I entered a huge warehouse, more like an airport hangar, though very modern and brightly lit, with, it seemed, not a square inch any less brightly lit than any other square inch, excepting of course those unfortunate areas of shadow, such are the imperfections of the natural world. There were thousands upon thousands of people pedalling furiously on exercise bikes, all hooked up by ingeniously ordered wires to some kind of device placed in the centre of the building. Squads of instructors shouted encouragement to the cyclists: "Faster, faster! We're getting closer! Don't slow down. Not now!" and so on. This was accompanied by pants, moans, even bursts of ecstatic screams from the cyclists, who, when having exhausted their reservoirs of available energy, would be swiftly replaced by the next in line of the veritable conveyor belts of onlookers that spread out in perfect order all over the warehouse; the replacements every bit as eager to give their all, and more, to the cause, whatever that cause may have been.
I went outside after a time and had a look at the building, half-expecting it to be travelling at some great speed towards some marvellous destination, but no, it was entirely stationary. I walked off very puzzled by it all.
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7 comments:
the "hamster's wheel of research" i used to call the so-called 'research' pumped out by academia; then i started temping and found it more a rule of human society in general, great activity to no end.
Though it's strange how open-ended a piece like this can be, it roughly meaning one thing to one person, say me, but how it can be something else entirely to another. There's one radio Pelevin interview I've heard in which the American interviewer keeps asking about what his pieces mean & their relevance to Russian society, but a finally benignely irritated Pelevin stresses that maybe they don't 'mean' anything. Meaning isn't what he is thinking about while writing. Compared with the the virtually inevitable and deeply depressing connection of any American writer to the "Great American novel", or perhaps 'the times we live in now,' or maybe even 'the post-911 novel'(good God): people so alien to existence, this abstract communal space that simply exists on television and in newspapers is their fundamental existence. I wonder how long before we start aspiring to the great European Union novel?
Yes, that's a problem with a late civilization - it's hard to pick the pen up without thinking of what kind of novel etc. one is writing. Ian McEwan to me is the exemplar of the 'statement' novel - i feel he gets the Big Theme, the meaning, first, then contrives a plot as vehicle. He lacks innocence.
Martin Amis seems even more of the ilk. As Theophanes the Greek says in Tarkovsky's 'Andrei Rublev' of a somewhat waywarldly motivated student of Rublev's: "He should get the crap beaten out of him every Saturday."
TO add, I've obviously written a few little pieces here that do 'mean' something, are obviously enough parables of sort, but the actual process is an image that comes to mind in something of a flash, and then I write of it or around it, generally very quickly, and all that concerns the creation is writing the piece. The meaning all takes care of itself, but if you're in a conscious process of creating a symbol, etc then you're pretty sure to have something dull whose substance is exhausted very quickly- once the 'meaning' is deciphered.
That is how i wrote my 10 good short stories - i had an image, e.g. a man who can call up visual images of a place by running his hand over a map, and i just started writing. Sometimes i knew how it would end and worked backwards from a more or less arbitrary starting point. The 'false parables' as i called them, began with such an image, but then i coerced a narrative from them, tried to contrive a meaning, rather than just letting it emerge. They were shit.
Maybe they could go into my bucket of shit.
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