Skinny Dipping

so many distractions … V.W. is concerned about finding a new house, thinks she’s found one and even draws a plan of the rooms in her diary, but nothing comes of it, the dream of the house fades … I don’t want to write about it at the moment. Alice and have our house dreams too, but ours involve staying put ,, our mortgage is all but paid off, just a few more months and then … and then … but the house needs things. The current stress has to do with upgrading the heating and cooling system to something more modern and which will require less maintenance. But such things come with a price tag and it seems that the purpose of every contractor and “service” provider is to liberate as much money from your wallet with as little in return as possible. Where’s the pride in a job well done? The world of my grandfather is gone forever.

I’m halfway through another November novel. I have a working title already: Dream the Endless Road. I’m anxious to get to it : to see what will happen (yesterday’s chapter “The Crisis” was totally unplanned and I discovered it in the writing) and I’ve made some important connections in my research which I’ve spent about an hour before breakfast writing out by hand in my notebooks. My Eureka moment came when I picked up The White Goddess by Robert Graves to p. 173 after reading pp. 807-809 in The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Alphabets! yes. Dick writes about the 22 letter Hebrew alphabet used to write the Torah and then asserts the existence of a 23rd letter that when added to the Hebrew alphabet completely changes the Torah: The 23rd letter is not just added on; the Torah returns to its jumbled matrix state and then reforms anew: differently. A hint of Burroughs’ cut-up procedure there too. The jumbled matrix is the word hoard and the writer/editor extracts the raw material from the womb and shapes it. / The operation of adding letters to an alphabet reminded me of my 1996 March Madness novelette, No More I Love Yous, in which the narrator writes about adding six new letters to the latin/roman alphabet, say ß, ∂, ∑, Ω, ∆, and ø, and then using those letters to invent new words which would then become part of the language in which he writes his books. E.g. a word like Øaceny which would indicate a contemplative way of being leading to a generative active visualization of multiworld overlays. / What led to the Eureka moment was connecting Dick’s project (one in which books can become worlds through the reading of them, the alphabet being the basecode of reality) with Graves’ tree alphabet. In Graves (a thesis explored in depth in Elizabeth Sewell’s The Orphic Voice) the poet serves/worships the goddess and poetry is a mythic system, the poetic images themselves are the alphabet of myth and that this alphabet is linked with trees. I’m moving in a shifting connective space of associations and maybe I don’t need to solidify the thought any further, but what’s essential is that I continue to push in deeper. (Somehow Le Guin’s novel, The Word for World is Forest, should connect with this.)