Finding a Form

Read William Gass’s essay “Finding a Form” as my priming text.  The collection it’s in has been glaring at me from the shelf for a couple of years now, and given my sense that I haven’t fully cracked my own mss’s form yet, it just seemed like the thing to grab.

It scared the shit out of me.  Gass is a fanatic for sentences. They are, he argues (rightly, IMHO) the irreducible units of both sense and the sensibility of any text.  They are not simply the sum of what the words in them say; how they sound, what they evoke, their rhythms carry all the overtones and undertones that turn a sequence of words into meaning.  Or, as Gass puts it: 

“In any event, and after many years of scribble and erasure, I came finally to the belief that sentence were containers of consciousness, that they were directly thought itself, which is one thing that goes on in consciousness, but they were other things as well in more devious, indirect ways.” 

I’m thinking about sentences today, and how much attention I should give to shining up each one as I fight through this first draft.  I’ve found that I’m really working harder than I expected just keeping the mss pushing ahead at a reasonable rate. There are more moving parts than I had realized in the genre-mandated glibness of the proposal, and trying to get the combination of facts, character, ideas and plot elements to work together has been…tricky.  The writing group catechism lauds shitty first drafts⁠4 and the virtues of just getting the text down, damn any polish or elegance.  But though I’d like to get to the fix-it-in-rewrite mindset, I find it hard to let go ofloose or rough and above all imprecise sentences.  I get tripped up by the sense that the 

Snow Day

Snow day yesterday. The snow began before dawn and kept going ’til evening.  Time glided by; late in the afternoon, I spiked warmed cider with bourbon.  That was that, an off day, a day off.

Today , Katha and I went to matinee of a friend’s one-man play, an exploration of what it means to be a man if you’re gay, and born in the 1950s.  It’s the third time we’ve seen Steve perform over the last couple of years, and this was its best iteration, tight and harsh and generous, but the feeling it evokes in me remains the same as it was on first witnessing:  life is too fucking short.

I make it here by late afternoon.  The browser come up and a quick whip through the chance nodes of the web take me to an old friend that resonates so with the afternoon’s performance it made me gasp: 

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

It gets me every time, that last stanza!  

“Forgive me”  

You must be fucking joking. Or rather, flaunting.  No one saying those words out loud is looking forabsolution.  

“they were delicious”

Yes they were. I can taste them still.

“so sweet”

Memory. Halt on this moment. This is why one writes; one reads.

“and so cold”

Hold that which cuts.

Marching orders.  Time to go.

Good Words

It’s almost eleven, and I’ve yet to get stuck in.  Bad.  I’m trying to impose a no-Twitter regimen, certainly before the day’s writing is done, but I’ve failed today; I find it hard not to react to each new Trumpian/GOP crapfest. Which, of course, is keyboard activism at best, or rather worst.

Reset.

I left off yesterday still playing with the opening to chapter five, in which Isaac Newton takes over the making of England’s currency.  This is the start of the second part of the book, and while I’m beginning to hear the story in my head, it’s still clunky. I’m trying to connect the character narrative with the historical sequence, and I haven’t quite got it yet.  That’s the task for the day: move from Newton and his job to the reason his task became necessary.  And to do so with some music.  Good words.

I’m reading Patti Smith’s M Train now, both as my daily inspiration and as the book that sings me to sleep at night.  It’s one of those that I hate to read too much of at any sitting because it’s too precious.  I want it helping me along for a while.  And of course, that evokes the opposite temptation, to start reading and not stop, because, for me, now, at my desk, looking out at this morning’s snow fall, what could matter more than total immersion in the story (ultimately) of a great artist exploring the inside of wherever it is she makes that art.  

I resist, and turn back a few pages to this highlighted two nights ago, the passage that made me decide to try this diary:

“What a drug this little book⁠1 is; to imbibe it is to find oneself presuming his process.  I read and feel the same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself. It is not mere envy, but a delusional quickening in the blood.  Soon abstracted, the book slips off my lap and I am off, diverted by the calloused heels of a young lad delivering loaves⁠2.”

Smith writes of her reaction to Sebald’s work: “At one time the three lengthy poems in this slim volume had such a profound effect on me that I could hardly bear to read them.”

I know what she means.

“I cannot assume the reader will be familiar with them all, but in the end, is the reader familiar with me? Does the reader wish to be so? I can only hope, as I offer my world on a platter filled with allusions.  As one held by the stuffed bear in Tolstoy’s house, an oval platter that was once overflowing with the names of callers, infamous and obscure, small cartes de visite, many among the many.⁠3”

Right. Hello Mr. Isaac.  There’s a shilling in your hand, a wretched coin, skinny and chipped out of round.  What are you going to do about it?