Skinny Dipping

§73 [3.ii.24.a : samedi] I’ve been up since 4 a.m. (it’s just past 8 o’clock now) and I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything yet. I’ve read a few pages of Joseph & His Brothers by Thomas Mann, the Sunday 3 February entry in V.W.’s diary, and some notes I wrote back in the summer of 2020 about “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. My mother calls this activity (the doing of whatever shiny thing catches one’s attention) “puttering”. I guess other people would call this kind of casting about puttering also, it’s not a private or obscure work, but I always think of my mother when I’m busying around without a clear object in mind : “I’m just puttering,” she’d say as she moved about the house doing this (picking up a sock) and that (wiping the counter) with no apparent system or plan. Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been at home most of the time. I don’t have to go anywhere : now that I’m a freelancer and so work from home. Rarely do I see anyone other than Alice (and at certain times of the year, my son when he’s home from college). Being at home so much has led me into increasing the amount of puttering I do. I clean the house constantly, keeping all the surfaces clear and wiped down. I’m constantly tidying up. The kitchen is the focus of a lot of my puttering since it is a site of constant activity (so much of our home life concerns the preparation of food : eating it takes much less time than either prep or K.P.). This tendency to putter in my physical space has probably led to a tendency to putter in my mental space. Now that I’m working more with the Brain (my private wiki where I do the majority of my writing) there’s more opportunity to putter since I can be constantly cleaning up the pages in the Brain, adding links, transcluding quotations, entering bibliographic information for the sources I consult. As the Brain grows it requires more and more attention and organization. I could putter endlessly inside the Brain. In theory, this puttering should lead to something : some finished project. All the note taking, commenting, contextualizing should lead eventually to the crystallization of a project+book. (I hope / that’s the theory.)

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For about a month now, I’ve been spending 15 minutes to an hour each day organizing my library. I’ve taken all the books down from three bookcases and am arranging the novels in alphabetical order by the author’s surname. Not all the novels will be thus arranged since I have special groupings (collections / arrangements) for certain authors : for example I have a shelf for Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Roberto Bolaño. The Vila-Matas shelf brings together books by many of the authors and books that he’s written about in his novels, so there are books by Paul Auster, W.G. Sebald, Witold Gombrowicz, Robert Walser, etc. in that assembly. Sebald’s gravitational field attracts other books: Thomas Brown, Casanova, Chateaubriand, etc. I prefer to cluster authors together in a referential manner rather than alphabetically (making a kind of branching tree of relationships). Then I have other shelf in my study which collect together the books that are part of topical reading projects : Weimar, Occultism, Surrealism, Orpheus, Experimental Writing, etc.

I’ve been wanting to write something about unpacking my library and have written in my head a short book about my library and this activity of arranging while my hands are occupied with the task of shifting and arranging books. (What remains is the labor of actually writing such a book out in physical form.) One evening, I uncovered my collection of books about soccer and immediately I felt a pang of nostalgia for that time in my life when soccer was so important, when I devoted so much time and effort to following the game and even writing a book of my own about soccer (a book I published online as I wrote it, so it may still be out there somewhere). How could I let such a source of joy slip out of my life? I must recover some of that, I thought. Find my way back into soccer somehow. So books, as physical objects, carry the past and time, and when I hold a book in my hands which bears the marks of my past reading, I travel back and I am standing beside my past self, entering into a dialog. My past self says, ah, so this is how I turned out?