Skinny Dipping

[22.xi.25.c : samedi / 24 September] Strange how these things seem to line up on their own, without my having to plan … I made the notes for this entry on 4 octobre without knowing that I would, when it came time to write it … that I would have actually written two pages of a story, as a test again … the story is “Outside the Whale” [& it begins here → “au naturale”] and is one in a cycle with the collective title: The Complete Angler, a cycle I started writing in novembre 2020.

Last month I experimented with serializing … c’est compliqué … when I began this (write.as) publication project in octobre 2023, one aspect or part would be the realization of a serial novel. It’s taken me some time to figure out how to … to invent a process that is both sustainable and adaptable. I’m going to resist explaining (reveal) the process at this very moment coz there are other things I want to say today, but I’m sure I’ll succumb to the temptations of revelation.

What I want to say to do concerns the Project (which began to take shape in 2018 when I was beginning to read Jacques Roubaud’s gfl). Now that I’ve formulated and practiced the process that will produce the serial novel (leadworth) (interspersed within or continuous with Nova Letters) I feel that I’ve begun my true work, no longer am I engaged in preparations for the novel or casting about for a structure that preserves some distinction between the public and the private, I can practice Total Writing here, now, acting now! … okay, fine, but This Space (Skinny Dipping) is parallel to the serial novel (which, now that I think of it, has two threads, a double strand braid : leadworth + manna / The Daily Catch / where I can offer up something to the ephemeral).

How does one record a feeling? The shape of this feeling I want to record is The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein and Miss Macintosh, My Darling by Marguerite Young … and perhaps even the two books by Helen DeWitt I began reading this week: The Last Samurai & Your Name Here ,, we’ll see. These books suggest the possibility of writing, the dance, the performance … here in my little closet, lit by a single electric light, I perform my esoteric practices and operations. The intention is to do something with my archive, the mass of writing that has accumulated over twenty-three years of nearly daily … attempts to find out what is that I like so that I may write it. Holding on to the sense that what I’m doing is important, that it deserves a reader even if (realistically) I know there will not be a reader except for my future self, who (in his old age) will leaf through these wild pages and ask himself, “did I write this?” and, shaking his head, will say “ … no, surely not.”

on a fine gray still day
     Lily doing my bedroom
starlings in the apple tree