I know by now that I will always be reading the wrong book – whether it’s Being and Time or Doctor Faustus or The Anatomy of Prose. The book which isn’t all the other wrong books (because I’m not sure it’s the right book, though it may be the correct book) – the book which isn’t Finnegans Wake or The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. The unwrong book is a desire of Tantalus: water that deliciously retreats as soon as you run to drink it. As soon as my attention focuses upon it, the book changes from possibly unwrong to just any book. And the only logical deduction is that this is because I am the wrong reader. Any book could have virtues, could be a corrective, but not if it’s in my hands and beneath my eyes. Once it’s there, I feel frustrated and stupid. I know I’m never going to be able to read the page well enough, totally enough, for it to mean what it means. Shoot me. Let my heart’s blood turn the left-hand page red, then soak through until all the pages turn to stuck-together waves. Let my dead head fall on it, as a new object. I am now a thing; it is now a thing. I am no longer reading it but I am no longer failing to read it. My hands are incapable of widening the pages into distractions. No more words can travel through the backs of my eyes, as the place the light reflects from least. Assassination is an appropriate response to moral philosophy. There is no joke coming, to release the image. Unshoot me, to give me a life-chance at acceptance of insufficiency, shortfall, duh. Let the skull unthud as it becomes burden rather than mass. Let the blood lollop back into the four chambers. I am my own special effect. Let the ink rise off this page, back into the pen, as all this is unsaid more perfectly.
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