[26.xi.25.b : mercredi] this is an act of faith : an argument here :: I propose that Ann Quin’s notions & it’s even been suggested by the background of her life, she had not always used a method of reiteration … a particularly prominent podcaster looked to her for inspiration : this is significant since it shifts focus away from what might be a joke … un blague / blog … with what enjoyment I learned that the Cosmos are back! but alas they will be playing their matches in Paterson … the Paterson of William Carlos Williams (and many, many others) … that story in Larry Goodell’s book about how Ann Quin met Alan Ginsberg in Paterson and went to see Pelé and the New York Cosmos … but this is impossible — still she has to ask ,, from what madness is : what if the music I will listen to afterwards is our present music?? what if this music has always been there if needed? What if “my” Cosmos will play on those eternal, poetic, and luminous fields in Paterson? She hasn’t asked. But when she does ask what madness does to language : the crystalline chromatic measures are what taught me to write. I have yet to imitate how this is caught up with converging and diverging … her (Quin’s) is an infinite series (I have no style), but she has questions about institutionalization: Actually have finished a whole draft of the book, but to the cost of a crazy kind of breakdown — I was working about ten/twelve hours a day on it for a week, then felt depressed after reading thru the manuscript; and just kind of felt it meaningless and everything else likewise, until I found I couldn’t even talk properly, a kind of stutter developed. Yeah, that tracks… #NN25

H/s

at least it’s something : our faces ,, early Sunday morning, Wayne drives through a little town and sees a church, parks El Greengo & goes, come unto me all ye who are heavy laden, the priest’s homily provoked … poems. “The most difficult thing to learn, how to bear that you look at the world, the flesh, the devil — it’s like watching TV, you look, but world isn’t looking … won’t look back at you, and most people drive themselves crazy doing whatever they can to get the world to look at them … a game, trap … but God is different,” says the priest, “God isn’t doing an entertaining dance … no hyper striptease for God … , if you slow down, if you sit quietly & pay attention, you see God and you’ll know she is looking back at you … so who will you put your trust in?” / if he had to pick a day, any day on which the seed of the fourth testament was planted, it would be that day

Something Camilla said to him (as if projecting): together we’ll sit by the fire, learn to better enjoy those evenings spent quietly together with an open book propped open on our lap believing that our lives have finally become the dreams of our world to come … the image of her, Camilla, standing in the mist gazing across the beaver pond & he thinking that life under the veil of mist has always been a dream or the coming of a dream … how long ago? two years? almost. The cool mist, the wet branches … if you write poems, the image of an endless river forms in the tapestry of unauthorized sources.

Now (it seemed to Wayne in that moment, perhaps a surge of megalomania) the priest addressed him directly (as if he could see into my soul, a cliché he’d invoke when describing the scene to Camilla … many years … ) … the priest addressed me directly as if my body where encased in a block of ice to be cut form a glacier … I would sleep inside that block of ice until a team of mountaineers discover my frozen body in the year 4001 & the first words I will utter will be: “Humanity may temporarily rise above gravity and into space but we will fall … a time will come when airplanes will crash, tall buildings collapse, and the world’s sleepers will lie in vast underground bunkers as a last refuge.”

The synthesizing chords have become a beacon for me, guiding me to these precisely strange overloaded formulas producing the full-toned icon (if you will) galvanizing within me the many imperfections and tragedies of a human life. The cliché of the writing, I argue, comes from the square and heavy tempos of Descartes. Rather, I cling to, engender a sense of hope that writing can enable an act of madness that leads us to sad melodies. I should always search out an alternative.

When the service had concluded and Wayne had partaken of the eucharist, the priest called him over, asking if he could have a word. “This may not make any sense, but I was told that you must save the archive.” Wayne regarded the priest. “Don’t rely on systems,” the priest added. Then said, “I’m sorry if that sounds crazy to you.” “No, no,” said Wayne. “I get it. That’s perfect. When I was listening to your homily, I saw that I must light a fire or dance wildly honking a kazoo flinging sand into the air … no longer, I will play the role of a lingerer, a waiter in the wings — such laziness will never fly like the raven who is sent forth in search of dry land.”

[27.xi.25.a : jeudi] That we are all here is miraculous ,, wondrous : our bodily existence always necessarily includes direct attenuating vibrations, vivid beats … routes [poetic] to : writing as deviation, perversion, narrative expression : because our presence here in this time & place is not meaningless nor absurd — though the rulers / infectoid aliens have done their best to destroy meaning & render daily life absurd : we’re here! enjoy it! : alternating with Frauenhofer lines of coconspirators … why are we everlastingly warned of unashamed delight?

All right so why are you confused? #NN25

the novel as a commodity reenforces capitalist realism [Fisher] the experimental novel ,, the antinovel changes … or provides the necessary conditions for a transformation in the reader … the reader’s way of life & thinking [a way of see through the Reality Show] rather than capitulating / confirming capitalist tropes / Subimal Misra :: “In order to survive in the capitalist system, artists, and litterateurs have to be amicable sometimes and sometimes the need to wrestle … she stands on the left, the left of everyone … I do not want my writing to be converted into capital, or be capable of being digested by the intestines of middle-class babus. I want to make my writing into a weapon against the repression-based civilization.” ………….. ++++ (20 June 1943 – 8 February 2023) was an Indian Bengali novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He was known as a maverick and audacious experimentalist in contemporary Bengali literature ..:::/—

Who is Subimal Misra?

,,,,,, came to be known to readers through his early writing, which bore a distinct style or quality. But he believed in continuously moving on, casting away anything that was not novel, and so kept evolving over the years and decades, in terms of form, style and content. In his words: “I hate stagnation of thought, ideas and beliefs. There are vast possibilities in front of us, new horizons, new understandings … Man cannot stop, man cannot brood over myths, he has only this option open to him — to move on, or perish.” /// ::— A tribute to the anti-establishment Bengali writer Subimal Misra, who passed away recently ….. )))) In form and content, Misra’s work was unparalleled in how it challenged preconceptions and encouraged a deeper discursive understanding of issues. >>>> ~ <<<< Bengali writer Subimal Misra (1943-2023) was one of these ,,, and The Earth Quakes, a translation (by V Ramaswamy) of 20 of his later stories, written between 1991 and 2010, is a striking showcase of Misra’s prowess as a writer—and his complete disregard for the conventions … —>>> If a rule can… )))) Subimal Misra began writing exclusively for little magazines in the late sixties. His stories soon came to be known as ,’,’’,’,,‘anti-stories’,’,’ ,’,’ ,’,’,’ although he calls them >>>>>> ‘films’ <<<<<< Misra credits Jean-Luc Godard with teaching him language, i.e., cinematic language, where the film is like an argument. By the end of the seventies,,,,,, Subimal Misra - anarchist, activist, anti-establishment experimental ‘anti-writer’ – is a contemporary master, and among India’s greatest living authors. This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale is a novella about a tea-estate worker turned Naxalite named Ramayan Chamar, who gets… Bengali author Subimal Misra, 80, breathed his last at 4:50 AM on Wednesday. Lauded as the “anti-establishment” Bengali writer, Misra, born in 1943, went on to be influenced by the cinematic works … → The Film Diaries /// Subimal Misra is regarded as the anti-establishment voice in the world of Bengali parallel literature. But the 75-year-old literary experimentalist is hardly known even to serious readers in Bengali. When Misra began writing, in the late 60s, he wrote only for little magazines and soon became the uncrowned …………

Don’t confuse aesthetics with politics, but don’t forget politics in pursuit of aesthetics.

Time does not march forward
     it staggers like a drunk

This effect arrises from a proliferation of word pauses : car headlights pearl necklaces a cannon in the spectroscopic analysis ,, a house reduced to rubble by bombs : you have barely lived life yet, you feel :: the forest, we go in remembering long ago that we entered hoping that we’d never come out [According to legend: the deluge which covered the Earth for 180 days began when a solar flare reached out to touch the face of … Iceworld.] at this level rather than providing a broader treatment because “this age” requires us to be terribly explicit … the average ability to read, really read has been stunted by … all our preconceptions are identical.

flowers, teapots, honeyed loons, a red tongue, planets … what grandeur! what has already passed you by, another historical or social discussion of notions :: if I write an account of my dream, I do not intend to interpret, but to explore … if the way is blocked, step across the flow, hold onto the wet branch … do you think your invisibility cloak will save you ,,, from the cold spray against your face ?? of imperishable logic and how pathetic the inevitable victim, the nonspy who has, day after day, asked himself the same question :: THE BIG QUESTION

[57] What’s left for the novel? the antinovel … the cut-up technique developed for film/cinema [cf. Subimal Misra] … already in the 50s & 60s writers were asking what the novel could do … not just ceding certain ground to cinema, but acknowledging that readers need/want different things at different times … sometimes it isn’t a question of what to do, but just a sense … an intuition that the void need not be filled with anything … I’m thinking of Rayner Heppenstall & B.S. Johnson, but already this is old news. almost as if reading anything not on a screen is an act of … not only tremendous will, but sabotage. This is the Film Diary of My Every Day Life … as such not just me, but we all are seduced by the image that we are the main character in the movie of our lives, but haunted by the knowledge that the theater is empty … we play to the audience of none : look at me! look at me!

[58] These are not excuses, just observations: decisions in the moment, based on feelings, how energetic or tired I am, certain ideas bubble up, impulses, some catch (gain traction), other slip by/through . What I want (or so the little voice says) is to return to a time ,, an image of the past, for example, three years ago when I was reading Solenoid and The Luminous Novel with my feet stretched out toward the fireplace/stove, those long autumn evenings giving way to even longer winter nights with two fat books, first one, then the other and not distracted by doubts or unwelcome waves of malaise, knowing that I was on to something, following a clue … thread.

[Z/a] THE BIG QUESTION … where did it all go? It = life … his life, the what has he done with it = time time time after time … what is time after time? what if there is no time after time? Not that he was old, he wasn’t old, no way was he old … not yet, he’d barely even started : still he had something to show for it [the effort … yes, a great deal of effort & patience], the archive, yes … yes! … the archive, the blessed archive. He wasn’t alone in the world, none of us are ever alone … he wrote this in his notebook. He had lots of notebooks which contained fragments such as this : if poetry is the fullest use of language & language is an evolved biological function, part of what it is to be human, then all humans share the same fundamental linguistic preconceptions @ a poetic level — it’s when grammar is imposed that preconceptions start to diverge along cultural (control) lines. What good did that do him? He resisted the notion that it was a problem to be worked out : death, presented as a fact. Death as sure a fact as … not even birth, since there is nothing inevitable about birth, but once you are born, you will die. At least that’s what they say. Here’s something else he’d worked out in another notebook some years ago:

Given that the universe is a quantum mechanical state, the universe as a whole may be represented by a wave function. In order for the universe to be real, the universal wavefunction must collapse and in order to collapse, the universe requires an observer, let’s call this person the Designated Observer :: And ,,, who is the designated observer? (Plausible and possibly incomplete answer: any sufficiently complicated macroscopic system capable of sensory data acquisition and language processing : necessary for recursion.) Accepting that quantum theory applies to observers, the issue of what happens to them if they are themselves observed by another (super)observer becomes important. The superobserver necessary to sustain the totality of reality is the Designated Observer … and so forth / by definition (thus) if you are the Designated Observer in this universe, then you will not die. The trick to immortality isn’t a combination of vitamins and exercise, all you have to do is to ensure that you are this universe’s Designated Observer. Wayne wasn’t so sure that he wanted the job … he certainly hadn’t filled out any applications : unless that was done right before drinking from the Lethe //// The fact that his body had continued to grow old was reassuring … or troubling since if he was the DO / D-Zero ?? / then relentless bodily decay … would he retrain consciousness if he was transformed into a jar of ash / sand? … the notion of inhabiting an hour glass ,,, for all time …

The crap that he had to do to the pay the bills (!) … okay, that wasn’t the only problem, there were the dishes, bodily hygiene, sleep which he didn’t mind so much : perchance to dream and all that, but by the end of the day, he just didn’t have it in him to do anything other than read … watching TV that eater of time had lost its appeal years ago. Slipping away, yes, that was it. He had to stop himself from feeling that time was slipping away, but how? It was hanging onto stuff that accelerated the perceived flow of time, if only he could let go of all his stuff … Wayne remembered the story of the rich young man who asked Fred how to enter the Aeon of Omega : get rid of all your crap, Fred has said. But I’ve got a lot of crap, said the rich young man, and I like my crap, it makes me feel safe and powerful. Suit yourself, said Fred, but I thought you wanted to enter the Aeon of Omega. Yeah, said the rich young man, I want it all … you know, the cake and eating it.

Wayne wasn’t a rich young man. He’d never been rich. Once he was a young man, but he’d wasted his youth … and the BIG SIX OH was looming, not that he was bothered by numbers. It’s not how old you are. And it wasn’t even the idea of death or knowing that he would die one day that bothered him (though he would still feel a moment of vertigo when he imaginatively transported himself to that last moment … it hardly seemed possible) and it was coming fast!! (like the ground, for that poor whale) What bothered him was that maybe he’d missed something really important, like someone had left a message : hey, this is really important! don’t forget to … before you die! But what was it that he should do? How to fill in the blank? time keeps on slippin’ slippin’ slippin’ away … a monstrous bewitchment! What bothered him really was the idea that maybe it was all a hoax: death that is. Death is just a kind of practical joke played on the unprepared, those who didn’t know any better or who hadn’t figured IT out where IT = ??? like how to fall without hitting the ground: people do it all the time when they are on an orbiter in orbit around … the center. What’s at the center? It might be true, Wayne thought, it might be true that at the moment of death, the Angel of Fill In The Blank would appear and grant him three wishes. Maybe you didn’t have to do anything. We’re all falling. And if you’re falling, the most important skill you can acquire is learning how to fly … or simply how not to die.

[28.xi.25.a : vendredi] of madness in Ann Quin’s era I track like the capricious music of the ancients ,, never paid any attention to nor attended closely to the formal cryptography governed by nothing /// the wild fantasies of pragmatists don’t appreciate the mechanisms of language. For them, it’s the act of buying that matters and to know which side the cornbread becomes … why say that Joyce’s creative wordplay is destructive? what good can come of that? Finnegans Wake is not a destruction of language, but a tutorial in language construction. Joyce is not showing us the END, he’s showing us how to break the shackles that have been clapped on language by the Thought Police :: he’s made it possible for us to enter into THE UNMAPPED COUNTRY, and in particular he reassures us not what is bought by turning butter into what began as a quiet effect of the layers and echoes of its home … into a form of dump ,, investigation has blown into full scale influence and intertexts, placing into a different light what might be called a sample of a still unresolved controversy. He shrugged and said (lightheartedly): Zeus gives us good & bad in unequal measure at different times. #NN25

I will not entertain you with a story of happy returns :: warning to the foot-on-the-ground reader :: THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR YOU. / Analysis of Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith (1936), the first of three novels by the English writer who became better known as a poet. … Stevie Smith was a British poet who expressed an original and visionary personality in her work, combining a lively wit with penetrating honesty and an absence of sentiment. For most of her life Smith lived with an aunt in the same house in Palmers Green, a northern London suburb. After attending …. was well aware of world politics & had serious things to say, especially about German fascism … Smith’s political insight in this novel is far in advance of the great majority or writers of the time. /// Pompey Casmilus, Stevie Smith’s loquacious alter ego, works as a secretary and writes down on yellow office paper this wickedly amusing novel. “Dear Reader,” she addresses us politely in the whirlwind of her opinions on death, sex, anti-Semitism, art, Greek tragedy, friendship, marriage, Nazism, gossip, and <<<<<<<<….>>>> Stevie Smith is a magnificent wild card in the deck of this century’s great writers—beyond category and past calculation … a true joker as Annie Dillard has said, “She is a wonder.” A great poet and novelist (Novel on Yellow Paper), Stevie Smith also wrote delightful short prose. And here, in A Very Pleasant Evening with… \\ .::— ::Author Background:: Stevie was born Florence Margaret Smith (1902-1971). Her father abandoned his wife and two daughters. Her mother turned to her sister, Smith’s Aunt Maggie, for financial and emotional support. Smith lived her entire life in the home that her aunt Maggie provided in Palmer’s Green, /./<</../>>>

Everything I’ve written has been put down for the benefit of some potential reader. This is why I am unable to be honest with myself in writing. What does it matter what I think of myself as long as my “Dear Reader” is standing in the center of the locked room between two soldiers with bayonets affixed to their rifles? What is my “Dear Reader”’s plan of action? / escape plan? anyone? anyone?

to Virginia Woolf together with an archive fit to be curated … a silent family questions how to respond to their fiction … in theory this approach becomes a defensive fort, a living artwork presented to you as a conk-headed … Now show us to bed, lull us into deep sweet sleep … fair elvenland! I came in search of news about my father :: // Rueben Sandwich never worried. He was well aware of more plausible excuses played on a single string, immense & floating on chittering waters, flittering bats passing beyond the void of his injurious past. He had a cruel father … that’s Mr Sandwich to you! … a doting father … has a desert rock whose marine structure suggests compatibility with the transforming expulsion of what might be taken by fanatical junkies as depopulation zones floating among icebergs ,, Sandwich … an indifferential mother rather than to inlay the irreversibility of slapping hands at the dinner table when Rueben announced his desire to become a bearded lighthouse keeper. Silhouettes on dunes always swelling. Current popular interest happened too quickly, Rueben was an only child, first child, the youngest and the middle child otherwise to be HOARDED inside and center with these characteristics: Rueben Sandwich grew up in poverty, wealth, the 19th century. His father called him Turkey. His grandfather, Ham.

I’ve always run too far. I am not absent minded between the circulatory creases, especially when it … as the Earth turns … is getting dark around the fiction/nonfiction boundary—think for consequent spoils only a few parallels in mind that researchers have been working into examples … to the grim underworld these parties do conduct !! on this gray morning the great Trismegistus plucks threads of the day before … wait & see all of the something funny in The Möbius Book (for authors writing nonfiction on a variety of complex experiments) has brought with it. I am neither a success nor a failure ::

Do my restless fingers astonish you? Even Balaam’s ass beheld an angel saddened by autumn leaves. How do stories come to be companion pieces to their work designed to detect desperate witchcraft or darker devilry … be wary and watchful while on our long walks together in the moonlight. Shall I whistle in your ear? Moan with my eyes closed? The operative word, Nurse Blunt, you have already suspected that a great white flower snaps shut in daylight sleeping. The magnetic pole & the watery conditions of icebergs floating in a featherweight winter meadow as a cold stone brooding about the world ending tomorrow. East is Wild West is East is all the same now : the world is a mountain home on the range.

[29.xi.25.b : samedi] The Gardian of Orthodoxy says, “Physicists do not write poems in the secret language of Dogon.” Nabokov wrote introductions to his imaginative efforts in stuffy motels. If you write poems, oh physicist !! employ an experiment with novels in late editions filled with nightmares and brutally gentle self-portraiture, try to find your own extensive introductions on your own wheelingly borrowed time or that of impassioned ladies and other critics. Discover a way out of the box that contains many novels for the New York edition: these areas have giant fans rotating notes, sketches, and studies undertaken to produce a double reading. The author displays on racks poem-snippets in fog machines in the course of creation. My earlier novel, Into the Labyrinth, is not simply located in the introductions of my other works, but in sugar buns dropped from airplanes functioning as a kind of portable toy produced by the novel itself and spewed upwards from strange machines that allowed me to playfully assemble introductions together into a codex on magic, a kind of grimoire to guide space pirates on their celestial reruns. But I don’t think I can use a can of beans as an E-meter to detect the conceptual (and aleatory) production of parallels that are close enough to be unhealthy habit patterns. During these various peregrinations materials can be arranged into purely helpful but invisible pages. Nabokov’s oedipal period can also pick up his as yet unexhibited novel. Still some of these introductions are cited by subtle emanations from a tomato, causing German-language reviewers, whose precedents come from their accompanying leaflets, to ascend to those loft heights shrouded in fog and mist. At least one English-language reviewer came from another direction and joined The Campaign for Real Fiction and insisted that this work be protected from seizure by the right of poets capable is seeing the mountain range for what it is. #NN25

She is my love & always has been taking the first step. Yes! that is why she’s so unexciting, so quiet, her hair so thick, I was frozen, stuck turning the crank … she a real green girl. Miss Freddy, my darling I will follow, follow, follow & persist in trying to predict the future to tuck everything in this little novelette of mine, Ima gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine … indeed I cannot forget to remember to follow by faith and perseverance to make her brown eyes turn blue in the final act. I regretted behaving so obnoxiously at my own party, making clever puns a figment of the mind poetical, putting on useless displays of erudition as if sunk in a submarine from which I will escape with the greatest of vowels, I will have made a good escape when I have learned to breathe under like a fish.

[30.xi.25.a : dimanche] Having said / written that mon journal intime is optional, I continue writing The Campaign for Real Fiction today ,, this substitute compares to the freedom of worship used to diagnose reading and shouldn’t be taken as the substitute [for] itself. What happened to the treatment of infectious disease or the last word in interpretation? Dada? a Lunar window blurred out of season while microbe hunters treat the sentimental spirit of artists who cannot keep their wits altogether when they talk. Because artists don’t always have to glitter & englobe people with a champagne spray mist … above the sea, overlooking the laconic lovers with falsetto voices grasping a thorough understanding of their work. There is no substance in town that is quite like a relativistic body rolling on a creaking bed: qualified to perform shirt open gospel and because it’s mistaken for a flat-headed artist who becomes a fish without fins. Glam rock began on a journey in an attempt to legislate meaning in transitional substances. We embark in a white-scaled atomic submarine, we view mermaids bound in corridors … your work, the first of these claims, is to summon up a solitary tear. The dimensions of your room are rarely touched by sea serpents, crocodiles, hippopotami — a statement which is trivially true, and the second is trivially false under the black sun. The player at the blaring electric piano uses hair-restorer and curled webbed falsies. Any artist who has given up a toe to be strung between heart and clock knowns the truth of Oklahoma dream shapes formed out of celebrity interviews … I mean, it would run so thin … or make statements that nibble in the half light and laughter of the desert, aware of the divisions of time. #NN25

[1.xii.25.a : lundi] A black hole accretion disk is a swirling business. The phenomenon Dada uttered a mass of gas & dust that orbits from behind a veil … she made a virtue of inwardness, of being inside a whale. For beginning a black hole, the gravitational pull of his evident interest in that book, it must have been a relief for the writer to be all confusedly heaped in fiction. The black hole causes the material to be liberated in the name of aesthetic inward spirals. He wanted to talk to someone about a disk, eventually falling into the principle derived from the rigors of classical form. Into the black hole itself she wanted to feel the immediate vicinity while documenting argument and composition … to be Adam ,, she had been rejected coldly … descriptions of his connection to the Cthulhu Club encouraged the recording of Oklahoma dreams as though subterraneanly interested in his autofictional crimes. Is the American work of art bought cheap off strange ascetic intellectuals and not in the writer’s new book? The four spent paperbacks on the rack were admired for their perfect, big parabolic bums. Paranoiac sailors spend the day together in a true-crime novel. Their ringleader is called Jake the Pirate. Six months after a dark star : railroad ghost stories and terminating novels are my virtues. Should I add a description of her struggles with hypothetical celestial objects that could have been drowned under years of talks with the writer whose latest novel existed in the early universe? Wandering and a desire to leap into the novel powered by dark matter rather than constantly flying forward to surrender to fall together … The writer (of this chapter) aims to reinterpret nuclear fusion as a forgotten plunge into the dark star. On the nautical calculation of true crime : the first novel genre is a major (set) comeback, not just in volume of pages, but in twisty passages. #NN25

[2.xii.25.a : mardi] Smartly attired in her red dress for going out, she was with a few of her friends at a wine bar in Soho when (perhaps because she’d had more to drink than usual that night) she began to tell this story:

For many years, a poet had labored quietly to perfect his skill. Then one day, knowing that he was ready, that he was finally writing the poems that he wanted to read, he wished to share his poems with the world. Thus he sent his poems to publishing houses whose editors (after only glancing at them and not recognizing the poet’s name) threw the poems away. The poet wrote in his diary …

As soon as I make something I realize that it isn’t good enough. Strategies of failure take their toll. Of course it’s the best I can do & I have bundles of energy for doing things badly in many different ways.

The poet understood the meaning irony, so he gave his poems to his friends & family, but they became embarrassed when they read the poems because they didn’t know what to make of them since they weren’t in the habit of reading poems and so their idea of a poem was something that Robert Frost had written, and these poems were nothing like Robert Frost’s.

Knowing before hand that my effort is sure to disappoint — a mastercourse of imperfection — I suffer no torment, no humiliation. This is the era of my life when I am past my prime. My mediocrity will inevitably increase as my body & mind begin to fail me.

Aware of his decline and that he didn’t want to live forever even if it turned out he was the Designated Observer, the poet posted his poems on the Internet and for a long time nobody noticed, but one day someone “liked” one of his poems but didn’t say why. Perhaps liking something was a way of getting attention. A few weeks later someone posted on social media that his poems were bad and made no sense and that he should take up gardening instead. But if his gardening was anything like his poems … Another person gave him advice about how to write “proper poems” using the traditional forms, meter, and rhyming patterns.

The lines I will write when I am 80 will be even more unsatisfactory, yet even knowing this, I’m certain I will carry on filling these notebooks with words, words, words. Why do something that no one else in the world wants? Because when I get to the end, when I have filled in the final page of this notebook with “my” words, I will feel for a fleeting moment, the slightest glimmer of satisfaction that comes from holding in my own hands the material proof that at the very least I did not give up. I did not abandon my chosen calling. My vocation is atonement.

She paused for a moment in her telling of the story about the poet and his intimate musings. Her friends at the wine bar in Soho had stopped smiling and were looking at her with eyes that implored her stop, to shut up, to let this poet’s story go. But she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t let go, not now. So for courage she took the final sip from her glass of red wine and concluded the poet’s story thus:

At last the poet’s poems found their way to certain readers who got what he was doing … they understood, or if it wasn’t understanding necessarily, they had the capacity to feel something and so asked for more of his poems. And for a while he did what they asked of him ,, what was expected, wrote more poems, but the more he wrote, the more ideas came him, he discovered new avenues, new approaches, processes that he wanted to test to see what the results would be, and so his poems transformed from what they were into something else until “his readers” said, why can’t you keep writing poems like you used to? By this time, the poet had become an old man and as old men tend to do, he spent more and more of his time thinking about his childhood.

I’m like the schoolboy, he wrote in his intimate diary, whose punishment is to write the same sentence 100, 1000, 10,000 times as expiation for some heinous & egregious misdemeanor. At least I write with no illusions. I know what I am worth and what these words will produce in any reader who by some improbable agency happens to read them. I know with utter conviction that as bad as what I write is it is far better than what the very best writers of this age could write. Even though these poems are inferior by my standards.

When she’d finished telling her story of the poet, her friends asked her, What are you trying to say though? Were the poems any good? If the editors at the publishing houses didn’t want them, then how could they be any good? If readers didn’t understand the poet, then that’s his fault. It’s important, especially in these times, to write in a comprehensible way. We don’t need any more nonsense. And the readers who like the poems and wanted more, did they even know what good poems are? Even so, if he’d found an audience, then why didn’t the poet keep writing poems that pleased those readers?

Before answering, she smoothed the fabric of her red dress over her knees. Who can say what a good poem is? she said off-handedly and in a light-hearted, joking tone that made it seem that the question didn’t matter. A reader of talent doesn’t judge a poem because they know what reading really is, they don’t need the poet to write good poems or even poems that are good enough. The poet sings and the reader of talent listens and in the reading completes the poem. All her friends stared at her with blank expressions … a reader of talent? How could they possibly understand that she’d once loved the poet when he was a young man? #NN25

[3.xii.25.a : mercredi] even Adam at once noticed that for a decade she had meditated on the innovations expressed in Danish or Nordic fiction, by expanding commentary [how he loved footnotes] he could definitely invent a new bop childhood in the 1960s. Connecticut was another possibility, Connecticut was like the 60s … les années soixante … : the little church in Stonington, a chapel by the sea … à côté de la mer … The possibilities of a novel … to all of my generation, a way of speaking in tongues. She was middle aged when she moved to L.A. [in love with a teenager] … northern world literature, a thrilling example! My favorite solution was to make due with what (as an author) I could pin down about the narrative: there should be some resistance, to struggle with ,, contra le matériau … and that’s precisely what this was for Adam, a struggle against … with a form of chaos, the random bubbling up of thoughts out of the depths, of course, he had to pick and choose … make them solid, this is why I would take, why it did take centuries : this is how one becomes a Designated Observer. This is precisely what Christ was teaching two thousand years ago … that and the need to escape the tyranny of perpetual government / Empire … alas. #NN25

On certain mornings, it seemed to him … or it certainly felt less likely that he was dreaming in cryosleep, but every once in a while he’d feel that bone-deep chill and it would take so long and thanks for all the … the insta-death feature / choice is very rare and contrasts with the concatenation of humming throughlines … & such a Story should have many : when time doesn’t work in a traditional manner, choose door number two ?? you’re dead! which was why Adam disliked those ban-tams :: choose your own adventure books he’d read as a child … well, disliked that aspect of them … why should you die just because you … ?? [a kind of leveling back down to square one] so he combined trace elements of a lost Amerika, a tragic story with so many derivatives, better to focus on a wide range of distinct days recorded, moments of hope blending poetry and other variables to track choices made within the Zone.

The Zone. Wayne’s introduction to the Zone : he was … let’s say he was seven, a significant number … when he (being a desig/dictated … observer of TV … there were seven channels: the 3 “major” networks bah! + PBS [3+1] which cultivated his early anglophilia, + three UHF channels : 21, 42, & 57 … Channel 42 KOZM was where he…) first discovered The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling … the host aka “the Writer” (and when Wayne realized this fact, that writers create worlds and they are eager to provide guided tours, he too decided to become the host of his own Zone) … was the prototype for the Designated Observer. Once he’d worked out the basic concept of the Zone, he realized that The Twilight Zone was only one instance of a zone. The magical zone, Faerie is also a place into which one crosses to operate under a different set of rules than “the real world” : Narnia, for example, was a precinct of Faerie. Tolkien’s Middle Earth was Faerie too, but one required [blood] time travel to get there, where Narnia like Eden could be accessed simply by stepping sideways, across the border. There was Oz, of course. But now he realized that Oz was also a zone, he would have to rewrite his fictional autobiography … or wait a minute, maybe not. There were (at least) two kinds of zones … or three plus one kinds.

[4.xii.25.a : jeudi] My unearthly childhood [another fictional autobiography I penned during the plague years] ended when I learned to give myself philosophical inquiry with rich cut-and-dried choices that point in … silt … #NN25

Don’t forget:

the point is / break the script :: we can write anything

whether a writer of grand theft autofiction … it was all coming, my torpor … shall I tell you about our melancholy journey through the Zone … Rod Serling who acted as the host, the guide to a world of strange traps, twist endings … the stinger!! … where anything (especially the weird) was not only possible, but probable … this prepared me for … it’s tempting to sit here in the bar / dining room of this inn, it’s the off-season and the inn is closed, but she [J.] has agreed to let me stay here at some negotiated rate and also because I’ve volunteered to do some odd jobs, some fixit tasks … she’s quite capable of course, but I am not yet sixty. This island (FW) is a zone of the first type or kind, all it takes to get here is a ferry ticket, whereas with Oz … necessarily, I’m starting somewhere in the middle, I couldn’t tell when I began or why other than when I was a young(er) man, I desired … time … an image of myself as an Old Man (still in the future, I hope) having written my books / novelizations. That’s all. a simple vision, something to do with a life ,, mostly harmless as it goes.

I spend my days calculating the obvious directions so that I can plot a different course … just different : my plans, my intentions dissolved like dust and became as dry sand sprinkled willy-nilly (not that I’m forcing myself to write this way … in daily installments) … imagine the music I must hear when my bladder is leaking while I’m standing in line at [the indignities of aging, a man humbled by his enfeebled prostate] … the grocery store on the island is small, actually one of those old-style general stores that serve the small number of people who remain on the island year ‘round … the troubles (inconvenience) of … life, don’t talk to me about … more subtle course corrections … you could say I’m searching for a forgotten city, so why spend my days walking next to the gray roiling sea? Today, I thought of Berlin & crowded streets, the clouds over Paris, the bridges of Prague … great waters ebb in the passing of seed while I wait nervously for the woman at the cash register … her romantic life or in her overgrown garden : winter is when the soil comes alive, it breathes as it expands and contracts, a novel … if this even turns out to be that … needs winter too, to breathe, to expand and contract, asks us to consider, what is a novel? … at the inn on FW I will spend my days digging here and there, smoothing patches of sod, today the sky is black.

[5.xii.25.a : vendredi] choices that could turn out , well , a surprising working-class saga … what is a single person’s responsibility? Each choice has a real consequence for spending the day together … & spending the day together is arguably humanity’s preservation [of the humanities] and real reward far beyond issues of what’s most conceptually ambitious in this world … the first season ,, a seven episode series … about death & survival, suffering & happiness, white & black #NN25

I’ve divided the materials into two … let’s call them : The White Novel and The Black Novel. forcing myself to make distinctions ,, subject matters? or perhaps the difference between White & Black is not one of content, but of presentation , pure coincidence. Before coming to the Island … FW dew run run run ah dew run run through it past (a river dream) … before FW the trouble with the Story is that it is written as a diary, a description of desire, a dream of the Promised Land written by a naked hermit dwelling in a desert cave : what concerned me, not such much as a problem of autobiography, but principally one of real fiction was the analysis of the laws of dissolution of the relationship between Adam & Melanie … Melinda Magdalene Martha → /// Martha Quest is a fictional protagonist … for her, this is a time of solitary reading daydreams, dancing naked — and the first disturbing encounters with sex … the second novel of British Nobel Prize in Literature-winner Doris Lessing, a true daughter of her century – the quarreling century in which the conflict between the generations reflects the conflict between old systems and new, between ascendant and ascending nations and races, and the first of the five-volume fictional autobiographical Children of Violence series, which traces Martha Quest’s life … the story of a rebel. When we first meet her, she is a girl of fifteen living on an impoverished African farm with her parents; a girl of passionate vitality, avid for experience and for self-knowledge, bitterly resentful of the conventional narrowness of her home life. … to middle age … her dedication to book lovers provides a salon where together we discover and share commentary about books and authors we enjoy. Read searching author interviews, exciting book reviews and lively book commentary :!! All books welcome! and that even includes books from bestselling, midlist and debut authors :!!! … What we learn is that he first novel is called Martha Quest. The other volumes in The Children of Violence are A Proper Marriage, A Ripple from the Storm, Landlocked, and The Four-Gated City. Martha Quest (the debut novel !!) is set in the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in southern Africa, where Lessing lived from 1925 until 1949 when … /// the names I thought I selected at random ,, evidently there is some invisible hand maiden who guides my productivity, it wasn’t until I’d read Lessing’s The Golden Notebook in middle age … the first time I read it, I read it badly when I was in my early twenties and only then on my father’s recommendation & that the plan of the book suggested a way for me to go about my own feats of interminable literary … great balls of … combustion using the multiple notebook system. What I only learned or realized later in life after decades of reading Lessing was that in The Children of Violence series, the women have names that begin with M and the men have names that begin with A … Melanie & Adam. What’s spookier still is that when I sent “Adam” through a hyperdimensional portal into a Zone (mwuh ha ha!! ,, a diabolic alla la faff), his doppelgänger, his alternate parallel world self is named Wes and Melanie has been transformed into Amelia. What we see (if you have eyes, dot them) in The Golden Notebook is that the principal character is named Anna … an A-name. It’s very nearly gender shifting. And you’ll note that a W is just an upside down M. One more curiosity, in Adam’s Story, after throwing off Melanie and the others of the M-Club from his mortal coil boil in oil, he settles in with a series of Es … Emily, Elaine, Eileen, Esther ,, Edweena !! just kidding … in The Golden Notebook when Anna writes her fictional autobiography, her double is Ella, two elles.

The [museum] novel of Adam’s Story can be written in other ways … so as not to focus exclusively on the failed love relationship with Melanie, I could introduce a entire garden of flowers: Nena, Polly, Gina … and Melinda (of course) who was a founding member of the Unicorn Club … and a huntress of Bawg … a black page, a white page … the sorting process continues. The trick … not that there is a trick, I’m struggling with angels [black] and monsters [white]. From chaos [je regarde la terre, et voici le tohu-bohu] emerges order, that’s just how it works. Things fall into a pattern. The black and white piles are only two of many. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle, but instead of beginning with the total image, I’m fashioning each of the pieces, one at a time, and then deciding where to place them. The operation is much like tiling a mosaic, a process which makes a virtue from fragmentation.

Supposing I were to write it like this: …

Tristram Shandy is a likely exhibit in the museum : a novel of digressions. How I began … writing about what happened in Rome was pure nostalgia. My high point. Nothing ever happened to me before and the few things that have happened since aren’t worth writing about, so I tell Adam’s Story after Melanie … a story which has no nostalgia in it because it’s a story about the present, about the future, about what the world is or could be. It’s the story of what Adam discovered when he opened the door and stepped through in the Zone.