Sometimes, work accelerates to the more awful end of its spectrum. I define “awful” in units such as: consecutive hours required bent in front of a computer; number of calls interrupting the call I was already on; minutes spent staring at my own face in the camera; unread emails unfurling beneath various threads; temperature of the chimeric blue evident in the ambient air when I finally look away from the orange-tinted screen. There is only a single evening where work continues late— it exists as a pocket outside of time, like Pynchon’s missing eleven days left over from the 1752 switch to the Georgian calendar, that one must be careful not to slide into, lest one become stuck therein. I seem to be more and more inside this pocket, lately. Secreting things becomes a habit.
Sometimes, I worry that the act of creation, or composition, is a reactive impulse: that one must be stimulated, or irritated, or provoked, in order to generate. That there isn’t sufficient accumulation inside my head to be generative, that I must instead continually prompt myself with the external, in hopes that it strikes something meaningful, seems suspect. It annoys me that the transmutation impulse is less ready to hand than the transcription impulse that I so desperately try to leave behind “at work.”
Sometimes, I go running in the park. The light is tentative. Beneath faint warmth, the wind is wretched in its force.
Sometimes, I think that characters, “character,” a character, is only a product of certain situations, or conditions, or circumstances. That if these things were to vanish, the character would revert to air. So much of what I know of various people is the result of specific moments in time, and many of these people I have seen change to confront new moments, often drastically. They seem to be the result of a process, that itself is subject to forces beyond them, and as a collection of fragments in motion have almost nothing to do with an individual at all. Sometimes, I think, a feeling can fill a room like air.
Sometimes, I stare at one of the passages I’ve written on cards and stuck to my wall. This is a juvenile habit I’ve been disinclined to break. This one is from Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. It is worth reproducing in full:
“The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one. Rilke said of Cézanne that he did not paint ‘I like it’, he painted ‘There it is.’ This is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals, or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals. We cease to be in order to attend to the existence of something else, a natural object, a person in need. We can see in mediocre art, where perhaps it is even more clearly seen than in mediocre conduct, the intrusion of fantasy, the assertion of self, the dimming of any reflection of the real world.”
Sometimes, I don’t leave the house until the late evening, and then I stagger out as if released from forty nights in a ship in the Bay of Naples. The red stars are easily distinguishable at night in the city.