He doesn’t like Ben Lerner. He doesn’t like most successful writers. He sits in his bathtub reading Ben Lerner’s Hatred of Poetry, because he hates Ben Lerner, and he hates poetry. He doesn’t just sit in his bathtub. He lies. He lies principally to himself, about his hatred of Ben Lerner and his hatred of poetry. An unfinished manuscript lies beside him. Its narrator is unreliable. The narrator concludes by saying that he has moved on from Patricia, the love of his life, but he has not moved on, because there is nowhere else to move on to. They had lived at forever, and forever has no forwarding address.

The bath-dweller skips a few pages. The essay is still written by Ben Lerner. No new author has appeared in the intervening pages. Unfortunately, Lerner has learned something new about modern poetry. This is it. Modern poetry is too self-centred. The poets no longer talk about the GRAND THEMES.

GOD.

DEATH.

REVELATION.

Yes, your life is miserable, your wife has long ago left you, your cat is friendlier to the neighbours, your kids haven’t seen you in years, your boss thinks you’re slow, incompetent or both, or terribly late or way too early, or both, and regardless, most people think that you are an IDIOT. But those are not the GRAND THEMES. They have no weight or consequence in the real world.

Why can’t Ben Lerner lie? The bath-dweller can lie, and indeed, lies well. He lies in his bathtub and lies to himself about his hatred of Ben Lerner and his hatred of poetry. Lerner is wrong, he says in this very lie. Then he speaks to the bathtub about himself. Every sentence starts with I. Because he must declare his opinions! I think. I know. I want. I believe. Yes, he wants to think and know and believe. If only he could think and know and believe, then he wouldn’t need to want so much anymore.

But just as the bath-dweller is distracted by his thoughts, a bomb explodes outside his window, shattering the glass into crystalline fragments that scatter over the white tiled floor. There is something GRAND happening outside. But his personal truths are more important than that, and that is why he must start every sentence with “I”. I did not like that window, he says to himself. I would really like to get a coffee, he says back, in reply.

On the street, everyone is running away from the GRAND THEME. A black cloud of smoke is rising in the distance, mingling with the orange hue of the dawn against the smokey blue of the sky. The runners are shouting profanities at him. The end is nigh. The end is nigh. Humanity is suffering the inevitable consequence of our depravity and sin. Repent or die. Repent or die. He drifts past them, and through them, to the coffee shop, where he luxuriates in the emptiness of the queue, for once, and the speed at which he reaches the all-too-young and dishevelled cashier. Sorry sir, we are closed, the cashier says. I have something of a headache this morning. I did not sleep correctly. I do not care for your excuses at the present moment, your job is to serve me and only me, the bath-dweller says.

The cashier is catatonic in reply, and obsessed with talking about the GRAND THEME, but the coffee machine is automated, and so the bath-dweller merely announces a few words and the machine purrs to life, spitting out hot water as an excremental cleaning fluid, then a steady pour of hot black liquid. The key to Godhood is caffeine. The bath-dweller learnt this lesson very early, in his first job, as an assistant to the assistant of Ben Lerner. That was when he first discovered his problem of saying I too frequently.

Do not use personal pronouns in my office.

That was a poster on Ben Lerner’s wall, which the bath-dweller disobeyed, quite frequently. What if Ben Lerner wanted him to rebel? What if the sign was just a test? This had never occurred to him before, but now, it seemed possible. Lerner could have had a GRAND TEST to intimidate his employees into silence. Perhaps the entire façade of Lerner himself was a test, and he was not so much of a poet but a truth-seeker of sorts, a grand sage of the old and classic variety. Or perhaps not.

The GRAND THEME is getting worse outside, and the radio won’t stop yapping on about it. A wallow-wallow-wallow sound is playing over the café speakers. He pays it no mind. He is busy thinking about his wife, and how in the early days she was so in love with him and would look at him with that half-glazed orgasmic glee that so typifies the early throes of love, for which he now longs and desires. I love how you care about the world, she would tell him, nakedly running her fingertips across his erect nipples. That had faded with time – the love, not the nipples.

This is the big WANT.

Every character MUST have a big WANT.

He wrote that to himself once, after talking to Ben Lerner.

I want my wife to return to me.

The want is an insatiable desire that is simultaneously unattainable but within easy reach, if the main character merely overcomes his central character flaw. The want first appeared when his wife left him. And it only got worse since then. Now it is all that he wants. Like a baseball player in a sports movie – he can only see the final countdown. He no longer does homework, housework, or breaths, he just wants.  All day he wants. He wants so much that there is very little time to do anything else. Sometimes, when the want gets so exhausting, he starts wanting more time in the day. I am alone, and only now that I am alone can I finally understand myself, he says to the empty café.

Ben Lerner disagrees. The cashier is Ben Lerner, he finally sees. “When I told you don’t say I – I was merely quoting others who made that argument. I do not make it in The Hatred of Poetry. You are completely misrepresenting me. I believe in the GRAND THEMES, like you do, deep inside. You must pay attention to the world around you, or the world will never pay attention to you,” Lerner says,

“I will ignore you,” I say, blocking my ears.

But Ben Lerner cannot be so easily ignored. Lerner’s skin is paginated. Each square block of skin has a number on it. The bath-dweller reads the skin and finds out that it is The Hatred of Poetry. It is a slick tattoo, black and neatly done. It unfolds across the skin so smoothly that it appears as if it may have always been there, and that Ben Lerner did not write it, as such, but merely wrote it down while looking at his reflection in the mirror. The Hatred of Poetry is a genetic text. It genetically came down to Ben Lerner. This is the FIRST REVELATION. Ben is like Moses, and he has climbed the mountain of modern poetry to find narcissism at its peak.

The bath dweller cries. His life would be easier were he just narcissistic and not self-centred. To love the self is to other the self. If he loved himself, he would never have to say I. He would say he. The bath dweller loves himself. He says this to himself, and he cries, as the rain pours down on the buzzing street outside. He cannot lie to himself. No. I love her, he says to Ben Lerner, I love her and that is the beginning and end of everything. Can’t you see that it is all interrelated, my love of her and the GRAND THEME of LOVE?

Ben Lerner doesn’t reply, instead holding up a mirror to the bath-dweller’s eye, to reveal, that he too, is Ben Lerner.

“It cannot be I,” he says, frantically, pushing the mirror away.

But the SECOND REVELATION has struck him, and the CLIMAX is soon to arrive.

Outside, the tanks roll by the little café, plundering over traffic cones and patrons, squishing them into smithereens under the GRAND THEME of WAR. Under that chaos, and the ensuing sigh, he spots his wife, darting across the street, with their two small children in tow. Help me, she screams, to no one in particular. No, I cannot engage with the grand theme, the bath-dweller tells himself, but his body has other ideas – step-by-step, he races across the street towards her, looking left and right and taking in the utter chaos that is in his wake; the famine and the disease, the war and the suffering, the love and the hope of men and women clutching onto their children; the bravery and the defiance against all odds; the fight against injustice, and the fragile hope of the just; the tyranny and the heroic; himself and his wife; love and true love, truest of all themes. He sees all of this, and for the first time in years, he cries about something other than himself. Oh, the frailty and tragedy of man, the beauty of moments receding, the destruction and chaos he has wrought in His name.

“I love you,” he says, clutching onto his wife.

She replies the same, the children scream

and just at that moment –

the precise moment of the bath-dweller’s deliverance –

– the GRAND THEME crushes him to death.

@JoshKrook

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