Diode
Susan Sontag thought that the writer must be four people: the Nut, the Moron, the Stylist, and the Critic. The first, she said, supplies the material; the second lets it come out; the third is taste; the fourth is intelligence.
I’ve been that Nut: the over-enthusiastic freak, the raw exposed nerve; who you are when you mistake your tedious delirium for living art. Prolonged abuse of substances – booze and cocaine and heroin, in my case, historically – not only covers your sickly days with a bruisish pall, and gives you a perverse sense of purpose in seeking those substances out, as you walk enshrouded in confusion, it also gives you interconnectedness, a sense of non-separation from the world around you. You feel like a diode in a circuit, a component part through which energy flows, and you’re alive and you know the provenance of the current that courses through you. And you can’t do anything but live through this extreme sensation, a bizarre way of being which of course makes you, to the vast majority of people you meet, utterly useless and annoying to be around, unfunctional, but you don’t care. And your giddy drunken highness as a conduit for overwhelming emotion is of course what gets you into the usual scrapes: the knife at your throat because the dealer thinks he saw your hand twitch towards the glovebox, when really you had half-thought to caress his kind face; the sad blowjob in a pub toilet interrupted by a bouncer, and the guy who picked you up beats you up. Anyway, that’s the material, supplied by the Nut.
The Moron stands before you. They’re the guy who is not only stupid enough to have had these experiences, but to tell you about them, too. They write them down. Then they cut the words to pieces and rearrange them in what they hope, in their headbanging and opinion-obsessed way, will be most pleasing to you the reader, who they hate and admire and scorn, and want to please, and whose attention they need to survive. They carry around their misremembered Wilde, like a talismanic plastic bag full of rubbish: there is nothing worse than not being talked about. There are further moronic scrapes. The Moron names people with whom they’ve had these experiences as the Nut: ‘how could you’ and ‘that’s not me’ are the words most often said in response, but it is who they are, and that’s why those words were written, because, by sheer dumb (bad) luck, the Moron has remembered correctly, and not thought to think that the sordid exploits that make up the material should be excised for more sensitive sensibilities, not considered the fact that people don’t like to be featured in stories that they didn’t write.
Channelling Cocteau, Susan said of style: ‘our manner of appearing is our manner of being. The mask is the face.’ This means that costumes of any kind, clothes or words or whatever, are not just representative of who we are but constitutive, a cool ideation of style that means the self is not so inescapable, because it is what is on show. I like the idea of an unessential self, one which does not proceed from observable biological realities, however obscured, because it means that there is no such thing as pretending to be someone else, and we are who we are, and not who we are not, and especially not who we were. I don’t know if this appreciation of style makes me Susan’s stylist – god, what a gig – but I guess it means that taste is then an expression of that style-as-self, something self-reflexive which decides what goes on show. In less esoteric terms I don’t know if I have good taste – after all, I hate what stupid people like, and they get to decide what’s popular or considered cool or both – but after all, I’m glad to be able to decide to be someone else.
I was brought up to be what you might call a small-C critic. My parents – uppercase Christians, bigoted with a capital B – hated everything, and made sure everyone knew about it. Every advert, every song, every branded supermarket item, was stupid and annoying, boring and bad for you. And so I learned to communicate by criticising, by making fun and pouring scorn; my adult face has settled into a sneer. I hope I’m a kind person. I feel positively about things, but I think I’m still guilty of this. In fact I know I am: I once said, of myself, to a group of friends, that I’m not particularly judgemental, and they all fell about laughing. My best friend said to me recently, ‘you’re the biggest hater I know.’ He said it with a smile, but still. I suppose it’s somehow ironic that I haven’t the intelligence to unlearn this particular learned behaviour, ironicker still that my critical impulse seems to stem from this stupidity. Perhaps Susan was wrong about the critic equalling intelligence. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood. This seems likely.
Susan – ah, Susan – also said that a great writer has all four things in her list, but you can still be good with only one and two. I think to myself: ah, good.
Joseph Coward is chronically unemployed and has spent the summer lying naked in the dark. There’s a novel somewhere, it’s coming out next year, but this is not special: Coward believes that everyone has one book in them, but that in most cases it should stay there. Writing is easy but it doesn’t pay.
