Goethe's Fire

Raised in a society in which God was long dead and even the thought of an 'individual' was becoming suspicious at best, it is only natural that I, a charicature of a thinker (think of an exiguous shadow, like in a German Expressionist film, emanating from the figure of a ponce like Wordsworth), should invert my dreamy gaze and question selfhood. I used to believe that the 'self' is simply the image we convey to the world. For me, if I could not apprehend myself, then neither could any other individual. However, that was to evade the point; there could still be a self, even if it lacked a sensible quality. My self could be exterior to me, so I thought, it could exist as a collection of fragments, images, voices, sounds, feelings, expressed by me and captured in the world like flies in a web. I transcended myself in projecting myself into the world.

But the more I attempted to acclimatise to this absence of 'sense of self', the more self-evident it became that self-awareness was too important. How could my legacy of being-in-the-world be exterior to the consciousness which shaped it? In other words, I wished to have some responsibility for my 'self'. Shuddering, as I so often would, as my words drowned in a sea of tedium, battered against the rocks of dialogue and buried beneath a thousand years of cigarette smoke, flannel shirts and apalling music, I reflected on the perceived pretentiousness any utterance in opposition to the binding of my thought might arouse. I shudder at this reflection.

I'm not pretentious. I'm lonely.

Thus, I found that any self I may have could not possibly be exterior to what I thought of it. For surely, my private thoughts about myself cannot be projected into the world. They are mine and mine alone - they are the scraps of evidence that I have been abandoned in the world, that I can even follow this very train of thought, bravely and alone.

I have never assumed myself above or exterior to humanity, so I can only assume that the impossibility of shaking my 'self' from out of myself applies to all. Yet I find myself confronted with a world in which exteriority defines, moulds and creates. I am reminded of a writer, whose name I forget - in which case, I may as well say that I am reminded of a piece of writing, which I also forget. He or it wrote, of Goethe, that landscape was his 'central carrier of meaning'. Young Werther's sorrow spilled out onto the valleys, he or it might have said, inundating the hills, dripping from the branches, seeping into the ditches. I remember how his beloved valley wept for his beloved.

Nowadays, no valley will weep for a broken heart. No spring will blossom in the hearts of the automatons staggering from rotten building to gloomy, rotten building, juggling work, sex and crises like bombs in the greatest circus to be banned for a breach of health and safety regulations. Please, do not misunderstand me; I do not yearn for Goethe's fire, for that rage which burns and tears from within us until it threatens, so we think, to singe the leaves of trees we have never even laid eyes upon. What I would like, if I permitted myself the luxury of desire, would be to understand how others can survive on self-projection. It seems such a silly way of coping with this dirty, ambiguous world.

I have realised that the world is not my canvas, ready for me to project a million instantiations of a self which is not even there, as though I were a creaky old stage consisting of a revolving door of acts, each hell-bent on outperforming the last in some bizarre Cubist experiment. I can't paint myself, not even by accident. The world is too full of sorrow, the sorrow I have invested in it, to even find the room.

Outside, as I write, the rain taps lightly at my window as though knocking politely, imagining me asleep rather than wide awake, describing their endeavour, now twice as fruitless for being mocked. The evening envelops the world, with its street lamps, its clusters of old newspapers and its basslines and, with an almighty shove, pushes the sky away, weeping, like a flooded valley.