The hawthorns
between telling and showing
What is honor.
What is it.
Honor, not horror of fame.
I can say anything here, without consequence. With sequence, without following.
I look inside and what am I finding there. What matters.
Envy, lust. There is a picture of me inside of me that wants to eat everything that doesn’t look like itself. Eat it and shit it out.
If you could write anything, why would you want to.
Concentration. De-inhibition. To get out from under disinclination.
“I write this down, getting it right.”
But a proposition is not a judgment; it’s neither possible nor desirable to “get it right.” A proposition is a lure for feeling. It is more important that a theory be beautiful than it be true. (Whitehead.)
Does my writing allure my own feeling? How can I lure myself into the field where what has to happen will happen?
To be lured TOWARD something. Preferably something not-me.
There’s experience and there’s reflection upon experience.
Roughly speaking, mimesis and diegesis.
I can admire or envy another writer’s success without honoring him, and the converse is often true.
One sentence and then another sentence. There’s always room for more.
Something very clean here, inviting me to make it dirty.
A novelist like Proust nearly overwhelms the reader with diegesis, spawned by breathaking moments of mimesis: the hawthorns! His narrative is parceled out, almost stingily. The mimesis has all the magic, but it’s the diegesis that astonishes and endures.
Part of the appeal of the novel, for me, was always its capaciousness and looseness. I want it to make room for poetry.
Part of the appeal of a notebook is writing for its own sake, its own pleasure, which should be the pleasure of any writing, always. Utility to be discovered later. Audience to be indefinitely postponed.
To discover a discipline. Not to look anything up. Not to accept distractions that aren’t printed on paper. I cross a desert or tundra or an endless plain of ambient music, a texture that thickens the point where thought meets fingers meeting keys meeting language.
Proceed in one direction because if you cross your tracks in the desert you are lost.
A spiral I mean, not a straight line, which is no more possible than desirable when writing is involved.
Revision is part of the process: I see what I’ve written and revise not with the delete key but by adding.
A cleaner way to say this: revision is additive.
The challenge of the contemporary. How to write from the untimely.
In literature I pursue a transcendence and an expressiveness and a level of sophistication for which there seems to be very little call from the times. All the more so do I desire it. Or it may be more correct to say that literature is my passion, in tension with more rational or rationalizing desires. I suffer writing. It is invasive. It makes me. Maybe I desire fame or riches or a wide readership; writing doesn’t care. As with Spider-Man, whose powers will never make him rich. “Action is his reward.”
I relish this solitude. The computer has given me back something it took from me the day I first hooked it up to a modem. Something it will very likely not give again.
“What is the language using us for?”
Its music, like a film score, may be damaging in the long run. It activates feelings of power and solemnity and significance that may not actually manifest in the writing. But if I try to be funny? If I want to look at small things?
Do I already know whom I might become, in writing, through writing? Are my subjects all mapped for me? Do I worry too much?
The openness of poetry, the solidity of prose. Diegesis and mimesis. Fabula and syuzhet.
Only one of these things is an illusion.
[I discovered this text in an old folder that dates back to 2014; it seems as (un)timely now as it did then.]
