JÉRÉMIE WENGER
Strings 2
‘about lighthouses not having to move to save a ship’
September 2024
from Lacanage
1
It could have been during one of my mechanical stepwise progressions down the stairs that the crux started to appear a little more worrying than usual. This was in all likelihood happening for the first time, yet had the distinct air of once more events. Or so I thought. For an instant I seemed to have felt happy, as if worrying could be power. Could it be power? I wondered. That is, might, brute and blind, I wondered forth, the dangerous thing. So dangerous, that some go as far as describing it as the thing that makes one stop thinking. Or the thing that makes one wake up to the stench of ‘No wonder!’, crying ‘Fool!’ before immediately falling back into the ungrateful void. Nay, the thing that would prevent even that, no thinking being possible in here, erasing perhaps even the possibility of waking, equanimously doing away with the fumes of consciousness and the milk of bad dreams. For short, the very thing anyone sensible would not fail to worry about. Yes, worrying thoughts all in all, I could not agree more, I swiftly resolved myself to think, before unilaterally shutting down all reasoning. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, I looked for the entrance door. It did not seem to be there. That left me more than perplexed. How could it not be there? I thought I knew I was not insane but some of the questions popping to my head, while eliciting a fair amount of casual, stolid hatred among the guttier angels of my nature, did not inspire confidence. (Now an appropriate Cantos quote: “Cut the cackle and do not believe ’em”.) This reeked of a black swan, I could detect that even without lifting a single cognitive finger. How could a bare, unconfirmed once more even come close to this once upon a hell of a long time? And of all times, how come now? Thought-hares could have been started running. It could have gone down a totemic path: an agony verging on raccoonness. In plain words, the uncontrollable gnawing of a mythologically dexterous, facial-masked, and ringed-tailed hate, against the universe, against the self, the universe containing the self, the self mirroring the universe. (A not unusual scenario given the particulars of ‘mein gänzliches Ich’, my whole self, as my inner German Idealist calls it.) But fortunately the most forthright of my automated reflexes promptly suggested an outward thrust – ejection, ejaculation, discharge, regurgitation, eructation, flatulence – of the unwanted state, which, for self-explanatory, that is, definitional reasons, was deemed to be the very thing, the sought-after thing, the solution. Get it out while, at the same time, get oneself out of this (I dare say mess). For indeed in the case of hate occurring more hate can and does ensue, more often than not, with rather unwelcome consequences for oneself and others. Hence the necessity, in the event of the resurgence of ex-abominations, of the rapid implementation of self-driven measures of excommunication. (C’est le cas de le dire.)
2
At long last something that is that might as well not have been. Rather than the expected ‘what might have been but never was’. Or, even more dully, the ‘what if attempted might have been proved infeasible’. All of it because of a certain being stuck while considering getting started, despite persistent calls to drop dead, calmly but firmly, allowing for the optional shriek, ‘No matter!’, provided that it be as feeble a whimper as possible. Now, it may be tempting straightforwardly to prophesy that, this having come to be, it will never go away, or worse, as soon as it may have gone it would come back, reappear, as it were, its head as ugly as it is reared. Delightful thought, this vain musing about that which will never go away, and which perforce is likely to remain here, of all places, albeit out of the focus of some eye or other, if any is glaring, or to recede, or surge back, or even reemerge before diving again, this time hopefully forever. A slightly more difficult thought presents itself as it slowly comes to mind that some dare lump this sort of gobbledygook together with the likes of the reconquest of being, the ever personal happenstance of mishaps, the mysterious ways of others, the sly totality, of which, for lack of this, for want of that, I remain as unaware as I am of the proof-of-stakeout of the Real, followed by the thought that it would definitely not be me, bundling shit up like that, in ugly sheaves, really not my style, that I would never do such a thing, even in my worst fits of manic peppering of everything with predictable heaps of unrelated nonsense.
3
The fact is, unlike previous bunches of magistrates (petty private lozengiers, lily-livered illiberals, less and less viable legitimists, or world summit warlocks), our present government in keeping has for some time been in possession of one stipulatory thing, whereby the superbold, especially those still in thrall to the Mysteries That Sum It All, must admit to be repeatedly fucked until becoming as juxtaposed as the Americas, as impossibly total as Eurasia, two necessary preconditions for remaining as incomprehensible as ‘it-speak’ – the macaronic muteness of what is generally understood to be the civil service of the North Indies –, which, for quite some time, although inexplicably, (is the pretence of being a great place no more than the decent resolve to treat one’s space as oneself?, and were that to be established, why even mention it?, except if it is only a question of getting us to talk about that in a politico or socialite sphere, leading to the predictable hurl of anathemas?, and all that despite the fact that the more salutary end to the question ‘How to come to terms with’ should not be, ‘Hugh Capet, Charles de Gaulle or Ronald Reagan’, but, ‘Chrétien de Troyes, Pierre Guyotat and Jean-Michel Basquiat’), which, as was being said, has been uttered, and, unquestionably, will go on being ‘unspoken’ – remember, ‘it-speak’ is muteness itself –, while war remains one of the weapons of choice of this and other groups. I suppose it was this thing – without a doubt a crown jewel of our prime-constitutional, semi-symmetrical countries’ mathematics, politics, arts (beyond the simple display of weapons), love practices (a litigious question that I could ask you to keep civil even if it sometimes happens that way sui generis), as well as extant principles (to refer to the exudations of those who are sat around the outer fire at the misty forefront of world literature: barons, indeed, of the one robber profession) – that would put even the bestwilling of us on track for centuries of bickering and betrayals, with entities from all over seeking compensation to boot.
(This explanation is aggregated and distilled from letters sent to us by de Clérambault, after the former’s self-inflicted month of respectively detailed and rending, tedious and humorous, debate and correspondence with Fliess – a two-volume set entitled The Developments of the Art of the Psy Thing: An Analytic Study of First-Object Retaliation in the Writings of St. Paul, (abridged), Saint-Étienne, July 1927.)
JÉRÉMIE WENGER is a writer and programmer based in London. His practice explores the intersection between literature, constraints and generative processes, as well as the consequences of the rise of Artificial Intelligence on literature and the self. He has exhibited works in Finland, Greece, Sweden and Switzerland, and has been involved in Franco-Swiss project using neural networks for live performances on stage. His texts have been accepted for publication in the Irish journal gorse, as well as Pamenar Online Magazine, ToCall, GRASS, Vernacular and TILT. @jchwenger / jeremiewenger.com.
