§90 “No doubt Proust could say what I mean—”
[7.xii.24.a : samedi] After I wrote the above prose moment yesterday (§89), I grew more & more excited about writing a new version of Best Imitation of Myself which fully explores the implications of the multiplication of self. In fact, a book with such a title should explore the implications of the multiplication of the self.
On my daily walk (another loop and an opportunity to talk with my mother who lives on the other coast, in Oregon) yesterday, I shared this exciting breakthrough with my mother. Of course, I’ve already written Best Imitation of Myself and there’s no reason to write it again. “I won’t throw the old one away,” I said. “But I might have to steal the title.” (Bruce Boswell, the grad student in the future who will assemble, edit, and comment on my papers, is going to have a rough time tracking how many different novels masquerade under the same title. But such complications are what grad students live for … I speak from experience. The scholar delights in disentangling a snarl and my Corpus Magnum is a twisty, tangled mess indeed.) The problem is … if one can really call it a problem … is that I’ve started work on Mallworld again. Working on Mallworld has become part of my year-long loop. Each year, around the first of December, I get the itch to resume working on Mallworld. I shouldn’t abandon working on Mallworld because of a whim, an impulse to write yet another version of Best Imitation of Myself. Earlier this year, in January & February, I worked on a document that was to be the final incarnation of Mallworld. The title itself was telling: This is Mallworld! (no matter what!)
Reading Solvej Balle’s time-loop novel has sent me thinking about loops. I’m also thinking about Jacques Roubaud who died two days ago, on Thursday, the 5th of December … which is (coincidentally) also his birthday. And! the date on which he had the revelatory dream (in 1961) that provided the vision of a novel he intended to write called “The Great Fire of London”. Roubaud failed to write a novel with that title, but he did begin writing at 5 o’clock in the morning on 11 June 1985 a book that would become the first branch of multivolume fiction / novel / essay / memoir / autobiography called the great fire of london which commenced with the announcement that he’d abandoned writing the novel that would have borne that title. Roubaud’s branching novel / essay / memoir / what-have-you … its form, Roubaud’s method and approach, the set of rules he used for its composition, fascinated and inspired me. Just as I had the impulse to write a new version of Best Imitation of Myself yesterday, I had the impulse to write my own branching narrative … and I did! It’s called In the Labyrinth of Forking Paths (appropriately enough). Like Roubaud’s branching novel, mine too had multiple branches, the first two were called Marginalia on Kerouac and Postcards from Weimar. Out of Marginalia on Kerouac another branch emerged, The Floating Life. In writing these branches, I focused on the composition of the main part of the branch from which the future limbs and leaves would emerge. Some of the limbs (interpolations and bifurcations) began growing along with the main branch, but I realized that I would have to loop back to add to these branches. Going back, reading and growing new limbs …
[writing interrupted by my yearly delivery of firewood]
[7.xii.24.b] Each branch of Roubaud’s gfl is organized into three parts: Story, Interpolations, & Bifurcations. The Story is subdivided into chapters. As you read the Story, you will encounter arrows directing you to either numbered Interpolations or Bifurcations. You can think of the Interpolations as longish footnotes or endnotes. You read the Interpolation and then return to the Story or sometimes, the Interpolations are linked. Bifurcations are like chapters of the Story, but which branch off in other narrative directions from the main Story. When I began reading gfl (in Branch One: Destruction Roubaud describes his method & process) I immediately saw how such an approach was ideally suited to my impulsive nature … anytime I felt like branching off ,, digressing in some other direction, I could and the main Story would be there, patiently waiting. In practice though, when I was writing the chapters of the Story, I ended up with very few Interpolations and my Bifurcations were never fully developed. By the time I’d written all the chapters in the Story, there was still work to be done on the other parts. But I was always eager to move on to the next branch and the next Story. I could also go back and add Interpolations & Bifurcations ( I lied to myself ). I imagined looping back through all these “labyrinth books” endlessly adding new forking paths. ( Certainly, I could! ) But (aside from the first book, In the Labyrinth of Forking Paths) I haven’t looped back through to make new Interpolations and Bifurcations. The point of writing this now is not to recapitulate my failure to follow through on my intentions, but to acknowledge that the fundamental idea of the execution of the method required going back and living through the already lived (written) chapters for the purpose of going deeper.
Beginning writing my labyrinth books coincided with my burgeoning interest in writing haiku. (Haiku is a principle preoccupation of Roubaud’s in Branch One: Destruction.) When I set out to write haiku, I would walk around my yard looking at blades of grass, leaves, the shadows of branches, birds, squirrels, the moon, etc. and I would use what I saw as the raw elements of my haiku. This approach worked well for two or three weeks, then I felt like my haiku were getting repetitive. How many haiku could I write about birds and patterns of shadows on rocks? If I was to continue writing haiku, I would either have to range farther afield for my subject matter, or I would have to look closer, more deeply, see things that I hadn’t noticed before. That’s what Tara Selter does in Solvej Balle’s time-loop novel: she notices more and more about the material facts of the eighteenth of November. Yes, I too live in a time loop. Every day I live is an approximate repeat of the one I lived the day before. The challenge is to pay closer attention, to see things today that I didn’t see yesterday: the way three seagulls converge in flight above a leafless tree, diagonal wave lines of froth cutting across the sound, the purple citadel of clouds tinged in pink floating above the treeline, the angle formed between two dog turds that I narrowly avoid stepping on, etc. One could, if one put in the effort, fill a whole book with such observations … Solvej Balle did … and kept it up for seven volumes!