“so my diary will be defrauded, stifled by too much life. The unrecorded clogs my pen”
§80 [26.vii.24.a : vendredi] On page 91 of Masha Tupitsyn’s Time Tells, note 35 : “bell hooks has often stated that the aim of art should be to document what could be, not simply what is. To explore the possible versus the actual. This is not to be confused with fantasy.” Since I live in a private universe completely disconnected from the Real World, I didn’t know what Masha Tupitsyn meant by “bell hooks” (lower case), was it a misprint? [I only recently heard the name “Taylor Swift” and assumed that it was Jonathan’s brother or son.] The Duck tells me that “bell hooks” was an artist named Gloria Jean Watkins (1952-2021). What she said was “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.” I like Tupitsyn’s shift in emphasis: to explore the possible versus the actual.
The diary … I’m not sure this is a problem, but there’s no way to capture everything, not everything can be written about, so much has to be let go, and it’s not always clear what one is going to hold on to and what one will let slip away, it’s not always the important stuff that we keep, it’s a lot of junk too.
Like V.W. I’ve been spending a lot of time away from my diary, this diary — Skinny Dipping. I’m falling behind … the unwritten clogs my pen. Yes, Virginia, there is an unwritten clause.
Who am I writing my diary for? For me? For my future Old Man self who will pass his days quietly sitting in the garden on summer afternoons or in front of the fire on winter evenings, paging through his diary, reliving life’s greatest hits? I think I’d rather read my antinovels, Invisible Enemy, Fragile Machines, Escape Master Plan D, etc. Those are wild books that break the rules, all of them, they are asyntactical, agrammatical … they are packages for delivering explosive incendiary devices. My diary is tame in comparison. Given a choice … and limited time … follow the yellow brick road.
Still, I do go back and read my old diaries. For years I’ve been ignoring a diary I wrote in 2011: my “Rohmer Diary”. Discovering Masha Tupitsyn’s book in Spoonbill in Williamsburg a couple of weekends back reminded me that I once loved film, that I was once a moviegoer, that movies were an occasion for me to think and to write, that movies offered another mode of reading that the printed page didn’t offer, a direct light on reality. When I’m watching a film, I am watching a real person move in the real world. The actor and the set may point to a constructed fiction, but I am not imagining what I see on the screen, I may be imagining along with, but the actor is not my fantasy, they too are actual even if the context, the aim is to present the possible : it is the possible made actual.
Éric Rohmer wrote in La Nouvelle Revue française (March 1971): “What I say, I do not say with words. I do not say it with images either … I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak. That is all I know how to do, but that is my true subject. The rest, I agree, is literature.”