Monday, September 22, 2003
Even the web is quite this early in the morning. This might be the earliest I've ever made an entry. I woke at 5:55 a.m., instantly wide awake and nothing in my head but doubts about Murder of Angels and the certainty that I would not be getting back to sleep. So, here I am, making a blogger entry at this ungodly hour, when any self-respecting author and absinthe fiend would be in bed. The world is weird this early. I mean that in the Machen and Dunsany sense of weird, though not quite in the Lovecraft sense. I sat in my office, trying not to wake Spooky, with nothing to do (after reading PZB's livejournal entry about Louisiana politics) but listen to the sounds outside. Nothing much at first. It was raining, but that ended. Silence, and then a truck, and then children laughing and shouting. That was about 6:30. There's just something wrong about hearing the laughter of children at 6:30 in the morning. Eventually, there were birds, and yet everything was still shrouded in that peculiar, almost smothering stillness. From my office I couldn't watch the sun rise, because, shortly after we moved in here, I blocked out the tall, south-facing window with an enormous length of black velvet. But I watched the hallway outside my office door grow lighter by degrees. And that was weird, too.
I know this morning that the 985 words I wrote yesterday, the third beginning of Chapter Ten, are the wrong 985 words. I begin to wonder it there are 985 right words to begin the ending of this novel with. So, today I'll wipe them all away and begin again, anew. I do not believe that third times are a charm, but circumstance has left me little choice but to try again. It seems the more this book steals from me, the more protective of it I become. It is a glorious parasite.
Blake and Milton and Yeats are still right here on my left. I keep hoping they have something very important to tell me, here at the last. Something redemptive. This is a redemptive novel, or it was supposed to be. I fear it may only be damnation in disguise. I shall now add Matthew Arnold to the club, with hope (hope is a four-letter word) that he'll throw the spark the other three refuse to relinguish. Am I not making sense? Don't worry. I'm not supposed to. No one is supposed to "make sense" this early in the morning, especially not me —
For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain . . .
and only then, Ah, love, let us be true, and I know that Arnold said it the other way round, but this morning my reversed sequence seems more true to me. The author who knows not the "darkling plain" has yet to find the truth of this art. At 5:55 a.m., my head swimming with wakeful failure, the darkling plain was very clear to me, stretched out black in all directions, as was my awareness of my place upon it, swept with confused alarms and struggles of flight. Critics may peck at me and readers may display their fickle minds, but in the end, The End, it hardly matters, because Mr. Arnold hit the nail on the head 152 years ago, 113 years before I was even born, and everything since then has only been a bloody string of footnotes.
For the world, which seems/To lie before us like a land of dreams, and suddenly I'm wandering (typo, "wondering," but maybe I was right the first time) if Mr. Arnold was purposefully referencing Mr. Blake: O, what land is the Land of Dreams?/What are its Mountains and what are its Streams? Or, more to the point:
Father, O Father! what do we here
In this Land of unbelief & fear?
The Land of Dreams is better far . . .
And now I circle back to Mr. Arnold (I'm always circling back to Mr. Arnold, or Mr. Yeats, or Mr. Eliot, or Mr. Blake, or Mr. Lewis Carroll — everyone needs at least five saints), the stanza before the one which I quoted above, but I'll leave that for you to consider without my "help." All these dead white men. I suppose a good feminist critic would say that I'm damned, with a pantheon like that. But Charles Fort would have said the same of me, and, though he's not a saint of mine, he's also a dead white man and he is a personal deamon, as well, and I listen when he speaks.
'I weep for you,' the Walrus said:
I deeply sympathize . . .
I think there's proper daylight outside now. Coffee, I suppose. And a hundred things to do before I try again. Try to try again. Try to try to try again. Try to try to try to try again. But that's only try to the fourth power. Pi for this sentence, please. It would go well with the coffee. Ha, ha, ha. No, really. I laughed. It happens.
This is not an entry. It's a goddamn essay and no one's paying me to write it. Disappointment, and poor judgement there, but freedom, too. How many words so far? I'll not keep count for once. Read on or give it up. I've not even gotten to the Amazon.com "review" of The Five of Cups by someone who felt compelled to point out everything I'd already made clear in my preface. Freedom of speech is one thing, and everyman's every opinion and all that, but this, this "review," is just a cry for attention. Moreover, the "reviewer" then proceeds to state that the novel's weaknesses derive not from the myriad of causes which I'd stated in the Preface, but, rather, because I apparently stopped trying halfway through the book. Ah, if he only knew how wrong he is. That was a novel I believed in, with all my rotten soul, from start to finish. That belief may well have been misplaced, but it was there.
Yesterday, at 2:57 EDT, Galileo dropped out of orbit and fell into the storms of Jupiter (and, if there's a Heaven for Isabel) and forever passed from our knowledge. I was busy writing That Which I Must Unwrite Today. The moment would have been better spent thinking of that tiny fleck of us tumbling in flames, plummeting towards endless clouds of methane, ammonia, and water. She might be falling still.
Spooky's up and moving (hence, my coffee). I need to bring this to a close, because, because, because, and I will have to do it abruptly and artlessly. All I have to do is stop typing and all you have to do is stop reading (or is it the other way round?). I'm stopping now. Go away. Shoo!
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