Yes. I was. I like that: typing. Much better than writing. And I’m very glad you didn’t say working. That’s what Stuart and his friends always call it. They imagine themselves to be in sympathy with the proletariat. The truth is that they want their labor to be acknowledged by the marketplace, no matter how they pretend otherwise. That’s a difficult thing not to want. So let us not condemn them. But neither let us call it work. It’s play, or it’s nothing. Minstrelsy at best.
Okay, Stanley says. So what are you typing?
I’m not sure, to be honest. I’m trying to remain unsure. What was it Antonin Artaud said? We spend our days fretting over forms, when we should be like heretics at the stake, gesticulating as the flames engulf us.
Stanley nods toward the tall stack of papers on the floor. It looks like you got a bunch of it, he says. Whatever it is.
Alex frowns, then considers the stack with narrowed eyes. The way somebody might look at a strange animal they’ve taken in, uncertain about what to feed it, how big it might grow.
It’s not poetry, he says. Nor is it a novel, though I have written novels, and published them. It is not artful in any way. During my time in Paris, I became involved with a group of young—how shall I describe them? Revolutionaries? Avant-gardistes? Criminals? To be any one of those, you must exert a plausible claim on the other two. My young friends were convinced that art in all its forms is counter-revolutionary. So-called avant-garde art most of all. Thirty years ago, the Dadaists called it the safety-valve of culture: it eases internal pressure, averts the transformative explosion. Instead of demanding adventure and beauty in our own lives, we seek their simulacra in films and cheap paperbacks. Instead of doing battle with cops and their finks, we sit home and recite our slogans into mirrors. The most skilled evocation of the most perfect society may help us to imagine it, but it brings it no closer to fruition. Quite the opposite. It’s a substitute. It makes our dissatisfactions tolerable, when they must not be tolerable. We rejected all that. We practiced a kind of auto-terrorism. We took as our main objective the construction of situations, and we walked the streets of the city with the demand that they reshape themselves according to our desires. Sometimes—very rarely—they did.
Stanley looks up, interested. How did that work? he says.
Alex doesn’t answer. The three of them sit in silence. The air grows thick with steam from their mugs and the electric kettle.
Stanley’s about to ask again when footsteps scrape the sidewalk outside. The door lurches in its frame; the deadbolt stops it with a clunk. A rapid knock follows. Stanley tenses, turns. The shadow of someone’s elbow appears and disappears at the edge of the painted-over glass.
Stanley looks at Alex, then at Lyn. Lyn is examining the veins in her arm. Alex lights a cigarette, shakes out the match. After a moment, without knocking again, the person at the door goes away. Muttering unintelligibly to himself. The voice is one that Stanley knows: the poet, the ad man, the drunk.
Lyn looks up with a sad smile. Charlie, she says.
Yes, Alex says. I suppose he’s forgotten again.
He leans forward, like a tree bent by ice-caked branches, and slides a mayonnaise-jar lid closer on the tabletop.
Perhaps, he says, it’s only a diary that I’m writing. A catalogue of impressions. A psychogeographical atlas. A rutter of drift. It’s the thread that I’ve unwound through the invisible labyrinth, in case anyone should care to retrace my steps. Such reports are not without value. Often I have relied upon them myself. The explorer who reaches a summit and curses to find another’s ice-axe already there is no explorer at all, but only a conqueror and a thug. Every worthwhile initiative is a collaboration, a conspiracy, a series of coded messages passed across the years from hand to anonymous hand. Such was the nature of our endeavor in Paris.