Skinny Dipping

[1.x.25 : mercredi / 5 September] During dinner V.W. fainted and was taken home by car, and remained in a delicate state of health for some time to come … I did not faint at dinner & thankfully I’m not in a delicate state of health, but I have (for the last month) been on vacation and so have … have what? what do I have to show for all that “time off”? Well, I’ve started studying Japanese for one …

Interesting how these things go … one sets out … and when I say “one” I’m generalizing from the particular : in some direction, with some clear idea where one is going, and then after eight weeks discovers that instead of Going West, one has Headed East !!

Writing into the void …

Japanese (a kind of falling in love, the possibility of post-midlife adventure → [#7995 : “Somewhere in the ‘middle’ of life”] {i} … ad-venture / ad-venes :: what befalls me … ) has brought me back to Roland Barthes (he’s … I’m never really far away) : to The Preparation of the Novel and (more obviously) to Empire of Signs. In Preparation I was (am) reminded that “part of life’s activity should always be set aside for the Ephemeral: what only happens once and vanishes” that is to say “don’t try to hold on to water … instead of a Paper Monument, build a Paper Boat.”

[4.x.25 : samedi] I have made a very quick & flourishing attack on… my French Leap foundered, but not quite : my 8 weeks that were so stuffed full of French words gave way to sprint through the doors of the Way Back machine to write again the novel I should have written when I was 26. Too late. I can only write the novel that a 56 year old would write. Impossible to undo the product of a second life time. The “very quick & flourishing attack” was on a set of four outlines I drafted in 2019. In 2002 I had started writing a book that (in my imagination) became a quartet. The evolution from a single book to a quartet of books was slow. It wasn’t until 2010 when I read Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet that I became infected with quartetitus. Now my Eden book would have to become a quartet of books. By 2019, I hadn’t completed that quartet of books, so I thought I would be clever and write a detailed outline for each one of them and declare victory. I reasoned that if I wrote the outlines, then I wouldn’t be obliged to actually write the books. I would have the feeling of having written them without having to do the really hard work. That plan worked up to a point and that point was a moment early in September when I came across a reference to these outlines in my diary. Oh! how I began to ache! Why had I never written these books? They deserve to be written! Three weeks later …

I’ve learned a great deal in three weeks. Not just about Japanese, but about how I learn or fail to learn (as the case may be) from my mistakes & omissions. I am still crawling … but if I could once get up the steam again. My first mistake was to take the outlines and (instead of writing the books outlined) try to write new books, to change so much about them as to make them nearly unrecognizable … the desire to redeem the past clashing with the impulse to experience the new. Of course, I had my reasons … I could tell a story about why a tour through Japan was necessary. If I could just get back to Japan, I believe I could spin it off with infinite relish where “it” (in this case) is my dreamed-of Eden Quartet.

I took up the pen meaning to write …

{i} For a week or so, I’ve been thinking about my writing process (my bad habits … writing in a private void) … it’s as if my writing process has had a pebble in its shoe, not a pointy jagged one, but small and smooth : not enough to hurt, but annoying nonetheless and demanding some attention. The problem is that I write and I write and I write and … never do anything with what I write. Pages and pages pile up and a year or two later, I go through these pages and read them and ask, “Why have you never done anything with this writing?” It’s more fun to write … to type than to prepare a book for publication ,, even a short one, like the novelettes I write for my Nova Letters project. So, I’m going to try to post the chapters of the Nova Letters as I write them, hence the “#7995” linked to above … yes, that’s Chapter #7995 … I’ve been writing this unfolding, continuous novel for a long time now. How will you … or I?? ever catch up … ???