Monday, June 24, 2002
I've been sitting in my office for an hour now, staring at a blank "page" on the iBook, trying to find the words that begin Chapter Ten. Sometimes the words just won't come. There's only the rattling, thundering noise inside my head, and the images, and it all refuses to resolve into the contrivance of written language. Mere words. At its worst, writing is reductionism, and I have grown to loathe reductionism over the years. The compression of the fabulous and unfathomable into the mundane and comprehensible, for convenience's sake, or the sake of our peace of mind. As one of the characters in Low Red Moon would say, "Six of one, half dozen of another." Of course, then it winds back the other way, and the text may suggest to the reader the barest intimations of the fabulous and unfathomable. But I have a quarrel with this cycle that I can neither win nor turn my back on. It's in my mind, what I want to show you and I can not ever truly get it out and onto paper. I can only reduce and compromise and settle for the third or fourth or fifth best thing to the truth of the source material. This medium is so insufficient to mine or anyone else's imagination.
But right now, I'm just looking for a fucking handful of words. A key. The way in. A line of dialogue or a snatch of description. An arbitrary starting point for the communication of something which is seamless and has no genuine beginning or ending. An acceptable translation of my memories of unhappened events. And it is heavy and at this moment I'd rather be doing almost anything else.
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