This entry is lifted from a letter I wrote to Sam Thursday night at 5 am. A large portion of what I post here will be excerpts from letters -- though, given my respect for my friends and family's privacy, I will try to only include the passages I wrote about myself. If this results in my sounding unbearably self-indulgent (I'm smiling, because it will), I apologize.
I've been wondering, for the first time in my life, if I can write. Rereading an old chapter a couple nights ago, I was shocked at how bad it was. I didn't know until then that I wrote like a blind man drawing: unable to perceive the results. My precision, knocked loose of personal associations, becomes wordiness. My rhythm: the page by itself doesn't remember how sentences should sound. My thoughts: I now wouldn't call them that.
I don't feel depressed by these criticisms. Any flash of (what feels like) objectivity is comforting. And, anyway, most published writing is bad.
[five paragraphs ommitted]
People. Me. What other words have real weight tonight? Words. Frustration. Where'd that come from? Going on: Body. (I can feel the apple, cored on my desk, in my stomach. Apples always make me feel sick, but I forget to not eat them.) Breath. (Cigarettes make me feel each.) Here. (The fucking present tense of me at my computer.) More specific words don't register. I mean, they don't make me feel anything that helps me explain myself.
[two paragraphs ommitted]
The strangest thing about my time in Iowa is that I don't feel sadness. And it's only when I write something like this, or force myself to talk more honestly on the phone, that I think, maybe I'm wrong, and I do feel it, I just don't recognize it. Usually, though, what is, just is. I say depression because I don't understand how else I could be so unproductive, so socially withdrawn, so strange in my habits and negligent towards my responsibilities.
Oh, crap. I'm erasing paragraphs. This could all be rubbish. The more I write, the less likely I am to send this letter. And I want to go on and on, but the more I try to explain myself, the more I doubt the distinctions I'm using.
Words again: Self! Weight <--- the constant pull of arms on shoulders. Me. Such a weird knowledge, that this is the consciousness I'm meant to feel attachment to. I don't feel real attachment to anything this mind is feeling: it's blank, confused, and I am the solidity of words, not it. That's why I haven't stopped writing.
But if I don't stop, I won't send this.
Maybe I'll feel different in the morning.
"After certain nights we should change names for we are no longer the same man."
- Antonin Artaud
For the past day, I've been returning to Pico Iyer's "In the Realm of Jet Lag," unable to finish it. It's barely a page, and is simply written. But when words excite me my impulse is to back away, breathe, calm down before returning to them. Sometimes this also occurs with films; I press pause and pace my room, pleasure as likely as pressure to distress my heart rate. My body regresses to the Victorian era, "the age of nerves" (Vicente Huidobro, “Ars Poetica"), in which nervousness could still exhibit aesthetic sensitivity.
(Related: This morning, OGIC posted about her slowness reading Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus. "…Every second or third sentence seems to contain some startlingly astringent perception about no less sweeping a subject than human nature, or love, or women, or men … Is it possible to compare something to quicksand and mean it as praise?")
Usually, it's a text's language that over-stimulates me. But in the case of "In the Realm of Jet Lag," it's the subject.
A day, a human day, has a certain shape and structure to it; a day, in most respects, resembles a room in which our things are ordered according to our preference. It may be empty or it may be full, but in either case it is familiar. Over here is the place where you rest (10 p.m. to 6 a.m., perhaps), over there is the place where you eat or work or feel most alive. You know your way around the place so well, you can find the bathroom in the dark. But under jet lag, of course, you lose all sense of where or who you are. You get up and walk toward the bathroom and bang into a chair. You reach toward the figure next to you and then remember that she's 7,000 miles away, at work. You get up for lunch, and then remember that you have eaten lunch six times already. You feel almost like an exile, a fugitive of sorts, as you walk along the hotel corridor at 4 a.m., while all good souls are in their beds, and then begin to yawn as everyone around you goes to work. The day is stretched and stretched, in this foreign world of displacement, till it snaps.My days lack any familiar shape, each day starting and stopping at a different time. I have no habits, and no way of keeping track of myself. A couple months ago, I tried:
Friday:woke up at eleven or midnight, went to bed at about 9 am, didn't fall asleep until 3 pm or later on Saturday. Slept until 2 am on Sunday. Don't remember when I went to bed on Sunday -- early evening, I think. Woke up in the early am on Monday and was exhausted by the afternoon.Last night (Sunday), I fell asleep by 10 pm and woke up at 4 am. Saturday night, or Sunday morning, I slept from 7 am to 9 am. Earlier on Saturday, I'd had my Friday's night sleep.