Played Out

We should put our literary things away. They don’t belong to us. Put our literary toys back in the box.

 

It’s played out. It’s been done. It’s over.

You can’t write after those guys. Except to say that you can’t write after those guys. Except to decry the impossibility of writing. The endless end of literature. The endless end of everything. Of everything meaningful!

 

It’s continual. It’s forever. The disastrous day that goes on forever. The apocalypse without actual apocalypse. The day of wrath that never ends.

There’s nothing else to know – to see – to think about. it’s every day there was and can be. It’s the Exhaustion. It’s the Played Out. it’s the Endless. It’s the Ceaseless. It’s the no more and the nothing else. It’s fatality. It’s farce. It’s after tragedy. Endless comedy, that amuses no one. Parody parodying what?

 

The Nothing. the great Nothing. The Everything as Nothing. Empty eyes scanning empty skies.

 

Literature’s caught. Literature’s at the end of the line. Thrashing.

 

Literature’s death twitch. It’s death shudder. And death without grandeur! With no one to see it! A whimpering, really. An unwitnessed death. A tree falling in a forest that makes no noise.

 

Literature gave up – and no one noticed.

No reason for it anymore. It lost its raison d’etre. It lost its survival instinct. It didn’t even want to live. Fuck going on, it said. I won’t go on. Fuck tomorrow. And fuck today.

 

The island of literature has sunk. Like Atlantis. Like Ys. It’s under the fucking waves. And it’s time to realise that.

 

A mouldy pile of Penguin modern classics from the 50s. Green spined. Small sized. Smelling bad. Spines cracked. Pages falling out.

Borges. Kafka. All those guys. In some bin bag at the dump. In the waste disposal. Shovelled into the maw of oblivion. With all the other abandoned crap. Used nappies.

All those Penguin Modern European Poetry books. In the tip! Not even worth taking to Oxfam. Even Oxfam wouldn’t take them. Even Pets in Distress. Even MIND didn’t want them. They were rejected from the Samaritans.

Too old! Too battered! Too smelly! Too rotten! Not even worth burning. Turned into pulp. Threatening no one. Scuffed. Trodden on. Boot marks on Kafka. Books opened. Pages open. With boot-marks. With rotting vegetables. With potato peelings.