomotive of thought, a TGV of allusion, a bullet train. The sudden need to write transformed to the desire to apologise, to unidentify, to dislocate, to purge and finally, to deny. To edit out the words. To pretend. Finally to lie. Whatever inspired me has come back to bite me: a rabid train of thought roaring through an unmarked level crossing. What is this age if not an age to be angry? To cry out. To cry. To protest. To scream. I think above all, I want to make no sense. Something inspired me to write, my right to make no sense, to be circular and circumlocutory. To circle around meaning, not to mean. To be left, finally, quiet and unread.