At Edelweiss-Center (1)
I had not developed any concrete thought on why I felt nauseous while reading 2666 last summer, but it’s been a ticking bomb somewhere. I was shoveled back to this question once again when I received a pre-order of Mörderische Huren this week. For 2666, the whole book was incrementally unbearable at best; it was the femicide chapter (i.e., the part about the crimes), dispassionately narrated in a pseudo-journalistic style to present an apocalyptic arena of evil layer after layer, that I found extremely disturbing—not because of the topic, but the level of disintegration by writing (and consequently reading) we might be able to attain, especially without much effort from the reader’s end. As a loafing reader I was certainly not looking for ease or comfort in literature or art in general, but the fundamental attestation of being an instinctively aware narrator versus being a too wide-eyed exerting one, I think (with prejudice of course), lies in the way they manage to (im)purify whatever partitioned reality they would propose in their work. Similar to Benjamin’s “knowledge is ascertainable through questioning, but truth is not”, I think morality is ascertainable through rhetoric architecting, but true innocence is not.
So I stopped reading Bolaño for almost half a year and regrettably (or rather blessedly?) washed out most inks of literal fracturedness and textualized wittiness he printed on my writing. All being said, Bolaño’s work (poems, in particular) is still the best I could possibly hope for at a wandering age disarranged and diluted: “fragmented” is a constantly revisiting theme, and nonlinearity is the default of nature. It was not so satisfying at first to move from his texts to other more consistently arced stories, but this was precisely the opposite he or his Infrarealist friends would suggest.
Risk is always elsewhere. The true poet is the one who is always abandoning himself. Never too much time in one place, like guerrilla fighters, like UFOs, like the white eyes of prisoners serving a life sentence.
O.K.
GIVE IT ALL UP AGAIN
HIT THE ROAD
Those were the sentences pounding inside of me when I sat watching others climbing and fist-bumping at Edelweiss-Center last night, thinking about how I clung onto different bouldering routes, my current research interests, or by chance instant connections before I was fully prepared, or if I ever will be. For the record the boulder place was fine. Not as spacious as the last two I visited but more beginner-friendly somehow.