Editor’s Note

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Contributors

Cover art: “House by the Sea” :: Jerome Larusson

—Olivia Dresher

Should of done this years ago. So quiet here you can hear yourself think. Plenty of sky too. Just the way I like it. And I sure do like the way that path winds under the pines. Makes sense, if you know what I mean. Cabin’s mighty nice too. Small enough so you can be in the whole thing at once. Not a bunch of loose ends. Not a house, more like something you wear. Here I am, sitting on the porch in the shade. Look out there at the sunlight hitting the ground. Got me a beer. Listen to the damn cicadas. Like an electric waterfall.

And the saxophones. Earl’s Tune. Glenn Miller. Gorgeous gal there, all in white. Her white dress, like clouds, white pearls. White teeth, white eyes. Snow, white snow falling, a snow curtain. Everything’s white, she’s whirling and whirling, her hair so white. She’s all over white, can’t see her. White. Wait.

Good grief. Must’ve fallen asleep. The easy sleep of old men. Read that somewhere. Jeez, my heart’s beating a mile a minute. But no, here’s the sunlight. Trees. Sage. Damn, smell that sage. That’s the way the earth smelled before people.

Cripes, it’s evening already. Where did the day go? Good thing I’ve got a fire going in the stove. Shot of George Dickel by the old elbow here, good book. What the hell else do you need?

Running along the Guadalquiver, gray stones uneven under my feet. River beating like copper in the sun. Sweat pours down me, and the smell of orange, like Sevilla is filled to the brim with sweat and orange blossoms. I’m stretching out on the grass in the big park, Maria Luisa, full of secret tile fountains, trash everywhere, blue trees. Pretty Spanish woman in sweat clothes talking to me, fine English, dark hair, blue eyes. She can tell I’m American just by looking. You are very flexible for a man, she says.

What’s that? Something out the window. Jesus Christ, an eye, a huge eye. God Almighty. What should I do? I’m standing up slowly, till I can grab the shade, pull it down. There. It’s gone. Jeez, my heart’s beating a mile a minute.

Here she goes again. Drums like a storm, like white water, like thunder in the mountains. Gorgeous when she dances. Spinning, like snow, everything white. Nobody but me knows how smooth her skin is, how warm inside the elbow, behind the knee. What she says, how she sings. Like strings of white light flying off her when she spins. White, everything white.

Good grief, must’ve fallen asleep. The easy sleep of old men. Read that somewhere. This place saves me, this cabin. Saves my butt, damn right. Quiet here, you can hear yourself think. Should of done this years ago. Look at the way the hill curves away. Such a sweet curve. The mountains like smoke way off there. The canyon there too, with the river running in it, but you can’t see it from up here.

Goddamn, there’s a hawk. Where’s my binoculars? Marianne brings me the binoculars. They’re almost too big for her fat little hands. Then she runs back to Carol. That one’s Carol, Carol’s forever. There’s fog, coming up from the river. Why are they walking toward it? They shouldn’t do that. Now it’s all around them, white, white. Rising. Wait, wait. No, no. Wait. White.

What’s that? A crash, like thunder in the mountains. The door comes flying in. A huge hand poking in the doorway, looks like a gigantic worm. It’s holding a spoon, of all things, a monster spoon. I dodge behind the table. There goes my George Dickel. Here’s the spoon, coming for me. God, look at the hand, a claw. The spoon’s in my mouth. I wouldn’t have thought it possible. I swallow. The spoon goes away. Hah! Fooled it. Jeez, what a taste. Tears in my eyes. I can’t wipe them. Why can’t I wipe them?

Where’s my George Dickel? Pour a goddamned glass. Thank God for the cabin. Fire in the stove. Dickel in the belly. Eye in the window. Spoon in the door. Got to send a message. George Dickel bottle on the waves. It’s fine in here, fine. Go away spoon. Go away eye. I’m fine. Doesn’t matter. Should of done this years ago. So quiet you can hear yourself think. Got the sun in the morning and the moon at night. I’m okay. Sweet curve of hill, sweet women in my bed, sweet hawk in the air.

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Liam Wilkinson writes, “The following fragments are sketches that I capture whenever and wherever I can—in my notebook, on scraps of paper, in my mobile phone at any moment that may present itself. Though I have a background as a writer of haiku and its related forms, these recent fragment poems are more free, often abstract word-paintings that land as they fall, with few or none of the revisions that haiku frequently demands. They are fragments of day or night, caught in a jar.”

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summer breeze
the cool
green shadow
of a blimp

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memory
slipped into
like a winter
coat

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where there
should be
something
nothing

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light from
another room
exciting silence
of solitude

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the sad
elimination
of years
of dust

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and so
I return
to this
jazz blue night

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drifting
sense of needing
to do
something

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looking
looking
and not finding
myself

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weekend
no work
to make me want
no work

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new fences
round old
freedoms
gone

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silent seaside
grey bare
rooms behind
thick glass

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outside the shop
yellowed
paperbacks lie
fluttering

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early
on the prom
a shutter
fluttering

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Blackpool prom
crash of waves
and last
night’s bottles

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small hours
a cup of tea
balanced on
a sofa arm

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dust
on cold
half-burned
candles

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street noises
climbing up
into this
guest bedroom

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the book
I’m re-reading
at rest
on the hotel floor

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dawn light
sitting with me
for a moment
in the kitchen

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dawn blue
I picture
myself
from behind

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first light
harbour fills
with tide
and gull

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tea
in the night
and a piece
of lined paper

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streaks
of street-lit
branches
in the city night

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night thinning
to nothing
but the breath
in your nose

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a grief
for sleep
on your
pale face

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the strange
animal
of that
wet dishcloth

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melting
into magnolia
this nothing
doing day

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room fits
to the flicker
of black and white
movies

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March
winds
wound around
railings

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butter moon
hanging
in a fissure
of night

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the pop
pop of
Bladderwrack
beneath our feet

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fingering
the oarweed
drying
on the rocks

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the night
slowly spirals
like a
moon snail shell

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dizzied
by the pattern
on a
calico clam

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under moon-
light
her dark
secret

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Curious phenomenon loneliness is that it can be dispelled by anyone. Sometimes we are a little dismayed that it so promiscuously gives itself away. It is as if it pays us back for withholding ourselves, gets even with us for allowing it to exist in the first place.

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You live with the secret hope that somehow all the loneliness will be erased by someone understanding it, or by your explanation to them, when in fact this only further ensures your being alone. Now what if just once you hoped for the contrary, that such understanding would encourage loneliness, deepen it? Then you would find people trying to get closer to you just because they sense you don’t want them to.

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Every manifestation of loneliness crowds often to such an extent that we are trampled by almost anyone that comes our way.

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I prick my skin to keep myself occupied, bleed the little bumps and pustules, pick, scrape again the scabs off, bleeding, serous, a clear lymph fluid oozes out. I talk to them, why aren’t you healed? They are silent as the blood collects in minipools, as if to say, we are only reflecting you.

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The hand and what it holds holds my attention. An empty hand also holds my attention. I watch to see what it does with itself. What it does with its emptiness. Rarely does it stay empty. It always holds onto something. To its other hand, to its own body, to a table, to a pencil, or it curls up into a half-fist, or clenches itself full-fisted. I am not sure how I want the hand to be. Open-palmed? Isn’t it then about to grasp something? And most vulnerably? Even our hand cannot be alone. It is the best sign of us.

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We want to love our fellow man but fear too quickly having all the energy of our feeling metabolize into one overwhelming rush of combustion and being reduced in our love to the grease spot on a piece of paper. Dimly aware that that is what would be left of them, most people nurture a vaguely defined hostility towards others. When at bottom it is no more than this oleaginous fear.

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Why I like refills is that I can store them up. It gives me the greatest satisfaction to know that I have something in reserve, that behind what I expend I am backed up. As a child being taken away, placed in a school, I remember a clear white plastic toy gun into which I could insert little colored balls of candy. And a refill I had. I remember how I fingered it in the long ride from my home. How it gave me a sense of security that I could store up so many pieces of candy in the gun as a kind of ammunition against being taken away, for the strange home I was being taken to. Not to shoot anybody of course, but as ammunition against them nevertheless.

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The little girl sneaks a piece of candy into her mouth. I imagine its sugars dissolving in secret, the crystals breaking down, the saliva activated and excited, rising to the occasion, the cheek sucking on the candy and the tongue, biting itself to get all the pleasure the mouth can out of the surreptitious insertion of the candy. And the beauty of the eyes. They triumphant as they look around to see if anyone has noticed the orgy of pleasure the mouth has experienced, the tongue proclaiming the sweets to the roof of the mouth, drawing every nook of delight into her enjoyment, vacuuming the mouth for the emptiness of her little life unpleased, for the predeterminate stage of her own sexuality that can only be bridged by this hard structure of candy dissolving, breaking down in her mouth by her sucking on it for dear life.

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I often try to freeze faces, keep my feelings for them unchanged. There is something frozen in my desires, some unthawing principle even when women are flowing towards me, melting in my arms. Something out in the cold that even women closest to me have felt. (And had to quickly get their clothes on for.) Little did they know of the mechanical desire for refrigeration. To keep them physically just the same as my love for them. For so deeply did I want them to remain unchanged that each one I finally froze out of my life. But years after they are all there. Even when the electricity went off, when there was no more artificial refrigeration, in the tundra of my consciousness, under the clear icy brilliance of the steppes they live on. Corpses almost of love that never really melted in me. That my mind is bound to, still beautiful as I pay homage to the image of themselves that they left me behind. As if these cold remnants, this aftermath, is the very essence of my feeling. That years before even the warmth of living associations with these women, the exchange of the warmest kisses and intimacies, was leading up to. As if that warm birth of feeling was only the preliminary to what would last in my mind a lifetime compared to the lovers they would soon take. I would still have them in cold storage, so to speak, like mammoth remains.

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What happens when you don’t read and don’t get out, your work starts to overlap, duplicate itself, multiply incestuously. One piece is lying atop another, in the same bed of thought so to speak and whatever creaks in one part of the house is picked up in the next. And jealousies ensue, the proud assertions of male dominance, the female wiles, the seductions of your own work trying to outdo, emasculate, reinvigorate itself, but in the end it is all incestuous, all the same family of desires, the weaknesses predominate, the strengths don’t outlive the household, there is no fresh blood and the diseases of inbreeding finally win out in work after all that no one else is related to.

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Again: whisper it: it spreads your life like a reflection on a night window, black and bottomless. The void that calls writing forward; the black blood that surges before the beginning.

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It is early now—or very late—and I cannot sleep. It is very late; it’s early. No dawn—not for a few hours. I hear the rushing of water from the kitchen—somewhere a pipe has broken. Somewhere it is leaking still, for all that the water company came out yesterday. I hear the heating coming on and then turning off again, and the crack of the water bottle from which I drank snapping back into shape.

I am awake now, as only writing can awaken me. Who writes? The river that looks to find itself—to return flowing to flowing, breaking apart the funerary flowers, and carrying away the ashes of the dead. To return to itself: as though writing wanted only to complete a circuit, to come back to itself by recounting a life, and the stories that speak of that life.

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I lost my place in the night; I slipped from my place and all places. I should be asleep; I am not asleep. I should be dreaming, and my dreams anchored by my sleeping body, but I do not sleep and if I dream, it is merged with my wakefulness. It is very late or very early; this is the crossroads of the night where the soul wanders from its home.

It is said that everything is recalled at the moment of death—you remember it all again, the whole of your life. And at the moment of awakening? It is as though you recalled your death—that it is death that remembers, like the night behind your image in the mirror. What do I remember? Death remembers itself in me; death—forgetting—destroys my memory.

Am I dead or alive? For myself, now, it is as though I surprised myself returning from the day—as though I had met myself returning from the future. I crossed myself here, before dawn; my future came towards me and my past rose up to meet it. And who was I, at the crossroads?

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Dawn is coming. Purple light; the outline of the pipe that runs along the kitchen’s edge, the white wooden door to the lane; the wheelie bin. Purple and black and white: those are the colours of this threshold. This morning—is it morning?—I feel as though I have kept vigil all night; that I have seen to it that the body of the departed was watched over. I watched; I was vigilant—but who was it that died?

I kept vigil over my own death; I was awake beside the corpse I am. You should not die alone and no one should be alone in their death. Of course, it is in the memories of others that you will live—they will give you a kind of life. But as long as they remember, you will remain in limbo; neither in this world or the next. When will they release you into forgetting? When they, too, are forgotten. But when will that day come?

Last night, this night, which is becoming morning, I outlived myself. Upstairs I can hear my neighbours passing from one room to another. Water drips from their bathroom into mine: there are others around who are alive. But last night, was I alive? Who was I, who watched over my own death? Who was I, companion to the one who died?

Ulysses passes among the shades, but where do I pass? Alongside myself; among myself—but that is not right either. The body is a stone withdrawn into itself. The body has turned aside from the world; its attention is turned to its heart. That is sleep: the body is turned to the heart and the heart expands to become the whole night. And you who watch over your body? You, awoken, who watch over your own sleep? Witness, vigilant one, who are you that withdraws from me now, on the shore of morning?

Light in the bathroom of the house opposite; the sky is light blue, and the colours of the world reveal themselves. It is 8:00 AM; two hands wrote this page. As night crossed into morning, so was there a crossing from death to life. The body has awoken; its attention is drawn into the world. The companion withdraws; no one is required to keep vigil.

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Begin with the yard, end with the yard. Open the curtains, there it is: the yard, still there, with the rotting plants and the grime on the concrete and one of the bins—where is the other?—on the other side of the back wall, over there in the lane.

Between its walls, you will have lived your life. New clothes-pegs, straggly plants…. This morning, though it is still early, it is as if I’ve already lived and died in this yard. Everything that can happen will happen here. Everything will happen; the sky will brighten and then the sky will darken. What day is it? Every day. Who am I? Anyone, everyone who passes beneath the day.

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What day is this? The first day, the supernumerary day. The page that has dropped out of the calendar. What day is it?

Dawn, the head of the day. Why get up early? To catch the day’s arrival—to be there as it comes to itself. You will have at least seen it appear, you for whom later the day will come apart. But isn’t that also the day: dispersal, the stagnancy of time? Is that what is dawning today, in the return of the first day; not the beginning, now, but the day as interruption—the first day as the last day, as the coming apart of days?

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What does it want with me, the day? To attest to itself. To summon a blindness commensurate with its own blindness. To fog the glass of writing so that nothing is communicated.

Breath on glass, opacity—you see what you once allowed you to see. The medium no longer mediates; the glass speaks, invisible surface. It speaks, boundary, of what separates the world from writing. It speaks, the mirror is fogged, a kind of blindness spreads across the surface of writing.

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Botched—the day is ruined. No: the day is ruin; today is the ruin of all days, today is the ruination of all days, their coming apart, their failing. Today I will fail—but today you will always have failed; this day is always the last day and the very last.

Accompany it, the day, as it comes to ruination. Be with it, the day, as it wears away the day. Today: the return of the nothing-will-happen. Today: the wearing away of the day, of every day.

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Today is today, it is nothing but itself. What happened today? What has ever happened? The same room, the same day: how can you pass from hour to hour? There is no passage; the day returns as the day; today is today, there is no future. Today is today—what returns except the same, and the same of the same?

Who looks out from the mirror, his arms limp at his side? An old man, a man impossibly old. A man out of use, for whom the world never had a place. His gaze has congealed; it cannot reach me. And who do I see, in the failure of his seeing? My own blindness; the blindspot of sight. Whoever sees God dies; and whoever sees his own blindness?

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No day that does not unfold itself in the eternal Day, in the event that does not come as itself, but in every other guise.

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Today, who am I today? I remember that scene in Mirror where the boy who, we learn, lost his parents in the siege of Leningrad, is questioned by his drill-sergeant. What is he asked? Specific questions that need specific answers. How does he reply? Without specificity, at once vaguely and determinedly; he speaks with firmness of what has no firmness. So too does the day ask to be remembered here. To be remembered, which is to say, to remember itself by way of my memories. By way of them, but not contained by them, the day having judged them and become their condition.

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Write, erase writing. Write, and find by erasure what asks first of all to be written. So is writing a kind of sacrifice, so writing burns up without anything being destroyed. The words remain, the same as before, but they are blazing. But nothing is blazing. There are words, only words, and nothing besides.

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What time is it? Any time, every time. What time is it? All hours cross here; all of time is present here. Nothing begins, but everything is gathered for the beginning. Nothing begins—this is where beginning fails, where the day is folded back upon itself, unable to dawn.

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It will not begin, not today, today of all days. Not today—all the days that did not begin are here, all of them. All the days pressed and concentrated here, in this non-day. Up early—and for what? Ready to work—but for what? Pulling the chair to the table—but for what?

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What is the opposite of déjà vu? You know that the marks you leave on the page today will be absorbed by the page you will see tomorrow. For it is the same page as today’s and yesterday’s: the same as it calls for writing and refuses to disappear beneath it.

The past and the future meet here, in the moment of writing. They witness each other and they pass, each in their own direction.

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Bad faith: to say to yourself: here I am, I survived, I learned, I can write about my experiences, I brought it all back home. But you know that what happens refuses this mastery. That, writing, each event eludes you now, today, tomorrow, echoing what eludes you in every other event, in everything that happens.

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Write. Write until nothing is said, or when what is said does not matter. Write until indifference blows through your words as the wind through the fields.

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A sharp pencil and a new notebook, but what is there to write? Say nothing; say it again, and by means of what you would write. Write of your life, and of everything that has happened to you, but say nothing; let nothing say itself again.

One day—when?—writing will complete itself. One day, the tautology of writing will be complete, and writing will speak where I am not. Immortality? No; the page will be turned when I die. The surface of the page will be testimony to that death which continues to return inside me. Serene pages, without me. Serene for that absence, which lifts itself from the yard, from the new clothes-pegs and the straggly plants.

Not, then, that I want to live forever, but I want never to have lived. Never to have lived, and from that death that reaches into my past, that cancels my life.—‘You took a wrong turn; the whole of your life was that turn.’—‘Yes, that is true.’—‘You lost yourself; you were lost.’—‘Yes, that is true.’

And isn’t writing a way to undo that loss? Let it come to itself, let it come, the tautology. Until it speaks of nothing but itself; until it speaks of everything but its exhibition. Writing that is not yet. Writing that is the life of the future without me. How to offer everything I have lived to its sacrificial flame?

Tautology: it will complete itself, there where I am not. It will come to birth, wings opening in the sun. Then will it act, writing, and without me. Then it will complete itself in a single gesture. Impossible day. Writing comes to itself; it does not come. That coming non-coming is the blank page of a notebook; it is a sharpened pencil.

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‘I remember.’—‘Memory desired you. Memory wanted to be born a mortal. The power of memory asked for a body. You are the avatar of memory.’

‘I remember.’—‘Avatar, you are the game memory plays with itself. Yours is not the power of memory; you do not own it. The power to remember is given, not taken, and what is given can also be withdrawn.’

‘Do you remember? That is not your power. Remembering happens; memory invents a body for itself, the event delimits itself so it can grant itself the thickness of a life.’

‘I remember.’—‘Memory remembers itself; memory is the pearl that invents the shell; who are you that are born from the chance of remembering? Who that comes to himself when memory deigns to give itself an agent?’

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Precision: to write what is essential, to uncover the Word, to let it speak. But what if the Word is the undoing of words? What if it turns all words from themselves? In the beginning was the Word; but in the beginning, too, was what drew it back to the non-Word that allows nothing to begin.

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Pressure of writing not yet written. Steady pressure, like rain in fine droplets. What would you like to do? To round off—to write and finish writing in a single gesture? No more drafts, no more rewriting—unless writing is always that, rewriting, and what would complete itself will need again to be completed. ‘Begin again.’—‘But I never began.’

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Fragment, day, I know you are alive only as you separate yourself from narrative, from narration. Fragment, I know you live by your separation from the whole. Nothing about you adds up to anything important; you leave nothing behind, no evidence, nothing in which your image might be caught.

I will not sum you up. I will not let the negligible substitute itself for you. Speak, then, across these words. The wind comes: all these words bow their heads. Day, fragment, you are that wind. Day—fragment—these words, bowing, speak of you.

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Brahma to Vishnu: ‘Without a sacrifice, nothing can be received. To create a new world, what shall I sacrifice?’ Vishnu: ‘sacrifice me.’—‘What shall I use as the sacrificial knife, the sacrificial altar and the sacrificial post?’—‘Use me.’—‘Where do I find the sacred fire and the sacred chants?’—‘In me.’—‘Who shall be the presiding deity?’—‘It will be me. I will also be the offering and the reward.’

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There is a fire that does not consume, but that burns in all things and in what can be written of those things. You must offer what happens by writing to sacrifice. You must repeat, through sacrifice, the burning of things. Sacrificial writing, pyre of the world, let the day offer itself to itself. For is fire not already the day, burning in everything?

‘Then the day sacrifices itself to itself?’—‘The day is sacrifice; returning to itself through the burning of things.’—‘But nothing is consumed. Nothing is destroyed.’—‘Every word is already a destruction. Everything, as it is brought to stand by the word, is already destroyed.’—‘But where is destruction? Why can’t I see it? Touch it?’—‘Because you are also burning. You are also sacrificed.’

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‘Why does the day need writing? Why does it need this mediation, this detour on its return to itself?’—‘Because it can only approach itself through detour; because that detour is the whole world, and everything in it as it is retold. Write of the world—tell everything as it happens, the most extraordinary, the most banal, and you will point to this detour without naming it.’

‘Then it is something more than a detour, or it seems to hold itself back from the events of the world.’—‘It is held back, and held back, too, from the recounting of the world, its telling.’—‘Then how to approach it? How to stand facing it, as I face the sun at noon?’—‘All telling is indirection, like the magician who tricks you by distracting your attention. You will not face it. There is no sun. The day is not itself, it is only the approach to itself, and you, writer, are the means of that approach.’

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‘Imagine it this way. Just as the sun sends out great flares from itself, great fiery loops which arc back to its surface, so is what you write an arc of the day. Imagine a sun that is made of such arcs; that is nothing more than their leaping. You, writing, are an arm of that sun, a mirror held up to the day, and by which the day will know itself.

‘But this, too, is analogy, for what can the day know? Its first trait is blindness. It does not see. Its second trait is unconsciousness. It does not know.’

‘Sometimes I imagine that it dreams, and its dreams are those solar arcs. Or imagine that, as a writer, I am like the astronauts who orbit Solaris. The day speaks; I write; but it does not know that it speaks, and I do not know what I write. Am I dreaming? Or is it that the day dreams in my writing, that to write is also to dream with the day?

‘Now I know: my first trait is blindness. My second trait is unconsciousness. I am an arm of the sun, of the day, by which it continues to forget itself. To unknow, to forget: isn’t that the task the day sets for writing? To betray the day: isn’t that what it wants? To betray it, yes, but only by way of telling the day—of speaking of those events, great and small, that belong to the continuity of time.’

‘Tell. But the sun arcs through you. It speaks, and you do not. It dreams, and what you write cannot reach it. But you know its return. You know it by writing, by the whole of your writing, as the day uncouples itself from itself.’

::

The same: the day comes to itself each morning. Comes to itself: the same day, the same each time. Why is it necessary to accompany it with writing? Why, if not to help the day complete itself, to complete it in a written act that sets its seal on its coming? The day comes to itself on the page. Or what is written marks its completion and redoubles it.

The day has arrived: that’s what writing says. But writing keeps its arrival; it does not need to come to itself anew. The day has come: write it now and it’s written forever. Why rewrite it, then? Why does it have to be rewritten?

Now I wonder whether writing marks what the day does not have; whether it is in writing, and writing alone that the day can come to itself. Is that why it asks to be written, and each morning? Is that what it seeks, in the writing it asks for?

Mark the day; mark the turning of the day. Mark what can never complete itself, once and for all, as the day’s coming. Set the seal on its coming; write: it has arrived; the day has come, even if, as you write, you know the day cannot come, or can only come to itself in writing.

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Write at dawn, as day lifts itself from night. The day is coming: write that. The day has come: write that. So is its arrival lifted into eternity. The white page: there, alone, can writing arrive, for look, outside: soon evening will come; soon the day will fall from itself. Then the white page is the day, and more day than the day: the eternity of sense, the supernumerary day of black on white.

The flag of writing flaps in the wind of time. Time mocks it: ‘You say the day has come, but it has not come’, but writing mocks time: ‘The day completes itself on my page.’

Night comes. Time says: ‘Isn’t night the ink of writing? Doesn’t the day live by the blood of night?’ Time pauses and goes on, ‘You have killed the day to make the day. Writing is also a tomb, and the words “the day has come” is the trail of blood running from the lips of a dead man.’

And writing laughs and says, ‘You know my secret. In truth, I can only write of the day in the ink of night; I bring the day only by way of forgetting. Somewhere else, another day is rising, a brighter sun. Somewhere else is rising the day to which all days are mere indices. How to write of the day itself, free from night? How to write in white ink on a white page, or in darkness upon darkness?

‘I know this is your dream, time, which is why you look for me.’

::

I think there is a god of the same, and of the Same of the same. A god who is lost in the heart of the turning of the days and has gone mad there. Mad because it turns in the same element. Because the same can only happen again.

Why write, why begin? Why seek to make a beginning? I think it is to translate the eternity of the day into a new eternity: to mark by beginning what fails to begin. Only to mark it again—to let the interminable quiver, the incessant. Perhaps writing is only the attempt to make a mark. To double up the day, to lend it another kind of consistency. To give it form, even as that form is allowed to tremble.

But why write, why begin? Are you the child that would make a yo-yo of the day, like Freud’s grandson, sending the death of his mother away from him and back, as if to master absence? To master the day, or the Same of the day. Not to be trapped. Not to endure its blind turning. (I think it is writers who are most closely attuned to the Same, who suffer it. Who suffer the everyday as what it is: blank time, dissolution.)

It is from a kind of exhaustion you must begin. An exhaustion so great it dissolves you. Only there’s a minimal doubling up, a minimal reflexivity. Something of you is there. Something of you crawls to mark a place, like the flag in the Sea of Serenity. But what you’ve made is only part of the day, a change, an alteration, and nothing else. And what you are is only a limb of the day, a way the Same can know itself.

:::

Lucerne

There is too much blue and green, teal and violet, on the slow train from Interlaken to Lucerne. The sun shines with no clouds to calm it. Lakes are large and placid around me. Mountains loom. Too much. I get a cramp in my neck from looking out of the window. I close my eyes. Too close.

Sometimes momentary glimpses are better.

The view on a postcard is sufficient.

It gives you enough to go on, doesn’t it.

Arriving in Lucerne in the middle of summer is like buying an already finished paint-by-numbers landscape. When what you really wanted was the kit and a chance to make it yourself. There is nothing to do in Lucerne except sit on a bench by the lake and admire what you did not paint.

A white-haired woman sits down beside me to watch the paddleboats. She has a small, flat, brown bag in one hand: postcards, I think. It is Sunday afternoon in August. Sparkle at every angle. Public flowers line the sidewalk. She takes a pocketwatch out of her handbag, checks the time. She slowly shuts the gold case and holds it in her palm for a while. Then, she sighs. She doesn’t take her postcards out of the bag, if that’s what they are, and write messages to people who aren’t here. No, she doesn’t say anything.

Oaxaca

Flowers? she asks me. Flowers, please?

The choice on a pleasant evening in the zócalo is difficult: whether to buy the small bundle of dark roses or the crushed gardenias. The woman has already grabbed my arm, and now she signals that these are my only options. I am trying to listen to the local music, but the flowers flop over the edges of a giant basket on her head right in front of me. I ask the price, and it’s a lot, too much even, for what I’m being offered. But I buy the gardenias and take them back to the hotel room, where they last all night, scenting dreams.

The hotel room has a hole in the window, and that music from the zócalo drips in until morning.

I wake up to a sense of smokiness: chiles and wood burning.

The food stalls are beginning to sell red peppers and crispy crickets in baskets. I wander among them.

But I cannot find the small woman with the old flowers on her head. I cannot tell her thank you for the perfume.

I sit on a bench in the zócalo and pretend to read my guidebook instead.

Tokyo

According to my guidebook, I have found the bookstore district. Where I avoid the bright, hospital-lit stores selling shiny new books and venture down the side streets, looking for those old stores selling used ones. Yes, this is better. Here are shops that are cramped and dim, seductive with the smell of dust. This is what pulls me in and puts me in the mood for books, for new discoveries, maybe even secrets. I wander around until I find a couple of things that I want from a 100-yen stall (dollar books) out on the sidewalk. I plan to tear these up and use them as decoration for all kinds of projects, even wrapping paper for Christmas gifts. (Imagine the yellowed pages tied with golden ribbons in the candlelight.)

To pay for my thin books, I go into the store and make my way to the back, through piles of violent Japanese pornography, which I now understand is the shop’s specialty. (Magazine covers show naked women tied up in ropes, women with their breasts chopped off. The used books are just a sideline, relegated to the sidewalk.) I make my way to the tidy gray woman manning the cash register at the end of a long row of stacks. This is the only store where my purchase is simply put into a paper bag and not wrapped up, where the bag itself isn’t closed with some sort of tiny decorative seal. The Japanese have no love of used goods (or so I’ve been told) and perhaps this is why my two old books (even though one is a book of poetry, I think, and in a slipcase) receive such abrupt treatment.

The woman who takes my money seems sad for me, maybe even embarrassed that I have to resort to such things. She pities me from behind the oversized magazines arranged around the cash register, in displays designed to catch your attention. And I wonder what kind of bag she puts them in.

Florence

I try to read an Italian magazine while eating a salmon roll at a Japanese restaurant. Sushi, I thought, would be better than another plate of thick pinci pasta or a sandwich stuffed with that fragrant, melting pecorino and mortadella. (But it is not.)

Across the street, a woman, an artist maybe, looks down from her open arched window to see what I’m eating. Her look is blank, but I can imagine the contempt. Or maybe she just feels sorry for me, alone in a foreign country. She has a large glass of dark pink wine in one hand and is wearing an apron. In a minute, she’ll go back to work: pinning fabric onto a mannequin behind her. I can see the green brocade and the muslin form. She stops periodically to take the pins out of her mouth, to take a drink. (Is dressmaking her job or her hobby? Hard to tell from this angle.) She looks out over Florence, her home. She can ignore the tourists on the patio below, dropping their chopsticks into soy sauce, which is served alongside olive oil.

But I can’t afford to ignore her.

She is a contemporary Italian painting come to life, in a gilt-edged frame.

And I am only a postcard.

:::

-met him at the publishers convention at the Javits Center. I’d told Jane I’d represent the agency at the “Quick Pitch Lunch”—where aspiring writers have two minutes to pitch their novels to each literary agent in the room.

“You can expect to hear from a bunch of nobodies going nowhere,” Jane said. “But we get paid for our presence, and we’d love our newest—and cutest—agent to re-”

::

-manuscript looked thin and slightly soiled. The top page was yellowed and had little specks of red and brown on it. I was about to push the stack of paper away.

“Please at least read the top page,” the man said. He looked even worse than his book. His eyes were bloodshot and tearing, and his neck appeared as if he’d been scratching it for days.

“I don’t want to pass it on,” he said, “but I don’t know what else to do to get rid of it. I’m sorry.”

I looked at the top page to avoid eye contact. (Jane had suggested, “Don’t make an emotional connection with any of them or else they’ll hound you for a year or more.”) I saw the same sentence repeated for paragraphs:

Cast out of the sky, I fell to my earthly prison.

“Is this a joke?” I asked.

The facilitator sounded the bell that signaled writers to move on to their next agent.

“Did you read the whole page?” the man asked. He was chewing the tip of a finger with no nail. He used that finger to point at the last paragraph, where another sentence began to repeat itself:

I am called H-

::

-cramps—like something dense forming in my intestine and having difficulty moving through.

I first felt the pain after leaving the convention. I was walking to my subway station with Randall, an editor at Promethean Books. I’d been trying to hook him on a chick lit series I was representing.

“So then the protagonist is in Rome with Gucci?” he asked.

I nodded, feeling a burning within my rib cage.

“I like the Anton character,” Randall said. “Love that he’s a chocolatier. But I don’t know about the miscarriage thing. Too many shades of gray. People like black and white these days.”

The burning felt like it was scorching my organs. I moved my hand over the place of pain.

“Do you have anything else for me?” Randall asked.

“I have something that was cast out of the sky,” I said. Shocked by my words, I touched my li-

::

-memories of my college years in the Bay Area came while I lay bent in bed, hurting and sweating. Inspired by Shelley and Coleridge and that mysterious typhus spring in Jane Eyre, I used to write little gloomy yet heartfelt rhymes and tales under the most interesting oak trees on campus.

But I was 21 in Berkeley, and now I’m 29 in New York.

Fiction is a business. Fiction is a business. Fiction is a-

::

-was ill,” I said. “Maybe something I ate at the convention?”

“And you couldn’t even call or email to tell me you’d miss work for two days?” Jane asked.

“I didn’t have the energy,” I said in a flat voice. I barely had the energy to be standing there, in her office with its piles of manuscripts to be rejected and its posters of the ’80s-era vampire books that had made her one of the industry’s most desired agents.

I started out of her office toward my cubicle.

“Jenny, did you talk to Redmond at Pillar Publishing like I asked?”

I turned around and saw my reflection in the glass frame of one of the posters. My dyed-blonde bangs were astray, and I looked as if I had violet welts under my eyes. “I talked to Redmond,” I said. “He likes the idea of a Hamptons cookbook, but he wants some quotes from big names, big names, big names, big-”

“Jenny, are you OK?” Jane asked, rising from her desk.

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling the agonizing swelling in my gut. “I guess I’m still-

::

-would think that this bulging, aching belly means I’m pregnant, except that I haven’t had sex in nearly seven months. I tried sleeping with Eli when I saw him at that rustic-themed bar in Soho a few weeks ago. He denied me, saying, “I told you when we broke up why I can’t be with you: I need my girlfriend to be passionate about something in her life.”

“Isn’t my job a-

::

“-you forget about what you need to reject?” Jane asked. She dropped a manuscript on my desk, partially covering a Post-It on which I’d been writing the words earthly prison.

I looked at the manuscript and wondered why I should have turned it down: Too literary/intellectual/experimental/political/ethnic/gay? I glanced at the title­ and author’s name and couldn’t remember either.

Jane snatched the manuscript and said, “Novelization of Laura Bush’s life. There’s already one on the market.”

“Oh, gosh, I’m sorry,” I said, feeling little remorse. “I should have known.”

“This is an important job,” Jane said. “Even if you are ill. You remember what I said about us being gatekeepers, don’t you?”

I nodded. Jane had informed me after I first started that agents and editors are the gatekeepers of literary culture. We’re the ones who determine what this country—and even other countries—read. She never mentioned that this is a position of responsibility, but she communicated very clearly that this is a position of power.

But what if people got rid of the gate-

::

-at night, when I’m icing my stomach and resisting taking too many Vicodins, there’s a voice in my head instructing me to share its story—H’s story—so I can finally write my own stories. In my head, I respond to the voice that I’m not crazy, that this pain in me is an ulcer, and then the tips of my fingers burn as if-

::

-inflammation, nausea, constipation, dizziness,” my therapist said. “Any others?”

I shook my head.

“Well, yes, those can all be psychosomatic. I’d arrange to get you on a higher dose of your anti-depressant, but you’ve been on the highest dose for some months now.”

“I know,” I said. The medication had been helping; I stopped having panic attacks, and my depression was something I witnessed rather than experienced, as if I were watching it at the drive-in movie theater I used to go to as a teenager.

“How is work?” my therapist asked. “Are things stable at the agency in this economy?”

“We aren’t having lay-offs or anything,” I said. “We just picked up some major clients. One of the women on that new reality housewife show, housewife show, housewife show, housewife show, housewife-”

“Jenny?” my therapist asked, touching my arm.

I looked him in the eyes and asked, “Do you believe in possession?”

“I believe that New York is an intense city. And I believe that very intense things are happening all over the world. And all this intensity can make a person feel…foreign in her own skin.”

I began to cry. I knew he couldn’t hear me. I guessed my New York friends wouldn’t be able to hear me. And both my parents had passed away, and our old home in Vermont was occupied by a new family.

“I think you should come see me again soon,” my therapist said. “Why don’t we increase your visits to-”

::

-you let something like this get out the door?” Jane asked. She showed me the hardcopy of an email I’d sent a potential author. The email contained our standard rejection language: Thank you for submitting your query, we receive hundreds of queries each month, publishers have higher expectations than ever, etc…. But the note ended with:

We’re sorry, but we just didn’t fall in love with your story love with your story love with your story love with your story love with your story love with your story

“Well?” Jane asked.

I snatched the paper from her and said, “I’m allowed to make mistakes, you know.” I was surprised by my anger.

Jane’s silence revealed that she wasn’t expecting such a response either. She scowled and said, “I don’t really have the time to write up a corrective action-

::

-closed my eyes on a bench near the reservoir. I pictured a rock-like tumor growing inside my stomach. I took the pad out of my purse and wrote a few sentences. There was movement in my bowels, and I scrambled to find a restroom on Fifth Avenue.

The movement ceased as soon as I caught sight of a fashionable bistro where the agency had held its well-attended Christmas party.

The voice in my head said, “Back into the park. First my story, then you-

::

-the ladder to reach a top shelf in the Strand Bookstore. I remained on the ladder while paging through the book of my choosing. I didn’t want anyone seeing me reading Exorcism: Risks and Benefits.

I stopped on a page with an illustration of a transparent, ghost-like thing hanging on a man’s back, placing its head inside his head. I scanned the opposite page and found the following text:

What seems like a demonic entity may actually be a guiding one. The entity may be mischievous, or even trigger episodes of insanity. Once gone, however, it may leave the host in a vastly improved-

::

-stood around him at the party like they were silently applauding him. He’d written a novel about a teenager who realizes her family makes up the core of a terrorist organization.

“Being on the Today Show wasn’t the nerve-wracking thing,” he said. “It was being approached about a movie deal in the men’s room.”

Someone laughed, and then almost all the others did the same.

“I think being a celebrity would distract me from my writing,” I said.

“Excuse me?” the author asked.

Some of the crowd gave me disapproving glances. An editor I’d worked with furrowed his brow and bit into a chocolate strawberry.

“I’m starting to write again,” I said. “I find I’m so focused during the process that the outside world just falls-

::

-put my head between my opened legs and felt the gushing into the toilet. The relief was far greater than the hurt and triggered a moan from deep within me. I wondered if anyone at the party had heard. I listened, but all I heard were the sounds of West Village traffic outside the bathroom window. Standing, I dared to look in the toilet and saw what resembled gravel filling the bowl. I attempted to flush-

::

-little time to update my diary since I’ve been working on my creative writing again. Keeping a diary requires energy enough. But writing something for others to actually read—that requires-

::

-blocked the door to the conference room. The agency was holding a meeting about 21st-century trends. Jane was wearing dark red lipstick and a white pantsuit for the occasion.

“You’re not going in there,” she said. “Where have you been all morning anyway?”

“Brunch with an author,” I lied. I’d actually been writing.

“So you suddenly have interest in our clients again? Even though you still can’t comb your hair or put cover-up on those sores on your cheek?”

I didn’t respond. I was staring through her into my future.

“I saw the pages you sent Ray,” Jane said. “He called me to say he didn’t appreciate the agency’s prank. Are you on drugs, Jenny?”

“I didn’t want to give the manuscript to him,” I said. I recalled typing over a hundred pages of repeating sentences. My fingers had been aching, but the searing at their tips was gone once I’d finished. “It was the only way to free myself for my own writing.”

“It’s also the way you wrecked your caree-

::

-writings to Times Square again. I don’t care if the cops bother me this morning. It’s not like I’m handing out bombs-

:::

I

“Hello. Is there anyone out there?” I misremembered a song lyric, I can imagine myself saying from time to time, I think I do say, I think may be the only thing I ever say(s).

I, the only lonely pronoun.

I, homonym for the organ that lets the world in but can’t shake the feeling that it’s projecting out.

The missing               , an absence that informs—that’s as close as I can get to rendering the strangeness of being in a body, oneself, in the world: always facing out.

David Foster Wallace said, “One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.”

If you’re reading this, you’re out there. And I’m in here. Check the byline. Scott F. Parker it says. But I don’t know if you’re out there or not. And I’m not sure I’m really in here. Scott F. Parker? A stranger. Je est un autre. This whole thing? A farce.

I is. What else is there to say? I’m trying but I don’t know where to go from here. No matter how many fragments of solitude I find, remember, imagine, invent, or steal, no matter how many ways I try to isolate the I, hovering all around the conceived, written, revised, read, is a lie with an I right in the middle of it.

My I is fragmented. How can I put it back together when I don’t even recognize the pieces, when I’m not sure if they’re from one set or a multitude, when I can’t figure out if there’s a final picture or just angles, perspectives.

I’m suddenly flashing back to a confused night when I tapped on a window for twenty minutes trying to get your attention before I realized I was standing in front of a mirror.

Oh my god. “What is art? Who am I?” Dar Williams once joked. Later, she covered a Pink Floyd song.

If there was no Other, I’d be forced to invent you.

I sometimes seems like one of those problems that I create for myself just by thinking about it. When I’m not thinking about it, what’s the problem? On the other hand, when I dig in and try to solve the problem once and for all, it sort of dissolves. Looking for I all I find is

I is a story I tell myself. A story I tell myself. Tell myself a story.

I teased my wife one morning: “You don’t know anything about me.”
She said, “I know your behavior.”
For a moment I felt totally exposed, for a moment I didn’t exist.
And then I came fully into melancholic existence, wishing her to be not only right but also exhaustive.
So I wouldn’t feel compelled to write words like these.
So even if I wrote these same words, it would be just a peculiar behavior of mine.
And I wouldn’t feel like there was an essence I wasn’t getting at, an isness of is I wasn’t quite articulating.

II

I don’t know what it’s like inside you and you don’t know what it’s like inside me. How do I leap over that wall? How do I have a significant conversation with another consciousness? How do I feel human and unalone?

It didn’t occur to me that I was lonely until I read Plato’s Apology and suddenly I wasn’t: someone was finally talking to me how I wanted to be talked to.

The Apology has one of the few plots that interests me. Socrates martyrs himself for his consciousness. Consciousness—the only subject that always interests me. Stories are stories because of what they say not because of what happened.

Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored together. Said Kierkegaard. Said Markson.

“In summa: my lonesomeness is now a twosomeness.”

We read in solitude,
To escape solitude.

III

“Imagination—that’s god’s gift to make the act of self-examination bearable.”
Novels and poems and essays are lies and tricks and deceits—bless them.

“Only an artist understands that he or she is condemned to be free, and understands that it means…to live in solitude.”

“It doesn’t seem possible to be an artist and not be sick.”

“There are many ways to make a living. Most of them are failures.”

A writer is someone who makes a living (or doesn’t) out of being human.

Why I get lonely in groups and have to retreat to books: writers—good ones—risk getting to the point.

Reading a good book is like getting drunk and not having to worry about a hangover.

When the author you love hangs himself, a part of yourself is lost. You venture out into the world not just sad but alone—who will I turn to for help when I can’t make sense of the world I find myself in?

An author’s death is a reminder that I only ever had myself to turn to, which is no turning at all—or is just a turning in circles.

The only way to leave a party is a long walk home.

“Thinking with someone else’s brain, Schopenhauer called reading.”

All writing asserts: I’m in here.
All reading: me too.

:::