Wittgenstein is a Bad Lieutenant: Fin de Siècle Remix
Wittgenstein is a bad lieutenant * Wittgenstein is a bad aesthetic influence * Wittgenstein, my love, who, at the time of his death left 20,000 plus pages of discrete remarks unpublished * If I am ever to finish this book * Must stop reading or thinking about Ludwig Wittgenstein * Who wrote, After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. . . . my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination * The little Wittgenstein inside my head * What height was Ludwig Wittgenstein * Will never be satisfied with this book * Any book I write will never be austere enough will never be shorn of all that is structurally unnecessary * Ludwig’s profligacy of inscribing is referred to as voluminous but it is also voluptuous * As voluptuous as the rough trade youths Ludwig who was 5 feet 6 inches tall and slender apparently is said to have encountered whilst cruising in the Prater during his student days and later in the parks of London * In this essay I will propose that the rough and promiscuous nature of my textual output is already more excessive, more repetitive and disorderly that Ludwig’s * My writing cannot be restrained by the repressed form we call “the book,” cannot be contained within a book’s bourgeois respectable propriety * What did Ludwig get up to in the parks and the toilets? These are philosophical questions * I am more interested in thinking about what he did in those toilets than in the Tractatus * Book, definition: a confined stinking space of longing * I feel a deep, possibly unhealthy affinity not only with Wittgenstein, but others like him, Raymond Roussel and Fernando Pessoa, all my profligate disordered homo writers who failed to fit their thoughts into a book and at the time of their death left daunting masses of their unpublished writings outside of the book * Wittgenstein who also said My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one * My favorite Wittgenstein book is the Private Notebooks not intended for publication, written from the trenches, the book that precedes the Tractatus, in which he writes of bedbugs and going to the baths, maneuvers and masturbation * How can I recapture that paradisiacal time I spent cruising in the parks of South London? * Perhaps I am not interested in writing books at all * Perhaps in lieu of this book I should present you with the material mass of scrawls I have accumulated * Perhaps I am merely and ultimately drawn to the initial, solitary, lust- driven energy of writing, the erotic dialectic between inscription and the imagination * Key Terms: Wittgenstein semen book memory abandon * Reading Philosophical Investigations, jacked off, or Heute wieder onaniert, today again masturbated, to thoughts of young Ludwig * Came into the book, open as his mouth, onto this proposition: What makes my image of him into an image of him? * Perhaps the book that remains unpublished, that eternally eludes publication and above all confinement is the one of greater value * Proposition: Fuck Ludwig Wittgenstein * Toilet Graffiti: I want to fuck Ludwig Wittgenstein * Let us leave our sentences hidden in trunks, in cupboards, in boxes, suitcases, basements, attics. Leave them anywhere but inside the book * Conclusion: the other side of austerity is the voluptuary * I hereby found a new genre, the licentious genre of abandonment that lies outside the prescribed perimeters of the book, that exceeds and escapes the confines or limits of any and every book EXCESS EXCESS EXCESS*
Alistair McCartney is the author of The Disintegrations and The End of the World Book, two experimental novels published with University of Wisconsin Press. The Disintegrations is the recipient of The Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. TEOTWB was a finalist for the PEN USA Fiction Award and the Publishing Triangle's Edmund White debut fiction award. His poetry and cross-genre writing has appeared in journals such as Hotel, Deleuzine, Fence, Light/Air, LIT, 3:AM, Vestiges, Nat.Brut, Animal Shelter (Semiotexte), and Pilot Press's Paul Thek and Forbidden Colours Anthologies. He is currently working on a book of poetics and a novel. Originally from Australia, he lives in Los Angeles, where he is Teaching Faculty in Antioch University's MFA program.