This uncovered writing has parts that feel like 16-year-old wordplay mixed with the aging man…sigh.
9 Notebooks
In an act of rebellion and a kind of self-serving exorcism or slate-clearing (what blog is NOT an attempt at an entity’s expression, communication?), and facing the duress of weeks burdened with commitments and inescapable responsibilities…[in other words]…I intuit I am encountering a “time” (weeks / months / foreseeable futures?) that I deduce as laden – somehow preordained – for preoccupations of employment, previously established obligations – freighted with encumberances complexly negotiated…[under pressure I compose]…and so I search for a project [as is my way] that is FOR ME[?] (something autotrophic, self-cannibalizing and nourishing at once, individually comprised and contained) an insurrection and defiance honoring self [so I surmise] facing compulsion…
…and I unearth these 9 Notebooks…all aborted undertakings from the past 12 months…via which I propose to mount mutiny by posting all that seems potentially warranted in them [upon re-reading as if the first time, long forgotten]…toward little other purpose than for purging, opening, erasing – a clearinghouse of efforts – that might evolve toward some novel substitution, unforeseen modification, development, emergence…
“this is what directs him to learning – where he may encounter fragments of his own existence,
fragments that are still within the context…”
– Walter Benjamin on Franz Kafka –
There will be stories, concepts, poems, characters, reflections, essays…and ephemeral scraps like these…
- think feel – attune to meaning – reflect and refract
- befriend your body, take care with your mind
- be gentle, be open. move fluidly, breathe
- go alert to your dreams
- wish more than hope, walk don’t run, run sometimes
- be careful of rules, they’re always changing, it’s the nature of the rule, the measure, the standard
- keep your eyes and ears open, along with heart and mind – only let things close into pleasure and pain – and that more of a wince
- don’t be afraid of your story – write and rewrite it, edit and revise, revise, revise, and write it again
Sometimes it seems, it takes me so much time (it seems) to find whereof I can speak…
An attempt viewed in incompletion
Impromptu
Arid time and things, they pass
Erase, not quite, deteriorate
Inexact as well, but depleting
Depleting.
Depleting.
.
Not exactly end, ending
Never a beginning
Ever picked up midstride
Midstream
Only ever in the midst
.
Tiring then,
Worn down,
Depleted, she said,
Exhausted,
.
and yet what from?
From what is he so tired
unto ruin?
What is ruin-ed?
What never was?
Perhaps.
.
Always midstride, then
Nearer to the end
this depletion
Depleting
.
nothing
Begun ever
Certainly nothing
ever completed.
Always midstride,
and nearer to the end,
incompleted, and
depleting
Depleting
.
Unable to keep up with 1/8 of the 9-year-old,
worrying the 10, the 17, the young man
fails the partner
fails the weather
failing his own mind
own dreams
his own body
.
ideas
.
Depleting
.
Always midstream,
frozen in place
nearer to the end
this present
Depleting
.
Would like to write it out
Write it off
Pick up again
Declare a start
But he can’t
or won’t
.
Nearing the end,
Never getting there,
(near completion, never that)
only begun and that just barely
joined midstride
nearer to the end
simply depleting
.
Inexorably
.
Without fail.
The one thing without fail.
The one absolute success.
The one almost-completion:
.
depletion.
Depleting
.
Always midstride
and nearer to the end –
very much like dancing
on bleeding broken legs
Ash grey little body only upright heart beating face to endlessness. Old love new love as in the blessed days unhappiness will reign again. Earth sand same grey as the air sky ruins body fine ash grey sand. Light refuge sheer white blank planes all gone from mind. Flatness endless little body only upright same grey all sides earth sky body ruins. Face to white calm touch close eye calm long last all gone from mind. One step more one alone all alone in the sand no hold he will make it.
– Samuel Beckett, Lessness –
Distractedly riffling through old notebooks stacked, shelved and scattered about my working space, some dating to 1991.
For most of my life I’ve desired to be a writer.
Nearly all of my life I’ve been writing.
Reading. Writing. Reading. Writing. Reading. Writing. Thinking.
Once out of the home, off on my own, out in the world,
the marginalia and doodles, notes in the headers and footers,
grew redundant with desire…
…desire for language to do some certain things,
…desire to be a certain sort of sayer, singer:
to write the ambiguities.
Repeatedly: to be a writer of “the grey,” “the foggy,” the layered and the liminal. Experience thickly translucent, ambivalent, inconclusive and unclear. That light in which even our shadows go unseen.
Yet over time, enduring work, assembling children, compiling experience, occasioning love and its passing by,
encountering mortality in its consistent accumulation of extraction,
my writing desire grows more active,
toward the active,
and its happening,
writing verbally,
writing living:
to write losing.
Losing in its agility and operation, its perpetuity.
Losing as it eventuates and proceeds, universally, in each instant.
TO WRITE LIVING : LOSING
to loose losing
…perhaps to lose it…
…face to endlessness…
will he make it?
Provisionally, some fiction
PROVISIONALLY
– a novel? –
We untiringly construct the world in order that the hidden dissolution, the universal corruption that governs what ‘is’ should be forgotten [Death, or its refusal] in favor of a clear and defined coherence of notions and objects, relations and forms…
-Maurice Blanchot-
Thought and writing weave an apprenticeship…
…it will not hold, meaning and words, it will not hold.
-Dan Beachy-Quick & Matthew Ghoulish-
our limited mode of access to reality
-Laurie Scheck-
The novel hurled to the ground breaks into verse and achieves a perfect synthesis
-Ben Lerner-
each page a fractured, beating thing
-Laurie Scheck-
He woke far too early, and could not back to sleep. Even slumber. Broken into verse. Eyes needled with discomfort, asking for their closing, refusing to stay shut. And her. Her, the one pushing away, the one who woke him, the one asking him to ‘please move farther’ when there is no room. And so he enters a deep – after a fashion, or of a sort – a sleepy sleepless land, an engagement like great fiction.
Without synthesis and not unbroken, but scattered in its way, as insomnia might be, like stars, like sky, the bewilderment of travel. An apprenticeship in weaving. The dreaming in the waking. Age-old questions, rich and beautiful: unanswered. The meaning and the words continue refusing to hold. Something “like” that, unlikably.
our words are so light that they keep opening out into questions…
…when you affirm, you still question
-Maurice Blanchot-
Impromptu
Death.
Abundance.
Extravagant generosity of depletion.
Lust with which the world gives way.
And life.
Things.
Prominence.
.
I have entered a world
in which I am
saddened
begladdened
nostalgic
and eaten away
.
It is “Today”
this world –
the realm, the sphere, the moment:
Now.
A time that’s never,
only almost
and a just-was.
.
Each beginning
what equals
another end.
That time.
What was.
What will be.
What I remember
and predict.
.
The first day
once again;
each possibly
the last
.
It is like this –
each time –
it is the present:
that attachment
that letting go.
Incessant welcome,
and its goodbye.
FYI – in margins
Although nearly silent, or, too busy to conjure and compose, or…
I have not given up, having not ceased,
somewhere in the mix of these,
somewhere between voices…
ASPECTS OF WRITING
To 2015, then
“Great changes in life are always a help…”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky-
A STEP AT A TIME
Now one eye daylight
and one not
there was a lifetime
before they flew
their true colors
but I must have known
the moment I was born
the pans of the balance
swinging along with me
always two poles
with the seasons rocking
between them
.
and the familiar the unexplored
the city the country
abroad almost at home
and home never quite there
just the way it was before
.
left foot right foot
on the same way
my own way
of finding and losing
and in my own time
coming to one
love one place
day and night
as they came to me
.
but the knowing and the rain
the dream and the morning
the wind the pain
the love the burning
.
it seems you must let them come
so you can let them go
you must let them go
so you let them come
– W. S. Merwin
All my Words are Silent 