Embrace chaos yes, by all means embrace chaos, yet make sure you do this only to the extent that this can be used to validate the ego-construct that purports to be doing this heroic embracing! In this case embrace chaos, embrace chaos and enjoy the dare-devil glory that comes with it! More kudos to you, as the man said. More kudos to you, my friend. Beware however that the chaos doesn’t get inside you all the same for if that happens then there’s nothing anyone can do to save you. Don’t be too reckless, in other words. Don’t take it too far. Don’t do what you are pretending to do. If the chaos actually gets inside of you then there’s no kudos in that I’m afraid. No indeed, there’s no kudos in that. Chaos doesn’t tolerate kudos; it provides no fertile ground for self-glorification. Chaos laughs in our stupid faces.
‘Garbage Thoughts on a Wet Thursday Afternoon.’ That’s going to be the title of my latest experimental novel. Not that there’s much demand for experimental novels these days of course. I wonder if there ever was, now that I come to think of it! Not with the general public, anyway. No one ever goes into a bookshop looking for an experimental novel, do they? If they go in at all then it’s inevitably going to be for something generic, something on the best-sellers list or something that was talked about on daytime TV. Garbage Thoughts on a Wet Thursday Afternoon. The idea is that the novel is made up of a long rambling inner monologue of bullshit thoughts – my long rambling interior monologue of bullshit thoughts. The type of empty, pointless thoughts that we are all guilty of populating the day with. You know well what I’m talking about here, I imagine. That’s our legacy, after all. Everyone needs to leave a legacy – that’s a type of basic psychological drive, like the drive to become the centre of attention when you’re in a group or the drive to bully people who are weaker than you are. It’s not enough to spend a short while on the creaky stage of life, strutting our stuff as Shakespeare says, we have to leave something behind us. Something to remind the world that we existed, that we were here. Even if we were nothing but sad self-deluding idiots with nothing to say.
‘Garbage Thoughts on a Wet Thursday Afternoon’ – there’s poetry in that, you know. There’s a whole world of poetry in that. It’s important to attend to the poetry of everyday life. Well, it is if that’s the sort of thing that you’re into, I guess. It’s important to those of us who find it important. They stick around, those bullshit thoughts. Most people probably imagine that a thought disappears after we done thinking it, but no – nothing of the kind. We leave them behind us, like odd repulsive artifacts made of some garish non-degradable polymer. They’ll still be there in ten thousand years – every bit as offensive, every bit as obnoxious as when you first thought them. These thoughts of ours tie us to the mechanical world, as you might imagine. They are an evil affliction and I’m afraid there is simply no other way to put it. Our thoughts serve the Evil One. The turning mechanical wheel is the Evil World Soul, isn’t that what DH Lawrence says? That or something very much like it. The Evil World Soul, turning and turning. Always turning, like the Great Pointless Machine that it is. The great pointless machine that eats up our lives, the great pointless machine that swallows all our days. It turns and we turn obediently with it – we don’t have the power to do otherwise, you see. We’ve been fed into the machine and so that’s our lot. We’ve become good little girls and boys.
‘Feed them to the machine’, the great brassy voice cries out, ‘feed them to the Machine and see how they get on with that. See how they like that, see how they like that…’ See how they like the Scrunger, see how they like the Mincer, see how they like the Muncing Machine. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ roars the voice, ‘we’ll see just how much they like that…’
