[syndicate] My stupid talking.

[Alan Sondheim]

My stupid talking.

When I speak I sound like an idiot. I can't control my words. Thoughts and
concepts fluster in and out, a jumble. When I write, things are different;
they organize themselves, I am a shepherd. My thinking wears my writing.
Words and worlds organize. Work is words. When I speak, things pour forth,
uselessly. When I write a letter or email, I continue speaking. The style,
content, is absurd, monstrous. No one keeps my email. I am constantly
losing posts. There's no reason to keep them; they're incorrect. When I
reply online to someone, it's the same thing, ridiculous. I lose track of
my emotions, of what I'm saying. I appear stupid. Only when I am writing,
like this, through the interior of what might have been my speech - only
when I am writing _thus,_ am I satisfied. My words connect; the thought is
often brilliant, almost always dense, compact, to the point. Speaking, I
can't even defend myself. I am not the other of the signifier I need to be
in order to be. If my speaking is becoming, my writing is ontology itself.
When I speak, it's strategy, joking. People are surprised at my sense of
humor. It's a carapace I wear with delight. It keeps me from death. Death
seeps through my writing. Death inhabits my writing; my writing inhabits
death. I do not draw a distinction; I write only within the written. When
I speak, language disappears into melody. There is a difficulty with
melody just as there is a difficulty with cleverness. Cleverness is a
proper turn-away from truth towards communality. I speak with cleverness.
It comes from the situation of speaking. I write from somewhere else. In
my writing cleverness sounds a false note. It indicates I am off track, I
have lost myself, I am suturing over the wound of ignorance and existence.
There is no laughter in my writing. There is laughter in my letters and
email. They are absurd as my laughter is absurd. They attempt to cover my
inadequacy. My absurd joking deflects my graceless awkwardness. It goes
nowhere, says nothing of any consequence, and says it poorly. I think my
speaking and email will be the death of me. They draw attention way from
my writing. They undermine it. They say it's not clever enough, intelli-
gent enough. My writing does not respond. My writing sinks, and is writing
about that sinking. My writing props up my world it undermines and
describes. My talking ignores the whole problem. My talking is that litany
of deflections. What I do not understand, I turn into something else. What
I do understand becomes fodder; it never nourishes sufficiently. My talk-
ing implies talking to another limit; there's no etiquette in this. There
is no community in my writing; community cannot survive honesty. But my
writing is full of subterfuge, is about that subterfuge. My talking
carries itself everywhere in order to become pointless. My talking is
pointless. My writing is chiseled into a simulacrum construct of the real.
The real in my writing has everything at stake. It is at stake through and
within the writing. My speaking ignores the real; what is at stake is my
self and its alterity. My self is always in the midst-of, when I am speak-
ing. My self is absent or boundary, bordering, when I am writing. I write
beyond myself; I speak from myself. My speaking is monstrous, self-defeat-
ing. My writing is after the fact. If my speaking is central, my writing
is peripheral; if my writing is central, my speaking is peripheral. One
must read my writing, read my writing with the utmost care. One must never
listen when I am speaking.