Daniel James
By silence, the artist frees himself from the servile bondage to the world534
I see now that I am not helpless. I can change things. I understand now what I have sensed all my life without fully realising, this feeling of unreality, the disconnection I have felt with the world. Somehow, I’ve always known the answer to the question inside my heart. There is no truth. We are living in a book that is constantly rewriting itself, that changes as we read it, as you read it. Reality is a palimpsest.
I hold in my hands a book I have written, a manuscript, an unauthorised biography, but once I give it up I will never get control back again. If I’m going to do this, the time is now. I won’t get another chance.
If I change the past, what cost will there be to the present? What price will I pay by erasing Maas from the world? If I tear these pages out, if I burn them, what will become of me?535 Could I be giving him exactly what he wants? Is that the last laugh? Will we both disappear? In the end, as in the beginning, all I have are questions. Did I invent Maas? Or did he create me? Are we both characters in someone else’s story ? Will I ever be sure?536
The flames are closing in on me now, the edges of the paper warping in the heat. The ugly spirits in the street outside, and beyond, are disappearing. I can feel it. The eyes that watch me are frightened.
I know what I have to do. I have to let go of it all.
The book, words, fiction, the truth…all of it…
I have to let go of everything…
…even my own identity.
I was a writer…a man of letters. I always had been. It was who I was, but words were just another illusion. Language did not reveal the true nature of things. And whether the truth was waiting somewhere outside or not, if anything really existed at all, it could never be found, never be known, not while you were searching from the inside. I had known this all along, but in my arrogance I had still believed I could break through to the truth, in my pride I had blinded myself. I had to let go of words and everything else that had defined me. I had to refuse all meaning.537
I knew how the story ended now…
…the only way it ever could…
…not with words, but…
Notes
534. Susan Sontag, The Aesthetics of Silence (1969).
535. It would seem clear that Daniel intended to destroy the manuscript. Instead, these few hundred pages survived and were delivered to me, anonymously. His attempt to burn his own work reminded me strongly of Kafka’s wish for his unfinished writing to be destroyed after his death. Dora Diamant, Kafka’s lover, is quoted as saying: “He wanted to burn everything that he had written in order to free his soul of these ghosts.” I wonder if, in the end, the same was true for Daniel? – Anonymous.
536. “My doubts stand in a circle around every word.” Franz Kafka – Anonymous.
537. “…refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates an activity we may call counter-theological, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning, is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law.” – Roland Barthes, Le Bruissement de la langue (1984).