Another post about writing? As you would say to a child to shame that child: ‘you are letting everyone down’ so I would say to myself.
This instead. Conversation with W. He says: ‘you have a fascination for genius’. What he suspects is a nostalgia for genius. As if someone should have said to me as was said by D.H. Lawrence when he submitted his first novel: ‘it’s not very good, but you have genius’. And then there is Mailer’s comment on the back of Naked Lunch: ‘Burroughs is the only American writer who is possessed by genius’.
Genius: as if, knowing it, you would thereby prepare yourself to write a work of genius. Is Neo, in the Matrix, the One? Or is he merely told he is the One to give him courage enough to become the One?
How do you brace yourself against the world? By listening to a voice within you saying: ‘you are a genius’? Now Leclair: we have to murder each day that wonderful child within us – the one who is the incarnation of the hopes of our parents for their own childhood, the hopes, that is, which were directed towards you, the child, the one who could be called ‘his majesty the Baby’ (Freud).
Youth: you are the one in whom hopes are placed, the one who will carry through a detached kind of ambition. The parent says: ‘I want you to be happy’, or: ‘I want you to do well’. I remember the performing children of our friends: one could do the Rubik’s cube, the other the twelve times table. They have children of their own: well balanced children who want for no attention, who are driven here and there and never experience that benign neglect that led some of us, as children, to wander across the great fields from which the housing estates and golf courses would spring as though it were our kingdom.
Benign neglect – W.’s phrase. Leave children to experience the infinition of time (Levinas’s word): the turning over of those hours in which nothing in particular occurs. There are the newts and leeches in the lake, the great pine tree, the endless estates to cycle around. Time when without parental supervision, without being driven from here to there, the child wanders with other children in the vast outdoors.