Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Bugger Bognor

There's a bit in Hamlet - but I can't remember the exact bit - where someone repeats something the Dane has said back to him, and he retorts, obviously lying, that, "Those words are not mine", or "I never said that", or something like that. When I say "obviously lying", the thing is, it's so obvious that you know he has another intention. He is not lying at all. He is, philosophically, turning himself into a Heraclitean river.

Sometimes I feel like deleting my entire blog. And yet, so far, I have simply gone on writing it. Either impulse, to delete or to write (that is the question), is really quite irrational.

Similarly, sometimes I think that I suffer from a kind of social Tourette's (I don't mean that in any medically accurate sense, but in a very silly 'popular misapprehension' sense) and should care more about what other people think, and sometimes I think I'm far too nice, and shouldn't care at all about what other people think.

Perhaps the strangeness of it all comes in thinking that any of the ripples (of word and deed) in this Heraclitean stream are actually me.

These days, I believe, it's not uncommon for someone to die having left websites, blogs, MySpace profiles and so on behind them in a strange kind of posterity. Depending on how many people knew and were interested in the departed, the moths of consciousness will gather about the glow of the computer screen to see their life preserved there. But these words are not their life. Embarrassing or beautiful or boring, it's...

Someone who knows my interests very recently informed me, hilariously, of the construction of the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, now nearing completion, and of the fact that there's a possibility that it may destroy the universe.

Perhaps it's another example of the silliness that so embarrasses me, which I should really feel utterly detached from, but I feel vaguely as if I might be changing.

In another of my books that I don't have to hand at the moment, because I have none of them to hand right now, there's a Japanese death poem (jisei), that goes something like this:

Oh, I don't care
Where autumn winds
Are blowing to

I'm reminded of a very similar jisei from a dying royal:

Bugger Bognor.