Skinny Dipping

[6.xii.24.b] Two things we always do when we’re in Rosendale: (1) go up on the Trestle at sunset & (2) pay a visit to Postmark Books. I spent the second & last evening in the cold, drafty house with my nose in On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle. The premise is this: the narrator, Tara Selter, is stuck in a time loop. Every day it’s the eighteenth of November all over again. Yes. Just like the movie Groundhog’s Day, but … well, it’s different somehow. I’m a sucker for time travel stories (being a time travel theorist myself) & I’m a lover of the serial novel :: there are seven volumes of On the Calculation of Volume. That the front cover blurb is by Karl Ove Knausgaard should be no surprise. But book one of Balle’s serial novel is only 160 pages, so not a series of fat books like Knausgaard’s, but still…

The first seventy or eighty pages are devoted to the exploration of the premise, the looping day and its anomalies. Okay, I get it, now what? I found myself thinking. What are you going to do with this time loop, Ms Balle? The close observation of reality, the exploration of what it would be like to live the same day over and over again … but that doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination. Most of us live the same day over and over again, or we do for five days straight, and then get a two day break from the small loop to experience the weekend loop, a larger temporal circumference, but still a loop … then there’s the yearly loop. I don’t really notice the months. My system of loops is dominated by days, weeks, and years. ➜ I §1 [Note: This is a link back to the first chapter of Skinny Dipping which is in the first volume of the print version, hence the roman numeral I.]

Reading is an occasion for contemplation. While reading On the Calculation of Volume, I think about my own loop of daily life and whether it too would be worthy of a literary treatment. I think also about the novel I started writing in 2015 and then forced myself to finish in May of 2023, Best Imitation of Myself. In my novel, first time stops, then time loops … only the loop in my novel is a week-long loop, July 4th to July 11th, 2015. At 3:08 a.m. on the morning of the eleventh of July 2015, time stops. My narrator (who calls himself “D-Zero” for reasons that become clear as the novel progresses) first delights in the wonders of frozen time, then (unwittingly) discovers the trick that gets time going again, only the time that’s going is looped back on itself. D-Zero lives through that week in July again, up until the point that time stops. What to do next? D-Zero is a time travel theorist too, but now he can be a time travel experimentalist, so he does some experiments.

Nothing is ever simple in my novels. I rig up Rube Goldberg machines with words. Some are so convoluted that I’ve never figured out how they actually work. One of the complications in Best Imitation of Myself is that when the loop runs again, D-Zero has a double. Another version of himself goes through the loop for the first time. Now I had to make a decision with how to treat these doubles of D-Zero. Would they multiply and pile up each time they run through the loop? Or is it only D-Zero that’s caught in the loop? I decided for the latter option, but … this morning, now that I’m revisiting my premise, I think, why not? If D-Zero had to deal with D-One, D-Two, D-Three… triggering another trip through the time loop would mean another multiplication of self. Soon there would be dozens, hundreds, thousands of D-#s. What would D-1666 do? Set fire to Barcelona?