The Disillusion of Not Being French

Alas, if only I had been French, I could have saved myself the disillusion, all my purposeless efforts, wasteful spending of weekends and evenings, under a silent reading lamp, quickly pulling my notebook from the table, leaving it balancing on my knees, and only now, after digging in intellectual mud for all these years, that I could have saved, do I realize the simplest of realizations, the thought that I should have started with if I would have only been, but now I have discovered it only at the end of my long journey, to come to the conclusion that it was all along so obvious, if only I had known. Of course, I knew, in a way, a disconnected way, I have known all the separate things to know, but I must have been utterly blind not to see the wholesome form, or what you ironically could call the Logos. Hell, the other, the world, the meaningless searching, the random attribution that was bound to be lost again, the homeless wanderer, the hunger, the importance of chance, all these flowing thoughts of consciousness that swell to the proportions of a river washing away old, established ideas, but they too get flooded by new ones, none remaining, nor leaving any soil for me to stand on myself, constantly grasping for the next thing, but only if I had seen the larger picture, from Heracleitus to Nietzsche to Derrida to myself, from Novalis to Strindberg to Celine to Le Clézio, from Homer to Freud. But now my life of Sisyphus and the feeling that I only now realize, and with every word, every sentence, again, the bubbling mud of sulphuric gases, every new release, another short lived word, it could all have made sense, if only I had been French.

The Frenzy, Frank

'But ... where is the frenzy, Frank, the bang, the boom, buddy, the slang, the oof, the awe, man, the puzzling pinnacle, the dithyrambic dazzle, the mind blowing wit! Where is it? I don't see it. It is missing.'

'Because I want to portray the slow digression in the opening, I wanted to introduce the daunting detail of every day, the common element in every one's life, you know, the benign, the petite, the insignificant, the ordinary.'

'Well, I can't publish it like this. You need to drag in the stranger with a hook, grab their attention with a forceful act, persuade the casual reader, create their curiosity and awaken their empathy.'

'That's exactly why I start so small. Everyone can immediately identify with the plain, the prattle of coffee on the kitchen counter at seven in the morning. It's a symbolic dripping through the filter of every day life.'

'But it doesn't distinguish the antagonist, you must create the extraordinary, the fantastic, what is special, there's nothing heroic in there now.'

'Precisely my point, the drama is hidden in every common person, the theater of life is present and enacted in every person's life, and it starts on an empty stage, the tragedy slowly unfolds, never does the reader recognize when fate takes a turn, by the hour but without notice, the big drama in life comes in the form of a subtle sadness.'

'No, no, no... I can't sell such sensitive, gay nonsense, it's too intellectual, too transgressive, if you want to sell your work, you cannot think like a playwright, think like a Hollywood director, the big picture, brother. Where is the explosive opening, the disastrous event, the fireworks, think Broadway! If no body dies, no body cares.'