Skinny Dipping

[18.x.25.c : samedi / 22 September] … if only to get started, so as not to delay … not to forget. I thought I was done writing for today, having spent the morning writing in/on my Film Diaries and feeling that I’d probably written all that I could write in one sitting. Now after pausing for breakfast and another cup of coffee … I’m reading Moyra Davey’s Index Cards. I bought the book back in June (on Bloomsday) because of its title. (I’m sure I’ve written about this already : about how Moyra Davey wrote the introduction for a book (Suzanne and Louise) by Hervé Guibert I bought and how Index Cards and a new book by Ian Penman, Erik Satie Three Piece Suite, both reference Prisoner of Love by Jean Genet. I bought all four books on the same day and only afterwards did I start seeing the connections … spooky ?? / Now, in Index Cards Davey writes in a section called AMPERSAND that she uses the & symbol because of Virgina Woolf “who made regular use of it” — I too adopted the ampersandean convention, practicing writing the symbol until I could quickly form an ampersand with pleasing proportions // a line from V.W.’s diary for “today” : “How my handwriting goes down hill!” … quite the opposite for me, especially now since I’m learning japanese and so am learning how to write hiragana & kanji symbols which require some care to get right.

Davey’s mention of V.W. and her &s leads to V.W.’s habit of “reading with pen & notebook” … this is the only kind of reading for me. I’m never reading without my pen & notebook. Davey links this to flânerie and Walter Benjamin & his Arcades Project … okay, fine. Davey: “Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project was a superlative flânerie, a long, digressive list of notes and citations. It was a surrealist-inspired collection…” Davey concludes her ampersandorial meditation with this:

“Benjamin and Virginia Woolf were contemporaries. They committed suicide within six months of each other in 1940-41, at the height of personal hopelessness and Nazi terror.”

When I began studying Japanese … I resumed my reading of Barthes: Empire of Signs & The Preparation of the Novel (a collection of lecture notes which I read over and over again, never tiring of reading them, a scriptural mode). Davey’s curates this quotation from Preparations:

“When a certain amount of time’s gone by without any note-taking, without my having taken out my notebook, I notice a certain feeling of frustration and aridity. And so each time I get back to note-taking (notatio) it’s like a drug, a refuge, a security. I’d say that the activity of notatio is like a mothering. I return to notatio as to a mother who protects me. Note-taking gives me a form of security.”

As I was transcribing that quote, I thought about how for twenty years I’ve gone around with a pen and what I call a “field” notebook in my pocket. The intention is there. I want to be the sort of person who takes notes, who surrenders to notatio (comme un lolo), but … do I notate? Yes, when I’m sitting and reading. And I also thought about William Carlos Williams and the stories of how he would take notes on the run, pulling his car to the side of the road on the way ,, making a house call, so that he could jot down a few lines that came to him.

[22.xi.25.b] Do … do I ever write what I want to? always? the practice of delay, avoidance ,, of taking the long road … there are things I set out to say in my writing, but often only as a negative imprint, the shape of a whole / V.W. knew that she was the only woman in England free to write what she likes … Gertrude Stein said something along those lines : know what you like and write it! 

the watery blue sunset / an ill tempered morose day
     repentance vanished in the clouds
gold over the downs / leaving on the top
     a soft gold fringe