I dont know if this is my last chance writing, or …
[19.xii.23.a : mardi] Decisions, decisions… will Virginia take her diary to Rodmell to continue working on it or will she leave it behind? To find out we (her readers) only need to flip the page, but how do such decisions … they take on — in the moment — such a proportion, then we forget about them that same night we dream of something else like navigating a strange underground train system in the Orient or exploring the Italian coastline as a storm rages in the Mediterranean. / Why do I do the things I do? Postlogic is a great tool for explaining the inexplicable of the moment.
Like V.W. did 100 years ago today, I opened my diary and began writing to see what would happen. She says she is stifled by work. Yes, I know that feeling. I resent every minute I spend on paid work that both enables & prevents my ever writing the Magnum Opus. A writer needs food & shelter, but if after twenty years of labor on the Work and he feels as if he’s just betting started, like he can’t pour a pure stream from his tap. But there’s also the risk that if I didn’t have the constraints imposed by the necessity to do paid work that I would take my time & waste it.
For the past two (well three) mornings (here at the writing desk) I’ve been putting my projects in order which consisted (mostly) of reading material from a document I started writing back in the summer when I was just beginning to think of this publication project, The Museum of Transformation(s), and wanted to include the serial novel as part of it. Now that I’m faced with having to select material to put into the “leadworth” (serial novel) thread : decisions, decisions, and because I don’t want to post/publish material that hasn’t been properly worked (rewritten & contextualized), I must reread and make decisions about shape, form, how to better connect different parts of the text to impart a sense that this is a work and not just a collection of stuff I wrote. Such labor could be joyous, and maybe it will become so as I proceed, but I couldn’t help but think : How elliptical this book becomes! .:. instead of writing the story, I veer off and follow some other trajectory, one that is guided by the gravitational or magnetic force of the object (the imagined, unwritten text). Something good came out of this effort of combing through the already written. I discovered something that I hadn’t noticed, some interesting connection in the text itself that I wasn’t aware of, something that my subconscious (perhaps) knew about, but was completely unplanned. When I realized what the connection was, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. My only regret is that for the reader who presumes that an author works out all this stuff ahead of time will think what I discovered was obvious, trite even. I’m the only one who will ever experience that fleeting joy of discovery of something unexpected in the text that I wrote. Perhaps this is a reason to write and to struggle with rewriting and restructuring, to afford small moments of epiphany. And there’s perhaps a reason why I named the file in which I’m writing the serial novel “The Discovered Part”.
One more thing before I have to quit. A line from Elizabeth Sewell’s The Orphic Voice has been haunting me. The line was written in the context of a study of William Wordsworth’s The Recluse, which he never finished. Sewell says that he didn’t need to write The Recluse because he’d already written The Prelude which was everything that he wanted to say in The Recluse. So Wordsworth didn’t fail. Sewell states, “You cannot, after all, write something that you’ve already written?”