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?