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Refuge for the rational.

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Martin Amis Is a Genius 

I’ve read this five times already:

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It’s Nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that…Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you would mark them.

The first time I read this there was a distinct “Ah ha!” It wasn’t audible, even in my head, but the feeling was there. There was some indication that if I juxtaposed this opening paragraph with everything I’ve written and continue to write, it would highlight everything I’m doing wrong.

This is the fifth time though, and I can’t pull out my computer (which I’ve become so dependant on; I seem to have no use for pens anymore) and furiously record the dialogue in my head. There are far too many people around me, this is rush hour and this is public transit, and it makes me uncomfortable having people around when I’m trying to disclose things. Writing is so much like acting—the process should make you feel naked.

So, I stare out the window, Amis still in hand, my left index finger stuck in and holding the page. There isn’t any need for this, it’s the first page and I haven’t got past it, but maybe I’d like to sneak at it again. I read past it this time and Amis describes a marriage and a bed that reeks of it and then I reach the line:

…the young sleep in another country, at once very dangerous and out of harm’s way, perennially humid with innocuous libido—

Jesus.

I take my finger out of the book this time; I smile and even shiver and put it away because it isn’t something I should be reading with all of these people around. I’ve found something that is so much a privilege and yet so much not—something we aren’t conscious enough to miss when it’s missing—and that is inspiration.

I stare out the window. A man jitters by the train as it’s at a standstill, smoking crack from a pipe and talking to himself. The train begins moving again and stops at a busy station where people fresh and exhausted from work pile onto the train. A woman sits next to me and a man stands above her.
“What do you want for dinner tonight?” The woman asks the man.
“I don’t know”
They play out the scene as people who have known each other for a very long time often do—barely regarding each other and taking the other’s presence for granted. I think for a moment that this should make me sad, but it doesn’t. I am briefly able to see these people as they really are—the colours of their work outfits become suddenly brighter, there is no inner dialogue in my head telling me that they are bad or boring or amputated people—they are just there. They continue to talk and I stare out the window, hearing small portions of the dialogue. I think I hear the word vegetables several times. And more questions: “What do you want to do tonight?”
“I don’t know…go to bed early. You have to get up early, don’t you?”
This is an ironic encounter given the three pages of Martin Amis’ book I’ve just read. I steal his words to describe this discourse—they reek of marriage. We pass a Sherwin-Williams paint outlet and the jingle runs through my head a few times. Innocuous libido. If only it were always that way—completely harmless and natural—protected by it’s intrinsicality and absolute innocence. But the perversion of the thing itself is not the thing itself, it’s the Nothing. It’s this performance, also natural and so potentially inevitable: It’s just sad dreams.
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