Kant or Nietzsche? The interview question I invariably lead with. There is no more efficient way to elicit the true nature of a candidate.
I am lucky to find myself comfortably well off. Not rich, but not poor enough that thoughts of self-preservation are part of my day-to-day. I am not happy, mind you. I mean, who is?
Very few people have captivated me. Which is just as well. Living in thrall to other people is a form of self-abnegation.
The dissonance between what I write and what I think (and I mean that in the loosest sense) has never been more pronounced. It’s almost as if the dumber I am in person, the more interesting I become on the page. Which is why I am not concerned about dementia in the slightest.
I have been bullied, loved, hated, scorned, ridiculed, envied, admired and ignored. In short, I have lived a full life.
Having been sat down for an extended period, the Real Slim Shady finally stood up.
What I do is not writing. It is something more primitive than that, or less effete in any case. Words are merely the shadow puppets of what I am trying to convey.
Only the poet knows how to smash the sense out of words, to shake the culture out of them. Only the poet knows how to break the rules of grammar without even knowing them. Only the poet can make language do their bidding (for the rest of us, the unpoetic majority, it is the other way around).
Language that invokes a so-called awakening does so by going beyond the concepts it exists to promulgate. It does this unwittingly. That it does so unwittingly is of course not a coincidence.
