the inadequate

I am having arguments with the man. He comes round in the mornings to read what I have written the day after I had convinced myself it was genius. He is the same man who detunes your casiotone between the recording and the replaying of it. He sneaks in illiteracy to your words and pulls out commas, he takes the sentiments of genius and spills gin stains and spliff ash on the sides. He is the sobriety and the headache at 9am, who informs you exactly how base you demeaned yourself as your fingers jabbered out nonsense, the literary equivalent of the fourteenth Bacardi breezer that induced the sticky pole dance or the dribbled and inhaled mushroom theory of life. In the recollection, it is trite. It does not posses the unquestionable beauty that a photograph could. It lacks the backbeat that makes the ‘I love you’ lyric seem pentrating. It is naked and exposed in its size 12 times new roman fontology, the too large print glaring and exposing like daylight on the clubbers skin; what glows so pretty under uv lights pulses dark circles in the metro morning.

Camille says we must press on. I like the sound of that sentiment. For we must, for shame, we must!

An endless battle is being waged with the man. We are coming back in the morning and carpet shampooing the red wine stains. We are emptying the ashtrays and polishing the edges. The crusty hardened noodles are being swept resolutely into the bin, half chewed corncobs cleared from the kitchen tables. We are looking for What Is Left. And we will gather it up and duct tape together the best bits. No doubt the man will come back the next day and prod at that too, pick away at the corners and point out the flaws. The tape will rise off and leave black stickiness underneath. But that’s ok. We have plenty of tape, rolls of it hidden down the back of sofas and in secret cupboards. We have secret weapons the man has no idea about. We will bring them out tonight, in the genius hour, and fix things up when the man is not looking. We will remind each other of the truth:

Camille Lorigo is a fucking genius.
Jane Flett is a fucking genius.

We will make t shirts that proclaim our infinite wisdom. We will varnish poetry to toilet seats and invite our friends round to record some ukulele solos. We will donate out some spasms of genius for the evening and watch it multiply twentyfold. We will find out that everyone is afraid of The Man.

We will find artists who cannot play music in public, except for the triangle.
We will find photographers who cannot put stories into words.
We will find crocheters who don’t want to play music.

They are all afaid.

FINE! We shall cry. We shall record the clackering of the crochet needles. We shall take microphones to the scratching pencils. We shall hand out scissors and boxes of wine to whack out the beats we keep hidden deep inside.

It is difficult to feel inferior when you are snipping the scissors. You do not compare yourself to Dostoyevsky. You do not long to be a better scissor snipper. In fact, you begin to believe the scissor snipping might just be the key to your soul.

So we will take the scissors, the boxes, the zippers and the geniuses in our midst. We shall bake bread and eat chocolate and custard for desert. We will let the ripples begin in the midst of the eating, and we shall watch them fluctuate. We will move off to a corner and begin discussing the origins of port, the alcohol will kick in and we will be moved to fantastical tales of sailors and concubines and STDs. We will demand to our friends that they lie to us solidly for 5 minutes and record the result faithfully, like Gods, in the corner on the computer. In the morning the lies will take form into stories, we will edit the falsities of our friends’ lives and make them flesh. We will publish them in our basement office, taking refuge in great sheathes of paper and the ever spewing printer. One of us will feed in the blank sheets, one will fold, one will staple. We will sneak copies into the toilets of libraries and the dark corners of bookshops, under the placemats in posh French restaurants. We will hire the Indian take-away man to post them through letterboxes alongside his special chicken tikka deals. We will build projectors and spam the ceilings with our words, the walls, the floors. We will be shameless in our self promotion and our belief. We will be religious converts, forcing the words from our mouths to the page, to your ears, to the world.

We will gain confidence as our ranks grow.

In the night we shall write manifestos. We shall fill them with grandiose language and ideas. Our laptops will grow warm on our laps, toasting our thighs with endless quivers of thought process. We will imagine ourselves to be taking over the world. We will hit our chairs with great arm spasms of agreement, shouting “YES! And…..” and there will be a thousand “and”s which leave our mouths. Ideas will germinate and be recorded faithfully in scribbled notebooks to be acted upon on later dates. In the morning we will read them and smile, and wonder when the later dates will be.



The great tragedy of our lives will be if there are no later dates.

The great tragedy will be the ideas that die in the morning. The ideas that the man takes away as his own. He will carry them to the furthest point from humanity like a Suskind antihero and leave them there to rot in caves. Years from now we will stumble across their bony corpses and wonder why we didn’t nourish them when there was still life and excitement in their souls, but by then it will be too late.



Still, we persevere.
Persevere.

Remember:

WE MUST PRESS ON!