6/12/90

A thought has to be lifted. This
requires at least the mental
equivalent of lifting anything else.
Lacking this effort, things
move just as little mentally as they do
physically.

The workpersonlike quality of art goes
into the scaffolding.

6/16/90

Let the sentences come one at a time
(I go to the shelf to find my notebook
and I don't see it at first glance-
this time I don't become anxious- that is
unusual. Is this the fear that someone will not
*be* there-either physically or experientially?)
To assert:
"Let the sentences come one at a time" is also
to recognize the "question and answer" aspect of
writing. But t wait for the answer to your question
(or assertion) is also to feel able to assume someone is out there.
I talked with Charles about my idea that so
called creative writing may function as a
transitional object for the reader, for the
writer and by implication- for the culture.
This is the silent supplication of the writer's
silence- the infinitely poignant voices of the
dead that Rilke was talking about.

Rousseau" "In this as in all other matters
my natural disposition has had a great
influence on my principles, or rather on my
habits, for I have hardly every acted according
to rules-or have hardly ever followed any
rules than the promptings of my nature.
Never has a premeditated lie approached my
mind, never have I lied to my own
advantage; but I have often lied out of
shame, to avoid embarassment in trivial
affairs that concerned only mek, as when in
order to keep a conversation going I have
been forced by tghe slowness of my ideas and
my lack of small talk to hav erecourse to
fiction for something to say.When I am
obliged to talk and interesting truths do not
spring to mind readily enough, I invent
stories rather than keep quiet, but in
making upt these stories I am careful as far
as possible to avoid lies which would go
against justice and the truth we
ower to others, andt keep to fictions
which are a matter of equal indifference to
myself and everyone else. In doing so I
should naturally prefer to put a moral
truth in the place of a factual truth,in
other words to give a true picture of the
natural affections..." (73-74)

Reveries of The Solitary Walker
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

*

Sink or Swim

A time in the future when a planetary
overheat brings a need to leave the planet.
This one Chance Devereux named Sink or
Swim. What
he never could have guessed was the possibility
that this hope amounted to more like a situation of Sink *and* Swim.

6/19/90

"What does it mean?"

"I don't know- yet. And that's
what makes it a poem."

6/24/90

An idea for a book-
thoughts of a writer in small excerpts- these
are gathered into "chapter"- These chapters have
titles like "Aftermath"- the titles (as in
"Aftermath") give a clue to the narrative. Earlier-
I waas thinking about some "concern" about a
certain "form" I wanted to write in- the
dillemmas that emerge
whenever I use such forms.

The "fictional" (speculative) quality of the
thought process itsel is that aspect of thought
which makes it so explicable with the psychoanalytic
method. Freud's psychoanalysis also a "psychopoetics"
(to use C.B.'s term) of everyday life.

There is a moral to every thought just as there
is a moral to every tale.

Thought itself is the fiction.

"The book" is the compilation of those
thoughts I transpose into the bound notebook.