888

an anti-memoir

This is... a phenomenological novel. This is an anti-memoir. This is a memory-erasing machine. I have 888 notebooks on a bookshelf to prove it. Evidence for your computer files. Everything will be revealed. All drawers unlocked. All passwords made visible. Prepare yourself. Call your supervisor. Call your secret agent. Send a text message to your preferred investigative reporter. We are going into the labyrinth. And you might want to purchase a spool of thread.

I have written my greatest novels while driving a 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle on the superhighways of Amerika. There is no “electronic transference” device... so all is lost... Alas! What remains... are a few thoughts scattered in spiral & composition notebooks. And I will try to recreate a superstructure for you here.

This will be a laboratory experiment. So you might want to put on a white lab coat and plastic safety goggles. Language is far more explosive than most people realize. Collide two words together and ... POOF! ... the planet implodes & explodes.

Let’s write badly. Really. It’s okay. I do not want good poems. I want bad poems.

Perception. What? You heard me. You see me, I think.

Let it rain... let it rain like fuck... I don’t care... anymore.

Now I am in my apartment. Typing like a freakshow. No words satisfy the moment. Language disappoints. I keep writing. You never know.

I eat a Bronx Bomber from Othello Deli. It is delicious, I must say. If I can’t write a novel after eating this thing...

Wintry rain in spring, of course. I admire the neon-green aftermath... the grass, the trees... a river breeze... which, coming from churning brackish waters, is a sea breeze... & how the salt air invigorates!

People speak of June. And I think of December. Let us begin at the beginning. Wherever that is. Astronomers tell us that the Andromeda Galaxy is 2 million light-years away. A blink of an eye. Augenblick.

Research... what is it? Is it researching the superstructure of medieval castles? As a writer, I drift... a digital being in the noösphere.

A crisis of human thought. Thought emergency after thought emergency. Are we in danger?

I try to outthink myself. And I always lose.

The walled city-fortress of Prague... is on my mind. As is the great sea fortress of Dubrovnik. And the walled city beyond Wall Street... in lower Manhattan. And I walk past Bowling Green on Broadway. And thousands of people are lined up to rub the bronze balls of the Charging Bull.

I forget. I keep forgetting. I am the anti-memoirist. I erase so I can create. I forge ahead. There is no stopping me. I do not exist.

I am a forgetting machine. The “I” was deleted. Now, there is just a machine... an infinity loop.

Are you keeping track? Are you calculating?

Let us take Notebook 444 off the shelf. Very interesting, very interesting. It says that Blanchot says: “From Kant onward, the philosopher is primarily a professor” & it is not without its consequences. Am I a professor? Hardly. I am an adjunct lecturer.

The adjunct lecturer is a vagabond: errant, restless, a wanderer...

Is writing about writing... writing?

Nietzsche.

Bataille.

They are exceptions.

I will now attempt to eat a tangerine.

As you can imagine: there is no thing to imagine.

There is no tangerine.

Or is there?

I need a paragraph with girth. Something to get us somewhere. Tangible. Palpable. All this abstraction is driving me bonkers. Bonkers in Yonkers. I am nowhere near Yonkers. Not really. Although I spent more time there than I realized. In a little town called Bronxville. Yes... me & Don DeLillo... passing each other without realizing it.

I am thinking about something the particle physicist Brian Cox said about the Universe: “The distances are terrifying. The scale of the thing is terrifying.”

Am I afraid?

Are you?

The space, the rift... what are we trying to say?

We speak... we blurt things out.