In tandem with the release of the collection Clinical, Brutal… An Anthology of Writing with Guts Christopher Nosnibor interviewed some of the contributors to the book about their contributions, their writing methods and their outlooks more broadly.

This series yielded a truly mind-blowing author ‘interview’ with Lee Kwo ‘conducted’ by Christopher Nosnibor.

Lee Kwo is no ordinary writer. He doesn’t simply use the cut-up technique as a writing tool: he lives and breathes cut-ups. I had so many questions I wanted to put to this man. Where to begin? In the end, I didn’t have to: Lee Kwo is not only a visionary and a posthuman, but also a psychic warrior, and responded to my every question and more when he unravelled the purpose behind the practice in this piece, entitled ‘Why Write.’

Why Write

Lee Kwo

Ritual Machinics the lies we tell ourselves to live under the weight of the WORD/ Why write?/ You see he said you are looking into the abyss while I am looking up out of the abyss while I am still falling I am a story I have constructed in order to give some meaning and drama a metaphysics that transcends the inevitable annihilation that each day brings forth each night that I want to sleep for ever its taking time to wind up the machine still falling I want a narrative that leads me somewhere away from the pack the swarm that explains my lack of progress but all I will be doing is exploring the bottom of the abyss and light fades as I fall I talk to myself but no one else listens they are to busy struggling with the doors of chance/the trembling sky falls slowly appropriating the artificial black sun my body doesn’t want to sleep it wants death weighed down by the ambition filth that has accumulated over the years each thought adds to the weight death that invisible opportunity not to be missed I am not afraid to die just bored with waiting doing all I can to hasten the event but I keep writing memories as if they will prolong life dreaming of the perpetuity of infinity how do I do it she asks but the ledge is far from my ears and I cannot hear what she says but in anticipation I call out submit yr self to the sign the way you submit yrself to yr pain and yr vision of hallucinations that there is a space set aside for you this is how I affirm atrocious narcissism as the driving force that plunges thru my veins the word exhausts my being and I fall where desire fails to maintain the bodies equilibrium but I write myself into the plunge you want to leave yr trace of the word then cling to the ledge avoid the perimeter the margin the threshold stay away from all borders this will be enough for you to survive to tell yr story yr life is only a surplus of death an extra you stumbled upon in the filth of the sewer of the soul and knowledge is merely a diversion that keeps our mind of things/What things?/cynicism/cunning/ revenge/ superficiality of the fact that the day begins just as the night ends/avoid passion and fantasy/I can do nothing for yr solitude and only the alternative of the nomadic rhizome remains/the desire for answers requires an accuracy of understanding that life has no need of arguments/What good are words and thoughts that do not lift us beyond all thoughts and words?/What are we looking for in a response other than gratitude and we get into the habit of expecting it/To write one word and say the thought that drives it deserves the hatred of the receiver because you have written the end of the world/The answer should remain in what you do not say that is the strength and self control of the accomplished writer/To be great and wise in silence lies at the point of realizing the fall into the abyss is a forever falling without end and this is how the tragedy ends but did we see its beginning did we notice the signs the way a fever warns of illness/in this sense consciousness is merely an accident of existence and not something all possess/consciousness is a pathological state the reflection of the dark side of the unconscious which evades dreams/To this end most avoid consciousness and this accounts for their inability to respond to expectations other than insanity/The consciousness does the damage that the unconscious tries to repair but we do not understand the dialect of the unconscious we are ignorant of its language which is designed to speak the conscious /Does Kants sense of causality apply to the one or the other?/We can never know our inner world says Leibniz it will remain a mystery for us until death which releases the conscious finally/What we don’t know is of more value what we don’t think the exquisite being and becoming possible that we drive ourselves each day with/She says there must be and he says there isn’t/There is nothing but the directive of the word do this think that act out this drama this desire which is another facet of the consciousness for the unconscious desires nothing but the elevation towards the state of not being/finally relieved of the great fatigue that goes with the desire to keep desiring and not being finally saited/Some call this the will but they are wrong/Creativity is the least achievement of the conscious and has nothing to do with the unconscious and this is why we perpetually work at “creating” a fetish of desiring/We place it in the arena and pray that it is adored/Demanding a conscious recognition which is in most cases impossible and in the least case there is such a demand it has unleashed a disease of creating a epidemic of expression coming from the shallow depths the surface of the conscious which can trail on which we can suffer the withdrawal symptoms from for months years the worst drug of all so why do we want to be more conscious?/Why cant we let the self go and do nothing about this desire that creates such an ache and which dreams attempt to salve/Why not concentrate on the dreams which are our true originality the greater sur-realism Schopenhauer’s ungodliness of existence that we have for 2000 years tried to come to understand replacing it all the time with other faiths and beliefs/In the last 200 years it has been the fate of creativity to achieve the divine/To this end only the mad those who have lost hold of consciousness are able to fulfil the aim of creation which is too reveal the unknown that which cannot be written or painted or carved but perhaps in that spontaneous order the harder the material the closer to the unconscious/I think of Brancuis totems and Malarmes minimal words/All we are doing as Blanchot points out is re writing re carving what has already been done but forgotten/The demand to write struggles against presence in contrary to absence/The conscious presence of the author demands desires wills consciously to be in the presence of the “to be”/It only re presents in the sense of the repetitive beginning again and the will and desire to begin again and again hunting preferable with the pack the “the temporally ungraspable anteriority” of the beginning again/“…to write in this sense is always first to re write…and does not refer to any previous writing [which of course it does always] any more than to an anteriority of speech or of presence or of signification…re writing holds itself apart from any productive initiative“ And does not claim to produce anything other than the authors conscious apprehension of the illusionary state of the “real” the present presence which has already passed and can only be apprehended partially/Hence the need to begin and begin again and again/To try to appropriate the full intent of the word or thought/Thus re writing repeats what does not take place/will not take place and cannot take place except “partially”/Re writing is the surplus which at the limit cannot define itself by anything by which it would add itself/excess of nothing but still excessive/Write that which is already known else it could not be written and fails to be understood because of the lack of consciousness or the desire not to know/This is self evident but none the less denied and remains unrecognized/”In the view of the demand to write nothing is either friendly or sacred men neither divine nor human/Those who carry this demand are transported by it and disappear into it/even if their name serves to identify it they are neither important or great/In their disparate [desperate] plurality even though they belong to the multiple and are real only as multiple they remain strangers separate to one another crossing paths without meeting/this is their solitude plurality that constitutes them neither out of their own singularity nor in view of a superior unity/The work is always modified by that which comes after it/