Shame

There was a man—a writer, that most difficult, temperamental, and vain kind of man—who, having failed to a produce a novel of any kind in his life despite his years of effort, decided to burn his unpublished works, wipe his hard drive of all literary fragments, sketches, and drafts, and commit the rest of his days to a more fruitful cause. So one morning he gathered all his worthless literary productions—reams of pages, scrawled notes, crumpled folders, printouts, manuscript drafts bound at print and copy shops, USB drives, and so on—and placed them in a box, on the ground, in his back garden. Dismayed by the pathetic, dusty pile that all his time on Earth had amounted to, he gave the box a pathetic little kick. It slid forward less than an inch.

        As a younger, more hopeful man, the writer had envisioned another life for himself. At this age he thought he would be surrounded by glossy volumes bearing his name and the logo of an esteemed publisher, a veritable tomb of premium ink and paper, foiled lettering and award insignias. He had imagined a much more significant precipitate of time, thought, and labour, than what lay before him. Instead he had gasoline and matches in hand, ready to set fire to the meagre record of his despicable, indulgent existence. Staring at the disgusting stack of paper, he wondered if his work would even have the dignity to burn well.

        The man tightened his grip on the gasoline container. But before he began the conflagration, he paused. Two thoughts had entered his mind. First: wasn’t it the height of vanity—exceeding, perhaps, even that of a successful author who saw fit to publish his works—to elevate these failed works with such a grand ceremony of destruction? And second: did he not deserve, in some way, to be burned at the stake alongside his works—or indeed, in their place, them being but the innocent progeny of a deluded, selfish mind?

        The man poured the gasoline over his head. For a moment, he trembled. He then tossed the container and matches aside and lay on his back next to his works. The sky overhead was cloudy, but only a little grey. It was a sign of his utter mediocrity, he felt, that he now wished it would rain.

        That morning, the man knew he was hoping—obscurely, furtively, in the dark, as it were—to liberate himself from the ballast of his history and identity. So freed of his past, he believed, a heretofore unimaginable creative vibrancy would animate his being, driving him upward into cultural hinterlands unexplored by lesser men who could never match his visionary talents and mastery of language. There he would complete an exploration of mind, words, reality, culture, history, and possibility, which, once transcribed and published, would be the work of genius he knew his future held. The title of genius would inevitably be bestowed on him, too, alongside that work.

        The man suppressed an illicit smile as a blunt self-loathing smothered this insight into his soul. He wanted, in short, to feel an intense felicity, so far only a dream in his life, and he felt that, in this world’s symbolic economy, this act of sacrifice would entitle him to it.

        But there was a problem with his desire. His work, by virtue of the fact that he had resolved to destroy it, had been declared worthless by the only soul who had read a single word of it—himself. And so this bid to acquire greatness was in fact underwritten by nothing more than his willingness to give up something he had declared “a load of fucking shit” on more than one occasion. Hardly an enticing prospect for those gods of artistic fortune, then. Those deities in whom this professed atheist did not believe but whose auspices he nonetheless—shamelessly—sought could, in the end, only be offended by his offering. They had afforded the man some degree of creative acumen—his box of failed works did sit beside him, remember, and was still, despite the man’s opinions, a box of work. But the man nonetheless had the temerity to see himself as the most authoritative critic of the work produced with the very gifts these faeries of inspiration and talent had bestowed upon him, work that he now, after his offense, sought to offer as a sacrifice to receive a blessing of artistic vision and fecundity that he in no way deserved, given his ingratitude. Indeed, with his judgement that his works must be destroyed rather than merely shunned or ignored the man went farther than any bitter critic who might denigrate his creations. To put himself in such a position implied such vast arrogance and pretentiousness that, now he was aware of his basically appalling disposition towards his gifts, the only conceivable response could be deep, unrelenting and oceanic shame.

        And shame he felt. For not only was he still convinced—despite all evidence of his wretchedness and mediocrity—that creating an artistic masterwork was his inevitable destiny. He also had the arrogance beyond his vanity to declare his attempts to date worthless, and the shamelessness then to offer up his debased scrawlings in exchange for the pathetic, egotistical future he dishonestly swore he no longer sought.

        The man rolled onto his side on the damp grass. He felt like a despicable worm as dirt clung to the back of his shirt, a blind and subterranean parasite eating his way through the shit of existence. Facing the box containing his life’s labours, he felt a sharp sting of self-pity. He suppressed an urge to cry while hate, aimed first at himself, then the entire sunken and damned world, then himself, then the world again, becoming ever more violent with each round, consumed him.

        Shame’s scent, he mused in the filth, is gasoline. As he lay beside his work, urges both suicidal and murderous filled his mind. To think his work was bad enough to warrant his death with the apotheosis of his deplorable feelings. For whose work—and mere literature at that—could possibly warrant such a punishment? On what grounds could his failure, no matter how vast, at a task so harmless and insignificant—nobody lived or died by his or any other esteemed author’s words, as much as they hoped their works would make them saviours, dictators, jurists, or terrorists—possibly demand his death? This guilt, he realised, was the greatness he sought, refracted through a dark prism. The man yearned to be the subject of a perfect, negative exceptionalism. To be an absolute genius or villain, deserving of eternal admiration or utter annihilation. Preferably both. Seeing this, he railed against himself that morning, strung up the like hog he was between the forces of literary dark and light he had erected in the mires of his unexceptional soul.

        Shaking with self-loathing as he writhed in the dirt, the sky remaining grey, the writer heard his mother’s call: “Breakfast is ready.” His daily ritual complete, and the forces of judgment exhausted for a time, he stood up, placed the gasoline and matches back in their usual place, collected his work and walked inside the house. The writing day began shortly afterwards.