A BUTTERCUP FOR YOUR SUFFERING
After William Gass

“Disguised as fiction the truth occasionally slipped through.”—Wilfred Bion

It has been said that writing is a way to relieve oneself of self, to find a reprieve from the onus of being “somebody”. Conversely, as one who has made this quest can attest, writing can also be a way of doubling down, rooting in, affirming one’s self-twist, despite the motive and motion toward self-effacement. Gestures of relieving selfhood can be made without ever reaching that threshold where those gestures come alive—without ever giving language the attention it ought to deserve, in following that realization.

**

The most obvious miss of the mark is to equate this realization with spiritual quietude, with actionless calm that never thinks about why it’s calm, about why it’s been granted its reprieve, or about what purpose the null center of self prepares one for, what it may devote itself to, like: going fishing in the ocean of signifers for gales.

The ascetic’s ideal was to finish with the world and not need language. It goes no further than that: traceless absorption in (non-)existence.

But what is easier than not-being? It all does it every day. Whole epochs, empires, dynasties, star clusters, have accomplished it so comparatively quickly that, from our perspective, they took no time at all.

The self one is to be relieved of, is a fiction written in a book quickly closed, a book lost in a vast, diffident shelf.

And non-being is even more immediate than that—it needn’t wait for a thing’s demise, the book’s close.

For the writer, too, the evaporation of the fictional character is built-in to its unfolding. Only by the stroke of the pen, by directed mental attention, by recitation, does one restore life to that character and its fictional world.

Just as one never secures the difference between inarticulate animal and articulated speech, just as every effort to secure that difference requires a new act of speech, a new cry uttered in the abyss between pure sound and failed sense—for the voice cannot be located anywhere else.

Non-being is the basic return state of an anthropogenesis never complete, of a language that has never been. To dream of having any other being takes the creative work of speech, of a word nonetheless still lost to the void the minute it leaps from one’s lips.

**

According to Berkeley, the last idealist, unless I’m looking at the forest-green candle half-burned on the table, with wax trickling down its side, stuck in a dusted bronze Arabic candleholder whose feet and head fan out like seashells, its grooves holding a few wooden sticks left over from the incense I burnt yesterday—unless I turn my head and summon my gaze to take in the hourglass python, it does not exist. Esse est percipi.

This doctrine might have consoled us, might have told us: God’s watchful eye is over us always, continually bringing everything into existence through his omnipresent perception. But intellectual history took a more dismal turn, a realist turn, which assures us that everything is out there whether we say it is or not.

Indeed today—when Texas-sized slicks of microscopic plastics loiter like gargantuan eye-masks on the Pacific surface (never mind the cognoscenti of plankton out there, wolfing it down with their mastaxes)—to assert not only that a falling tree makes no sound without our hearing it, but worse, that no falling tree exists in the absence of its perceptual registry (never mind the tree’s capacities in that area)—that nothing “is” apart from our attention of it, well, this stabs as the epitome of scientific naivety.

Or think quarks (though it’s not clear how to do that): without microprocessors and Hadron colliders, not even God could see them. It has been speculated that God did not think we’d sharpen our sight to such a degree, and now he’s got to backfill all the missing data: hence the gift and mystery of quantum geometry. These quarks so small, so unlike things, so ubiquitous and impenetrable, so invisible, we don’t know what perceiving them would mean. They vanish into thin air like the magician’s genial assistant in a shark tank when the curtain’s pulled.

What’s more, thanks to the Buddhist doctrine of pratītyasamutpāda, we know there’s no self-intrinsic existence to anything. What came will go and what comes will came, twice, once, the countable aspects when and where, the nameable aspects to whom and for what, the question taken by the form—all this not so relevant when “form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” a slogan I quite like since it proves my point: Not-being is the easiest way to be. (Just think of how many things have ceased existing since you started reading—candles, quarks, Berkeley!)

Now imagine the Bombs-A’-Way Coaster stuck at its rickety summit, right before the steep incline plummet, and you’re there 200 feet high, alone and exposed to the winds whipping up stronger now (is that a Tornado forming in the distance I see?), unable to budge an inch with these bars across your shoulder, and your belly’s grumbling with sugars of cotton candy, and you’re wondering if you remembered to put out the candle at home and feed your pet plankton, it’s all too much trying to reconcile climate change with the Buddha’s teaching, when suddenly you realize: if you closed your eyes now, it would change nothing.

Observe closely, now, what everyone knows so horribly. It takes literally nothing for me to kill that poor sap stranded up there on the coaster: heart attack, stroke, battering ram of a 2×4 launched by the thunderstorm’s winds, or the wooden girders collapse beneath him (termite damage), a screw comes loose at the loop, a heartache he’ll never recover from haunts him from the next over empty seat (now there’s a long story)—it’s all easy, so easy, that “relieving the self” barely counts.

For while it is true that everything “is” out there, whether or not we say it is, or perceive it —though, rigorously speaking, isn’t this too an unfalsifiable belief?—the bigger issue is: it’s all about to not be, anyway.

A thing that makes a noise makes a dissipation of noise too. What occurs is a sign of the coming dead. What we perceive is a mark of the thing-perceived, but exhausted. Being is what we attribute to non-beings that aren’t gone yet.

**

The spiritualist dreams about the “peace of the graveyard,” like in Kafka’s fantasy of being free of writing before he died. But no, when Kafka picks up his pen, it’s not then that he’s killed, that he’s relieved of selfhood. When he’s walking to the office, bearing with some insufferable family difficulty, begging for Felice to understand why he can’t…, he knows unconsciously already: non-being is everything. So much so he can write, “There is no having, only a being, only a state of being that craves the last breath, craves suffocation,” though in truth it’s the opposite: the only state of being is suffocated already. One needn’t want that. If nothing is had, not even one’s own being, then not-being is the easiest thing out. Why crave what all being announces? Whatever you are, you blend into the given. The givenness of non-existence begins in completion; call it excompletion.

Just like our man up there trembling on the edge to nowhere, forgetting own-existence is easy. Just pick up the story elsewhere.

**

Relief of selfhood is rife with so many pitfalls that the whole game appears to be a performative bunkering down, one big act of suffocating oneself or freeing oneself—all the same deceit.

Just listen to the self-lackers, the gurus with their 109^th bead, clever poets and proud saints abnegating themselves to Kingdom Come: Look at me! How I’m figuring out the self is plural and inconstant! The I is always different, I’m that difference—and I’m not it! The universe is me, but what the universe is is not. All I have is how I’m me, and I don’t have it!…

Well, “relieving oneself” also means taking a piss. The stream leaves a sign as yellow as any buttercup’s petals, and—depending on one’s drink—a scent much stronger.

If you can love the gardener out there wobbling on his own pond, good.

The writer, however, thinks otherwise: it is not “I” who is relieved, but Pain itself. Through the power of metaphor, its transmutation into images, into petals capturing the essence of non-being, of the quest of the inarticulable voice yoked into the incorporeal of language, the full range of the sayable, Pain itself resurrects as Life in the Call.

It turns the story into no one’s—a fictional character steadied for the fatal plunge.

**

Relieving oneself of selfhood through language—I’m referring to writing, not the existential issue—requires one get explicit about this relief, but only so far as one is not yet non-being. One must come to understand its role in the linguistic practice, that’s all.

Past that, non-existence becomes another project—and then not a good word gets written—and without a word getting written, how can the house in flames sing its song? How can the magnificence of meaning show its feeble arms, if they are always being plunged into black soot and jars of nirvana?

Relief of selfhood is a central, a priori “disaster,” as Blanchot has it—not relief at all but the unfulfillable imperative of a writing whose responsibility exceeds whatever self might think it knows it—though luckily for it, it need not know that. The reason why one feels it remains forever unknown.

That feeling is what the writer bears over into images and chases down like a hunter on the trail of the last nutritious meal left, though it be ash.

The disaster is active at every instant of thought in language, in thinking existence at all. The writer’s experience is of the indestructible, but not an ontologized indestructible, not the indestructible of God or of the now. It is too modest to accept this, it takes skill and will and luck to detect it, for what it refers to is the most nondescript block party this side of Sagittarius. It is this unbelievable thing called literature: the working of thought in images.

**

Without some relief—and please, Exister, don’t forget! I would never disallow any of your meditations…—, without some Einsicht in dass was ist, regarding the centrality of Nothing to the experience of things, a writer never sees the language in what they work, but only themselves: their struggle, their story reflected in it, however multiple and speedy they believe they are.

The role of the excomplete mediator, the floating signifier, the shifty whistle in the referee-free jam, the void of sense, the subatomic necromancer, the avalanche of freshly stubbed toes, the noematic altitude of the aleatory ribbon, the symphonic virtue streaming time’s most intimate pow, fiddler and conqueror of the No-man’s-land’s Cello, delightful sorcerer of the yellowing page salvo who, organon for endless relaunches of portentous stealth, last anterior tense for the viviparous and wounded, feels into our unutterable nearness to the sore, to the source, to the sword of exited worlds—well, one cannot escape writing toward that, on and on and on, using the only rule there is in the study of images: never believe it is really there. (Yes, this means you up there, stranded in the coaster, eyeing the grizzly mechanic, mounting slowly with his dubious wrench to get you down.)

But the minute these zeros become themes, thematically dominant, or self-relief appear like a goal—or you get convinced that literature is the royal road to suffocation (when really it’s much easier than that, just snap your fingers); the minute the linguistic-shifter-attitude becomes an empty set on display, instead of merely gluing mind and sensitivity to the literary impulse as it presents itself, to best work it out; at that minute one loses the fecund cheery-picker stretching into the heavens of deft phrase, the industrious giddyap of the leaderless horse, the yellow tornado tossing scraps of emotion into your whirlwind-without-end, unblocked, whisked into the paramount absurdity of just say what it is.

Otherwise, all this quickly proves overbearing, a vain performance of realizing a non-existent state, and little else.

Because this fundamentally “structural” insight was perverted so often into a substantialist notion, into a mysticism, some thinkers of 20th century had to insist: structure never hangs together without its void-force-genesis remaining suspended in the unlocalizable middle, shifting, punching through signification and trimming all established wreathes of meanings. Trouble is, to name it (“void-force-genesis”, “truth”) puzzles you. And there the reader is right to wonder if I’ve not snuck God back in by the backdoor, offered him a free martini or two, so long as he doesn’t get too belligerent with the hostile crowd.

That is, nothing can be explained without an image; and everything an image can’t explain.

**

My advice, then, for the zero-bound writer, doughty and laughable, is this:

Don’t let what is erasure of self become a stockpile of narcissistic erasers—for if you let that happen, writing (I mean the speech of a life) will imprison itself in dull diatribes and dufus-made diaries, clever shows that are only cornerstones and mementos for a self that believes it has been relieved of itself for good, substantially, not having grasped the adventurous role of the velleity, the letter’s drive-driven dance.

Granted, there’s a buttercup that still dreams of standing tall, of letting its pollen out onto all the flowers, to feed all the bees! And what a view from up there! It shivers in the rain before it freezes in the snow. A buttercup very much like you and me. For it is pleasurable to evacuate oneself, we all know that. To let go.

—July 11, 2020 / August 23, 2023