From a letter to a friend (on 'emergencies') (DH)

One more note. I have an idea now of what you think an emergency is. But the more that I think about what it means to me the more I feel that it’s something that relates to my conception of other people. I feel myself to be in emergency. That means for me that I feel responsible for my friends and comrades who are not keeping their shit together. The feeling of responsibility builds up and accumulates in my head into a kind of metallic grating, a monotonous drone. An alarm. “Your phone rings all the time. You are only thinking about the people, it gets worse, so you stay to help. You don’t think about the people you have helped, only the ones you haven’t, the things you didn’t have time to do.” For several years now I’ve lost the ability to think. Or, it’s as though throughout everything I did and at the core of every one of my ‘ideas’ a phone was ringing, shrilly and unanswerably, and the noise of that phone were somehow the ‘meaning’ of whatever it is that I’m trying to conceive of or say. That’s what the ‘emergency’ is for me. You see? And it’s only when I see this and understand it that I begin to understand another desire that I’ve felt for almost as long, which is this bewildering need to find in poetry a counterforce of irresponsibility, the fractions-of-a-second inversion when the ringing becomes so loud and so vile that consciousness seems to buckle and split off from itself and watch with powerless unperturbed serenity as a new voice emerges and spits itself out from my body and its words flash with hilarity and a pure physical sensation somewhere between astonishment and relief. Like mania. Like thin rain falling between buildings. In an empty street. 

Do you feel it too? There’s been times in the last months when I’ve remonstrated with myself and thought of this need as the same will-to-transgression that defines the worst culture of our period. Groyper will-to-power… I’ve come up with all kinds of formulae. But it’s not true. The point is that poetry needs to be a response to this terrible noise or pressure in our heads, this sensation building up inside of language that doesn’t mean what the words mean. Clearly it follows from this that we can call it whatever we want. Seizure. 'Political art'. Spheares Musick. Cream cake. It’s all the same. The only thing that characterises it is you know it when you hear it.

(DH)