«It's been so long since I've posted here!» Did you notice how many blog entries or social-media posts start like that? It says something about people, that they feel they should do it more, but don't. First rule of blogging: never open with "It's been a long time..."

I should give us a break really, but somehow I enjoy the idea that every single fragment of what she said since I met her telling me she should already be somewhere else, has been the foundations for a monument mourning the last chapter of my life. It's a sort of religious thing, like how there's not a single incident in the gospels which is not celebrated in thousands forms through cathedrals, church, chapels, painting, sacred music, etc. Nothing is anecdotal. Everything bears the full weight of creation.

I understand this is too much. I know. I just reject them both: the knowing and the understanding. I only want to keep the feeling.

Anyway, ever since I have set up this 𝕐 thing—which I like, it's my own sort of therapy, the thread that keeps my mind anchored to my sanity, by allowing random, unimportant things to bathe and slosh in an ocean of tragedy, with me by the shore waiting for the Leviathan to emerge and offer a bit of what doom always brings with it: a big show—I find that I don't need so much to "blog" anymore...

I've never blogged much, actually, while now I yeet daily, several times a day. Yes, I called it "yeet", my own 𝕐-tweeting. I was not tweeting much either. 3199 posts in 15 years. That's more than I remember, about one every two days. But they were not Poissonian, I used to be writing long threads. Maybe I was really tweeting a couple of times a week, sometimes with several weeks going by silently.

I write a lot. I write a lot of emails, a lot of notes, a lot of things that never surface. A lot of letters I never send. I'm possibly a narcissist. I would be if I published nothing. Then I become an exhibitionist instead. I'm not sure what's worse and I'm not sure I'm either of those. I like to think I'm more of an explorer. I like to see, to study, to touch things, to turn them around, to scratch people, I like to communicate, both ways, but not passively. I hate passivity. The spectator, that is the worst condition of the masses. What I hate most in our contemporary society is that we became spectators of spectators. We don't even look at the show anymore. We look at people looking at a show. It's funny because my understanding of love is precisely to do that but with someone, someone unique (to you, «chacun sa Dulcinéa»). There is nothing more beautiful than to look at someone you love looking at the world. That is my definition of happiness, of enlightenment. If you think about it, that explains creation, by the way. God made us to look at us struggle with stuff. Because he loves us. We look at his stars and his quantum fluctuations, and try to put a mechanism to tie them together, and he thinks "how adorable!" We conquer lands and submit our neighbours, and he frowns and sighs, but still think "how cute!" It makes complete sense to me.

Anyway, I also read a lot, compulsively, and because I hate passivity—I feel it's degrading—I have to write a lot too... What is this post about? Well, it's about me not blogging because I have something else now, which is easy, short, not taking too much time. My posts tend to become very long. Some people sometimes read them. I'm always genuinely surprised. I would read them too, if I hadn't written them first. I sometimes read my old posts and I sometimes find them nice, moving, personal, endearing... I always notice broken grammar, though, non-idiomatic atrocities and—worst of all—missed opportunities for a beautiful metaphor, a clever construct, an inspired piece of poetry. That kills me. There's something I once almost wrote, which I don't have anymore, which I'd wish I could read again to see how bad it really was, after all, after all the feverish excitement has gone now and cooled down, now that she is definitely at those places she had to be instead of being in front of me... Anyway... from this which I can't read anymore—too bad—I remember there was a story with a sink, and putting yourself in this sink, to get a different perspective of things, you know. The idea comes from Graham Chapman's A liar's autobiography. I offered my copy of this book to a friend when I was at the University. I should buy it again. I miss reading it. The peonies, the gin and tonic, the pissed-off pythons... So, in this book, Graham went into the sink to see things differently. I did that. It didn't work. I'm probably a narcissist then. Even in the sink, I was still only seeing myself, with the same world around. I'm reminding this story because after writing it, once it was too late to amend, but before it was too soon to completely forget about it—in this couple of weeks when the universe was in a superposition of never and always—I realized I had missed the obvious, the central, the capital formulation to present this particular bit as: putting your skin in the sink. I had overlooked that. I was sure she would never forgive me, that without this figment of universality, merging flesh and porcelain in a wordplay, the point was falling flat. She didn't forgive me. Not for the pun, though, for everything that was serious around it.

I always thought that if I'd write something, I'd sprinkle references to all major works, characters, stories ever written, to weave my story from the threads of all the great writers. This was my idea and since a long time ago, but I saw it as another wink of the universe that one of her favourite movies runs with a similar idea of connecting the main narrative with excerpts from and references to other movies. I think it's what she liked. What I liked in her movie wasn't this, it was the pathos of different people not wanting the same thing, not looking for a common ground, but still having to spend a bit of time together. The mayor explaining he'd have to leave soon to fetch his daughter at the airport while the other guy was opening his bowels on his life-project betrayed by misunderstanding, corruption and indifference. Funnily, this also applied to us, the meeting of two people who would have been better off never meeting. The pain in that, the pain of that, in itself, is also a bit of a story. Maybe she did like this too in the movie. It remains a wonder to me that there's nothing whatsoever she liked about me.

The more distant the people, the better. I read a lot of private, personal stuff of complete strangers. The farther they are from me, the closer I find myself to them. Reading what they have to say about nothing is captivating. There is not much, of course. Most of it is around the core idea that "it's been so long since I've posted something..." But the little that you find... Wow! that's literature too. I'd rather read a private, clumsy, insignificant piece by a random guy on the Internet than a recognized professional but mediocre Author. By mediocre, I mean people like Amélie Nothomb for instance. She's been hailed as a significant writer and was awarded various, including prestigious, prizes, such as the Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française, or the Prix Renaudot. I tried to read her, to see what great literature from a contemporary author would look like. I never liked it. It's not even that. I couldn't even dislike it much. I found it cheap, easy, expected, artificial, professional. She has good titles, though. «Hygiène de l'assassin» (her first book), «Métaphysique des tubes», «L'Entrée du Christ à Bruxelles»... but the content looks like an exercise of style to me. The stories are unmemorable, the characters are artificial. It's as if she wants to write, she likes to write, but she has nothing to write about. I can't remember anything of the few books I read of her, two or three, I'm not even sure which ones exactly. She writes one book every year. It doesn't seem to me that this type of regularity can be encountered in anybody who is creative and driven by meaning and purpose. Creation is chaotic, it is disordered, it goes as it comes, it alternates between gaps of intense production and desertic withdrawals. It's not even that she writes a lot (her Prix Renaudot was still her 100th book), but that she writes with such a regularity which is suspicious. I think Woody Allen was doing something similar with movies. They were about as empty (not entirely) as Nothomb's books.

Anyway, I found nothing about Nothomb's work that I could ever use in a conversation, as a metaphor, an illustration, an example of something original, deep or merely beautiful. Her only use to me is this: that some people are better left unread. I guess it's most writers, actually. Sometimes I force myself to pick up a random book from a random author. Last time, it was this Hooked in the Madrid airport on my way to Russia, by Asako Yusuko. It wasn't entirely unlike Nothomb, I would say. It had one massive selling point for me: it was eerily connected to many details that had tossed me around for the past year or so. Yusuko's Eriko was a strange contrived fusion of jumbled private details as if someone had played Chinese whispers with what happened to me and written a weird story out of it, something between a confused dream and a mocking parody. I felt like the universe was playing a practical joke on me, putting specifics that couldn't be explained by chance alone (although they were, of course).

A few passages were interesting on their own, as I described elsewhere. The Author's masterpiece is not this but バター (Batā, or "butter"), inspired by real events relating the murders from a woman who lured men at her place through gastronomical and other feminine trickery. This could probably be better, or even good. The premise has a Mishimaesque look. Besides, Yusuko's grip of sexual distress is accurate, I think, this is what she masters the most. The "passage à l'acte" between Eriko and her workmate—its motives, its unravelling, its consequences—this was all very good. It made me feel something. I was in the bed with them. But like Nothomb, some seed of talent dispersed in the volume of hundred pages doesn't automatically blossom into a full garden. It can grow wildly instead into wild vegetation. Her book becomes tedious, repetitive, artificial and ultimately boring and stupid. Not my worst read, by far (I've read various books from Nothomb), but not something that I would particularly recommend, although I did.

So, don't read everybody who is professional... read the classics, the masters—there are enough of them to keep you busy until forever—but as far as the rest is concerned, instead of professionals, read people who are not. They are the most interesting. They have something to say, because, whatever it is, it is true, it is felt, it is coming from somewhere. And this I want to see.

It reminds me Chabrol who was observing that his favourite movies were porn movies, but not for the sex, for the story that leads to it: it's fascinating because there is something universal and relatable in how the mailman arrives in a house where a bored maid is lightly dressed, and finds in this random encounter the salvation to her aspirations and the justification to her existence, or how the plumber opens by mistake a door that he shouldn't have, with cataclysmic consequences that can lead to crime or a new bloodline, or the milkman who cannot be paid and is offered alternative compensations, muddying humiliation with manipulation, blurring the lines between who is the victim and who is the corrupter, who wants it and who concedes it, and all those simple, random, idiotic, almost childish stories, that ineluctably lead to this terrible, intemporal escalation, the one with which the species perpetuates itself. Not a small thing. But when they reach this point, when it turns to sex, «alors c'est toujours pareil», observes Chabrol. It's true. Then Balzac, Zola and Maupassant turn into Nothomb.

I had nothing to say; I did write this almost like Nothomb has to write a book every year. Because I needed to check my upgrade of my home-made blogging facility, how it interfaces with 𝕐 and how it gets synchronized now from my computer to the rest of the World... where you—from where—maybe, you are reading this. Which, also maybe, is not the worst thing you'll have read in your life. Especially if you have read Nothomb.