The limits of your author's writing are apparent - perhaps they've been reached once or twice - but that isn't of any great interest. The boundaries of writing as a whole are what concern me, and how they might look.
As I type, the first thing that comes to mind is the work of Hubert Selby Jr., with its broken-down repertoire of punctuation, and words running into one another: all the time fuckaround. I'm thinking too of stream-of-consciousness - Beckett's 'How It Is.'
Yet still we are no further forward. If we were to multiply 'How It Is' by 'The Room' then we would have some idea of my idea of the extremities of writing, but I have read nowhere near deeply enough to state whether or not I cite good examples of the far recesses of expression.
Perhaps the hybrid of Beckett and Selby Jr. would be akin to the automatic writing practised by the Surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s; that is, the attempted release of the unconscious by writing the first thing that comes to mind.
About six months ago, I had an idea, but I've never had the time nor courage to follow it through. I wanted to act upon every thought I had, noting it down as I did so:
- You're pretty. Even though I've never seen you before, I think we should sleep together.
- I want to lay England in the next Ashes series for £500.
- How many times is that I've listened to John Lennon's Imagine tonight? Perhaps I should stop now.
- Sometimes this atheist is filled with religious sentiment. To be a real atheist, you have to get over that.
- I miss the woman who suggested I should start this blog. I should ask her to meet me again.
- I actually like David Cameron. Maybe you'll get my vote next time, you odious Conservative bastard.
Now this is getting somewhere close to where I imagine the end of the line is. Indeed, perhaps these simple, tedious outpourings of my own boring mind - no less than the very antithesis of creativity and akin to the Vienna Circle's generating of logical-positivist statements - might be the answer I seek.
I need to work on it some more, and not fall asleep at 3am when my thoughts are at their most ripe. I must learn to defy sleep, that enemy of the writer, and instead pick the thoughts and then labour over the skeletons and shadows which were scribbled into the notebook I keep next to my bed (there isn't yet a notebook.)
To truly create, you must let go of the handbrake, the handbrake imposed by society and by morals and by embarrassment. As long as it remains jammed fast against the fingers and the brain, everything that is written will be derivative and miserable and shallow.
