Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Shogyou Mujou

An earthquake in Britain. Although I hate to be alarmist, and hate even more to state the obvious, it is actually the end of the world. And yet, even as masonry falls about their heads publishers find themselves too timid to publish anything even remotely interesting, for fear it will shock the brains of the simpering, moronic readers they imagine to be their only hope of survival in this world, and upon whom they desperately wish to fawn.

WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY?

WHY?

Come on. We're all dying anyway, you might as well do what you know very well you should do and publish me.



I'm just typing up my current novel Susuki. I have come, in my typing, to my translation of the beginning of Kamo no Chomei's Hojoki:

The flow of the river moves forever onwards, and the ever-changing water is not that which flowed here at the start. Bubbles that float in the backwaters now burst, now appear and burst again, and never have been known to stay for long. The people of this world and their habitations may also be likened unto this.

Susuki is chock-full of good stuff like this. I only hope I can pull off the ending and the embedded texts. But perhaps I've given away too much already, and it will probably be about fifty billion years till it gets published, anyway, when some publisher - the message not yet having travelled to his decayed brain that he no longer exists - picks up the manuscript again after tossing it aside fifty billion years ago, and says, "Okay, it's not bad, actually, we might as well go ahead with it."



Kamo no Chomei, some eight hundred years ago, was witness to a whole series of disasters in the then capital city of Kyoto, including fire, famine and earthquake. He ended his life as a wandering recluse living in a portable hut, rather like the shell of a hermit crab, which is when he wrote Hojoki, A Record of My Hut. So, the end of the world has happened before, and he told the tale. The only thing is, in those days the world was Kyoto; now it's Planet Earth. Not sure there's anywhere left for me to take my portable hut.

Anyway, must get back to my Nero-like fiddling.

Labels: Kamo no Chomei, the end of the world