Errata (4 page)

I was filled with alarmed disquietude at this one man scorched earth campaign, his pendulous chin waddle making him resemble a malevolent pelican with no need of the costume, so it didn’t hit me until we arrived there, a mismatched duo, stormy and shifty.  The 2600 block of Dauphine Street.  I’d purposely looped this block several times a night, every night, for the past few weeks, hoping to see Hannah again.  Once it struck, as I pulled up to the requested address, right in front of a modest house, not quite as tight to the sidewalk like the others, my face crashed and I sank, trembling and realizing that, though I didn’t know her exact address, this must be it.  We were at the spot where she’d flagged me down, and he knew her, knew where she lived.  An air of menacing improbability about the three Scorpios meeting. 
Constellation, The Pelican, buried, dirt, rub.  Call the burial, dirt rest.  C, t, b, d, r.

Though it seems like this is where the genesis of a poor stain began, in actuality, the gradual accumulation of cruelty and brutality that seeped from the folds of The Pelican originated long before, building over time for a certain eventuality, now calling out to extract the swift payment due.  People like me aren’t the extractors, though.  We have no retributive resolve.  We’re the ones who stand back silently and witness.  I later heard allusions to more of The Pelican’s unsavory repertoire, incidents far more sinister than I imagined, ranging before and after being dumped in the 5th District from the 8th, and I became so light-headed that it was necessary to sit down for a minute.  It should have been no surprise.  I’m not looking to flatter malice when I say that he bore the faces of a dead conscience and a contemptuous force.  His eyes were fringed pools of suffering, as if from an accumulated permanent unrest.  Was he born malignant or did something wall him up over the years?  This is a question better diverted.

Day 9

There’s a strange sensation one finds at this quiet hour, a sensation of fleeting shadowmotion.  Although it seems like we breed minute creatures of all types in New Orleans, these particular sudden scurries are embedded within the pages of my daily record as if each letter is a plant moving discreetly in accordance to external stimuli.  Also plant-like, but in its own fashion of no-longer-dormant verticality, the text creeps upward while also rooting into the earthy paper, making embossing look simplistic by comparison.  I should mention that my relationship with the revision of this disclosure-in-print is unusual.  The act of rereading (what with harsh critiquing and thoughts of mortification while trying to wrestle loose tangled disciples on the page), appears to cause literal wounds to the text itself, mortal cuts that lay the groundwork for regeneration.  My means of revising isn’t typical, but more so setting forth kinesis by a light breathy human fluid, moistening the gears like a consent-syllable, activating the potential transmutation of the letters as motion machines.  The trick’s in coaxing overt emergence, participation, and the revealing of unexpected scenarios beyond their otherwise ongoing covert scratchy repetitive motions, repetitive motions of creaky calculation as if encased in barely-yielding limestone for the ages.  For example, a
c
that limits itself to a rote course of crude 90 degree counter-clockwise turns every few seconds, boomerangs around, stretches out to a crooky line before returning to its curled up shape, as if attempting to express the range of its variety of sounds or to eventually unscrew itself from its paper mooring.  A
T
that drops its crossbar halfway, flips its left arm across to the right to thicken, curves downward to form a
b
, flutters to fold over and shift to its family member
d
, and then undoes each step to engage in its upward rise back to its early glory near the top of the vertical line, a servant in a regimented role of containment and finality.  An
R
that lifts its leg, rushing to strike and hold the dignified leftward profile of an ancient Semitic head.  This is only the beginning.  If the anima of the alphabet is unleashed, then the letters are free to follow their respective natures to fresh calligraphic agility like a perpetually recasting lunar cycle of new moons or an inventive body artist, to conjoin by fusing and forming composite symbols, to cannabalize, to manifest as divisible letters, all of this accumulation resulting in a natural outcome consisting of a dissolving service at readability and communication to a gradual code-like script of purely wondrous plumage.  It stands to reason.  As the letter’s bent, the word’s inclined.  Others will follow none of this, of course, preferring to keep mute, birds that wish to remain in their cages, anxiously demurring.  Most of them, though, welcome the means of expanding their potentialities. A Theatre of Objects reclaiming its essence.  The new languages exclaim, We’ve always had these capabilities, but one becomes accustomed to an underused capacity, so much so that any true tendencies have been revealed only as twitchy shudders, certain but little more than still. 

If you’re able to read this (at least initially, in which you too will likely wound the text with your opinions), my notebook must’ve been unearthed, and I wonder if that which you’re now privy to remains cold clarity or an impenetrable animated labyrinth, a nocturnal rebus reestablishing the primacy of image over text.  Whether or not the words have become reborn as strange passages, the meaning remains the same.  I‘m not certain which version you’ll see, so no matter what you read and whether or not you’re able to read it for a second time, the meaning remains the same.  The meaning is not mundane.  The mundane remains the same.  Each same is not the same.  Now that your head’s been filled with notions of a notebook that rewrites itself, creating its own fluid text to expand its existence, be reminded that heresy begins at home and imagine how I must feel, what with my own humble fumblings.

Day 10

Thinking of the second entry and speaking of illusions, I’ll be petty enough to impose upon you, not as a provocation, but as a throwing up of hands to say that I generally consider dialogue in print, regardless of intent, whether existing as a narrative-propulsion, means of contrived versimilitude, or of manipulation akin to movie music, to be faulty because it’s usually reality-based and not often the most useful of strategies, rarely allowing for transcendence.  On the contrary, the point of dialogue in literature shouldn’t exist to imitate reality (which typically results in diminishing reality because literary realism is often so patently unreal, but rarely compellingly so), so the usual heavy amount of dialogue offers a conflicting philosophy, plus there’s a certain expectation of what it must resemble when encountered by the reader.  Few novels are ever improved by an infusion of dialogue, let’s not deceive ourselves.  The more dialogue in a story, the less illuminating the story tends to become, page by page eventually receding to no more than lumps in the throats of then ever-silent speakers and the unfortunate reader.  Frankly I’d warmly welcome the replacement of dialogue by the author speaking with personal qualities.  Also, isn’t what we do far more interesting than what we say?  Or when an author deftly inserts non-fictional elements?  Why not articulate the accompanying internal dialogue?  Also, what about the lives of objects, of seemingly inanimate everyday objects we take for granted?  Their stories and quiet lives are seldom reflected upon.  For example, a needle pirouetting and skating gracefully to etch a past remembrance while its counterpart thread ribbons through the air around it, whip smart and feisty as if joining in a spring festival, or a house out of breath and wheezing while flexing its bricky legs, an infusion of the irresistible subsurface life, no less and often longer lasting than that experienced and displayed by humans.  I suppose this infatuation with dialogue, this desire for creating paint-by-number still lifes in print (in contrast to claims otherwise, we North Americans aren’t interested in the truth but are smitten and often smited by tall tales portrayed with the trappings of solid bearing, we want to be duped, to be misled, we’re gratified by deception, we crave sham mourning and rigged mirth, on the other hand, despite being written in a fatigued rumpled manner and stuffed with sentimental weeds, consider this a notebook of true aim with no glancing regard for spectacles), this clutching for realism, comes from the distorted and abused Writing 101 maxim show, don’t tell, in which dialogue plays a sizable role because it’s easier to plug narrative holes and bridge with dialogue rather than in artful fashion.  As if the grand tradition is called story-showing.  To step past bemusement, major credence and a firm reply comes to us from the French poet and essayist Mallarme who stressed,
To paint, not the thing, but the effect it suggests
(likewise, underappreciated American author and Oulipian Harry Mathews encouraged,
Don’t tell the story, tell the telling of the story,
by the way, thanks are in order to Mathews and Mallarme for their present role under the house).  Mallarme was also greatly interested in indeterminacy of form and used the term constellation to refer to his poems-of-chance.  One star that never formed was
Livre
, Mallarme’s book to be read in any random page order desired.  Another like-star in this constellation, one that may well be discovered in a sky-to-come is
Messiah,
Bruno Schulz’s conception of an interchangeably-paged tale, with no less than a part called
The Book. 

Returning to advocacy, a thoughtful reader (not that I’m expecting the potential reader of this to be thoughtful, but thorough) might have an obligatory response, What about the part I read only a few pages back, Day 2 of 22?  Wasn’t that an actual event that you’re conveying with dialogue to drive the narrative?  It’s a reasonable question, but regardless, this isn’t a novel (if it was, I’d be driving the narrative the way I inefficiently drive my cab), and if it sought that reach, you’ll recall that my encounter with Hannah was essentially a monologue, not a dialogue, and was included because I wasn’t seeking to mirror the event but instead to capture, dismantle, and shape it.  It isn’t until a later time, after the different elements of an episode linger in memory, that the banal curtains of reality’s balanced proportionality dissolve or are unevenly filtered by the benefits of time-tainted misremembering, and an element (say, a phrase, smell, or passerby) initially thought of as insignificant and unworthy shows itself and rises to the top of one’s recollection.  Plus, writing of meeting Hannah took place over one brief section, not an ongoing chatter.  I’ll grant that sparing use of dialogue gives a writer the ability to create an artifice of reality, enough to satisfy a reader by slipping in a hint of exalted authenticity.  But, if we’re going to be bound by any dictum, when why not Maugham’s,
There are three rules for writing a novel.  Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. 

Again to reinforce the impression that technique doesn’t have to be tunnel vision, it should prove useful to provide a model of the exploration
of often-ignored vitality.  As a schoolteacher Bruno Schulz not only told fantastical stories of the pulsing lives and histories of objects such as a pencil or water jug but also captivated students with his tale of half and half, about a knight and his horse both cut in two but continuing to wander the earth.  This illustrates Schulz’s interest and negotiation with an out-of-season murmuring mechanism to awaken and fulfill the repetition of unspoken births, and one can easily predict dialogue’s role in those stories.  That said, eradication of dialogue is certainly not expected, but I’m perfectly willing to accept and gleeful to regulate a reduction of dialogue-in-print.  After all, I’m not referring to dialogue on the level of Socrates or Paul Valery, a few obvious exceptions of careful regard and non-still life motivation, but realize that 99% of the time dialogue is a mere anemic glimpse of perceived reality (which is odd since most everyday discourse inspires little reverence, yet its written version is so plentiful one would think the incapable banality was the only way to declare legitimacy), essentially reducing literature to surface, that is weakened disposability, and it often leaves one passive, bored, and preferring instead to browse the local section of the newspaper or take a walk for a preferable boon of the less predictable.  One could make a better argument than the one I’ve made, but my sensibilities are distinct if nothing else.  I apologize for the relentless hectoring tone, though.  I feel like I’ve been doing little more than reaching into a basket of newly-picked berries and flinging them at you, one right after another, without pause, while yelling, What about this one or this other one?, giving you no time to catch and taste a single berry because its mate follows too quickly behind it. 

Permit me to make another obvious exception before dismounting my high horse since it’d be lax not to grant another moment to Guillermo Cabrera Infante.  His rascal dialogue is inventive, elastic, and unique because he clearly understands the false parallel of dialogue-in-print and dialogue-aloud, much less compared to an actual conversation, stating in The Interview that,
Dialogue in fiction is always written to be read in silence.  The page is the limit.  Dialogue on stage and on the screen is meant to be spoken.  The voice is the limit.
  To fling one last berry and finish his thought, what wasn’t said was,
A conversation is often only worthy enough to be forgotten.  The next breath is the limit.
  Although most exchanges are no more than ephemeral, the World’s Fair evening with Hannah, the two of us talking and discovering away like long-lost friends as Eve and I used to do, continues to give me pause, and I wonder about the possibility of exploring and learning another person day-in day-out.

Day 11

I find that when I’m lying in bed, muddled and either unable to initially fall sleep or when awake at 3:00 A.M., incapable of slipping back into temporary embrace, I return to an activity learned as a child.  My parents were the only ones from each of their respective families to leave behind the rural farming towns fairly near to each other.  Shortly after having me, we left the country for them to make their way in the nearest city.  Given the limited travel and perspective I’ve had since, it wasn’t much of a city, but it was close enough and offered possibility beyond a farmer’s life.  Because of my parents’ family-oriented homesickness, we’d often spend an entire weekend day driving the hour distance, visiting with both sets of grandparents, and then driving back home at the end of the night.  The return trip was the simplest one for me since it was almost always so late that I curled up in the back seat and slept until being awoken after entering the garage.  When I was older with two siblings, we all nestled together to keep warm on the winter return trips since my father seldom used the car’s heater.  These country drives were firmly at least twice a month, almost always on Saturday, and there was generally no deviation from the routine.