“It really takes so much time to become a writer and you have to be able to roll in time itself, that was my experience, it seems to me, like a dog likes to roll in dead fish at the beach. Or a dog (my dog) stands in the shit of a stable underneath the body of a horse (trembling) and feels awe. Cause there’s so much shit and there’s so much horse. But if you’re somebody that wants to do that with your life which is just waste your time moment to moment, I mean it’s great, I thought I will waste it being a poet, I threw the gauntlet down and what happened after that was nothing and nothing is where I work.
I’ll get to the why of it. I think literature is wasted time. I don’t think there’s anything good about it. It’s not a moral project except in this profound aspect of wasting time. I have had this adventure in all of these ways. It’s the great adventure of our time.
…
All of it’s an alibi. Because I am aware not so much that my own becoming a writer is a construction of sorts but more that there’s a kind of aesthetic experience I believe that precedes the work so that you kind of fail into it finding your style and content and opportunity all together at last. That’s happened enough times for me to believe that that’s my process and it exists and will occur again no matter how much suffering my work causes me and betrayal is so deeply a part of it because I’ll be sailing along thinking this is incredible and days later I’ll stop and some version of me that lives at a different pace reads what I’ve written and pronounces it bad and I return to it later and pick out pieces and surges and rearrange it so ultimately I’m talking about ease and how it is an utter fiction so I disbelieve all ideas about genre because it’s all such fabricated stuff, writing, art, music every bit of it is not so much lying but instead is perched in relation to this other thing which is living and however I am about it, doing this thing, in my case writing, makes that thing I think more beautiful. I have time for it. I am in it and I am relentlessly talking about time but I can feel it drumming, rarely am I really peaceful, no I’m happy but I’m digging this little hole right here which is really tearing a hole in the other thing, copying it somehow in a way I like.”
فما عادَ في الأرض مُتّسعٌ لنا 