Tom, your mother is shitting little green apples because of the blog. I’d get on your case too, but I’m enjoying all the strudel.
–Richard Gilbert
Bear in mind that I know far more of the labels you have given to me and this blog than you are capable of producing individually—“weird,” “radical,” “insubordinate,” “insane,” “gross,” “impressive,” “creepy,” “perverted,” “enlightening,” “brilliant,” “a lot of fun,” “goes too far,” “harsh,” “hilarious,” “obsessive,” “reductive,” “an accurate depiction of a certain teacher,” “gay,” “pseudo-intellectual,” “so weird,” “unfair,” “experimental,” “a healthy ambiguity,” “dishonest,” “schizophrenic,” and of course “the abyss.” Somehow from the start I believed that the abyss of DIS was something worth charting and revealing to itself. This is the primary point I want to make: that from the start I was always a most humble author, and sought only to bring others down to my own level of humility, because as the days in Denmark ticked by I became yet more steadily convinced that no one else could match my own penitence before the absolute.
Hence the overarching structure of each post individually as well as in totality was always deliberate, and aimed towards the task of a re-levelling of the supremely bizarre expatriate culture in which I took part. It was necessary to write from behind so that you not immediately become turned off to the project; it was necessary that you become fascinated against your will with a perceived confessionality or unbridled-ness that grew as the blog continued, so that in reading the blog we would all become steadily more deconstructed. Certainly it is true that I did not always “know” where I was going with it…but these moments were the exception, and besides which these moments quickly revealed their structure in the planned process soon after their completion. Art, as I hope to God we have at last learned from embarking on this journey together, must venture a little bit into the Dangerous in order to emerge in the Interesting.
So I started with some almost run-of-the-mill material; I say almost because it was, I hope, a bit clear immediately that the blog would be ambitious and cunning, though I endeavored to find a voice a bit vulnerable at first, too, in order to allow the reader to assume a paternal position relative to blogger-Tom. This was absolutely crucial, for if you had believed from the start that, wow, I guess he isn’t at all afraid of getting expelled for writing these things, or geez, he’s never going to drop the Follicles shit I guess—had you seen these realities from the start, the dialectic would have been ruined, all tension erased, and it would have been easy to corner me into that same crowded box where we put all polemicists, who in my age group are near always disappointingly angsty and shrill.
No, it was necessary to place the blog on the DIS website. It was necessary to win you over with thought-out, carefully structured, intelligent and heart-felt but ultimately safe narratives that you could pat yourself on the back for reading as a way of encouraging the fledgling creative spurts of a vulnerable Sorbonne-ian in waiting. The hard part came in deciding how quickly to introduce you to the deeper weirdness of which I was capable. The key was to commit this not so quickly that it did not appear organic, thus preserving the dialectic, but not so slow that you could confuse the maturation for a legitimate by-product of spending a third of a year in a foreign country. In this way readers could be passively threatened into questioning their relation to the author without scaring the reader into submission. And I also had to consider how to synthesize this gradual weird-ening, as well as this escalating readership I acquired which put considerably more pressure on each concurrent post in preserving the dialectic, with my actions in actuality. It is true that I have not once committed myself to a project here, in life, merely so that I could write about it later. Down that path lies despair. However it was necessary to measure my actions in advance so that they not destroy the careful synthesis in the writing. Hence, I allowed certain ‘repeat-characters’ to learn of the blog’s existence at opportune moments; I introduced new characters after these ‘repeat-characters’ discovered themselves, so that these certain characters would form new relations with these other characters; I forced all these characters to anticipate future appearances on the blog, as a way of adjusting their behavior in actuality to my liking; I could subtly synthesize this new, “real” behavior into the narratives I weaved, so that they had their own dialectics with their fictional counterparts. And most importantly, in this way, I could allow people to become so fascinated with the fictional versions of themselves that even as the blog became steadily more unbelievable and unstable in its makeup the readership remained high and people continued to ask edifying questions of themselves, past the normality previously possible and well into absurdity.
This all seems quite perspicacious, I know. But perhaps if I were to discuss a few concrete examples of my method, you would become more convinced of its premeditation. I can start with the one we are most anxious for, that of Follicles, who represents many things that I will not unpack but whom I will touch on in my purpose to confess, here, as a penitent in pursuit of absolution. Every post “of” or “with” Follicles was placed deliberately in the spectrum of the blog and was designed to develop the dialectic, whose ultimate aim was to force you into forming a relation to yourselves. The degree of intentionality had to remain ambiguous—clearly you knew the posts were going somewhere, though if you thought it was all completely planned out “in the beginning” then you would be turned off, feeling manipulated. In allowing the story to form over time, in allowing his narrative to integrate more and more with places and events in which I was clearly present—in other words, in allowing him to become fully causal—I could make you reevaluate your assumptions transcendentally. It was never important to me whether you believed he existed or not. It was absolutely pivotal that whatever you once thought would become questioned, hopefully repeatedly, and that this would unfold in an organic way in your own mind rather than in the purposeful dominion of the author. While also (I say this at the risk of reducing the mystery of the aesthetic) I grew my mutton chops over so many months, and precisely for the purpose expressed in my previous post, so as to make the final composition more striking when compared with what I had written when the peach-fuzz began to form, namely, the “Brian’s Head” series of posts, which while pushing the proverbial envelope hardly ass-rape it in the manner of later writings. These things ran parallel—the growing of the facial hair, the composition of the “safe” material—so my premeditation has been proven from the start.
And you all bought it—oh, how all of you bought it! It is not malice but joy that now makes me reveal my satisfaction to you. Though I have long known it true for America, I was greatly depressed to discover that Europe too suffers from a great deficiency of martyrs. This was something that had to be remedied. But unfortunately the present age is so nihilistic and self-destructive that in order for one martyr to begin to redeem the world, many other martyrs must be made in the process. That is, the selflessness of martyrdom has been (necessarily) perverted into the martyrdom of the crucifier. So all of you were crucified here, in blog-space, as caricatures of yourselves alternately highly accurate and garishly exaggerated. This had to be done so that a true martyr or sufferer could be created—the structure of my method was such that the author’s creations would martyr him. You think you have been put on trial or judged with a cold eye; but no, it is I and only I who has suffered, only I who have born the weight of the cruelty of the project, for, in the infinite sense, no one has been mutilated or roughly transposed or poetically sullied as I have.
Now you see how the blog was the vehicle for my ultimate penitence. How every observation or description or narration reverberated inside me to the utmost. While not a believer in self-flagellation, I acknowledge the importance of secret suffering. You might ask if I am not now undoing the whole purpose, by revealing the suffering and destroying the dialectic which I no longer have to bear alone. In response: there is a point after which prostration before God becomes so overwhelming that even serving Him in this back-ended way must be undone, and replaced with the most earnest—most directly earnest—confession. Tom qua author qua spy needed to be simplified to just Tom. I do still take a childish delight in having served in this previous, un-dispelled way, although in relation to God I offer this my entire work more shamefacedly and bashfully than a child who gives its parents a gift the parents have given the child. Everything here is reciprocal—yes, everything—so take nothing at its own value, scatter it all to the winds! Remember my regret and forget your own, take up my suffering and let yours wash away! Forgive all, but only to the capacity of your personality! Take nothing, nothing, nothing as it is, not even—hah!
