What were the ‘periods’ he went through… ? tried to think. There was the write-as-much-as-you-can-period, ten pages a day like Dostoyevsky, Trilling was it, Trollope actually, and watch as “beneath the dull paper mass a mighty fire rages.” “Unexpectedly from out of the dull soggy thatch the spark of two words becomes a flame of three phrases–”
( Never wrote more than 1/2 antireciprocal “mot-wrong” flaubert pages a day during the “writing for real period”;;)
Then there was the Only Read period: don’t even bother with writing — you can’t– and writers, famously devoid of volition, are, like function machines of which no one knows the function, only capable of determining what will be put into them, not what will come out or when. Therefore, perform such a mass of reading that the “dark diamond” must emerge and, and — you simply “wake” to find yourself writing.
(The results exactly resemble those of the write-as-much-as-you-can period.)
Then the “consolidation period”: despite all you’ve written and read to this point (a small fraction of what ambition requires), what have you achieved? what but fragments hard-ended as rocks which, inchoate and undeveloping, will never do more than begin? Give up therefore and sit unmoving like a monk, until the thread that runs through all you’ve done is plucked attained — or just smash these blasted things together! Because surely they must — somehow — go — together . . .!
Passing in the meantime:
— discarded police tape in curbside. “In its yellow-black furls and curls are the grass clippings of the previous day’s rain’s.” [no, I don’t accept “furls and curls.”];
Trying to memorize the serial numbers of a lamppost as I pass it — three or four digits — and getting mixed up before I’ve even looked away (as if the attempt to remember has pre-garbled the perception of which the memory was to be made);
In my imagination — really an anti-imagination — a hysterical voice absurdly taking a woman to task for opening her car door and pouring out liquid on the street (“it’s only water” she says “yes — but your backwash” — ridiculous — space junk– my imagination at its most inadvertent and extraneous) Months ago I’d seen someone pour out the contents of their water bottle on this spot.
Thinking, I need to write this down, all down, but am still about a mile from work. By the time I get there I will have forgotten and, like all of the best writing, it will fail to have been written — and it was.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 