Skinny Dipping

§70 [17.i.24.a : mercredi] This entry comes a bit late : V.W. wrote on the 12th and this is the morning of the 17th. The cause of this delay is that I was away from my normal environs, outside of my usual space and routine. I knew before I left for Oregon that I would save this chapter for my return to Long Neck. Again (e.g. last March when I flew to Las Vegas), I decided to leave V.W. at home and catch up on my return. (Does writing such words even matter? If only to get something started…)

What seems to matter more is that due to the logistics of this year’s stay in Oregon (we arrived later in the evening, so I didn’t wake as early on the first morning so…) I didn’t get as much writing done and some mornings got no writing done at all. Not getting in a good writing session or missing writing completely is enough to put me in an edgy, irritable mood all day. I need to write, to put my thoughts in order, to feel as if I’d done something, but—shall I survive the process? The process, I suppose, is the elaborate writing rituals I’ve evolved over the past two decades of focused labor. How much of what I write is necessary? Its odd how unimportant my work seems, suddenly, when a practical matter like this [travel, in my case] blocks my way. I see how it appears to the world, from outside, not all cavernous & lit up as it appears from within. The contrast of outside & inside again : the world doesn’t need my writing, but I need my writing to be in the world (a statement that can be read accurately in at least two senses).

During the whole past week, I was thinking back to last year’s Oregon trip (see §24) and wishing that I could have awakened at 4 a.m. each morning and gotten a good start on another project ( last year, what I began in Oregon led to the first complete, if not finished, draft of a novel called Best Imitation of Myself ) or even brought my current work-in-progress ( Mallworld ) to some fuller form, but I couldn’t recapitulate my previous success. However, I was able to spend a great deal of time thinking about structural and organizational aspects of my work. What is easy is to sit down and just start typing. In a couple of hours I can type whatever comes into my head and feel as if I’ve had a productive morning, but such expenditure of effort only seems to be productive. It’s productive in the sense of causing pages to pile up, but if what I’m aiming for is making a work, then I need to attend to more than just the musical phase (of page production), I need to spend time on the architectonic and textile phases as well, and these latter phases might be the most important.

As of 2020, my list of projects begun (some fraction are completed, if not finished) exceeds 80. It’s possible that with some structuring (architecture) and weaving together (textile) I could produce half a dozen decent books out of that material. It’s possible that I’ve added another dozen titles to my project list since 2020, and the books I’ve written since 2020 are my best, the ones that I feel most confident about, but I would attribute my recent success to a more organized approach. But also, since last summer, I’ve been experimenting with a “slipbox method” (see §41) (similar to how Nabokov wrote his novels on 3 by 5 cards, crystalizing the entire project as a whole rather than starting at chapter 1 and bashing away until THE END in chapter Z : more or less “the method of Aira”) and this experiment has forced me to think more about organization. Also, the slipbox method bears some similarity to Raymond Roussel’s process described in “How I Wrote Some of My Books” : he would begin with the first sentence, then formulate a last (concluding) sentence by punning words and make letter substitutions, once sentence 1 and Z are set, the trick is getting from 1 to Z.