Notebooks, Second Draft

——Of course I am adding to what I have already accomplished, and even filed away, while at the same time clearing out more space–for new constructions, fabricated in all earnestness, fledgling ideas barely decked out which are, however, part of the same great project of awareness, the explication of the expanding mystery of my own existence.  I am a master destroyer, and fantastic builder. It is impossible to write without a sense of continuity, and a built-in cognizance of what I have written before. But the more I accomplish, the more a desert ahead of me is exposed, the greater a need for further exploration. Supremely, I show up the poverty of my own poetic images, which as soon they are as born cry out for partnering expressions. And witnesses.
——Surely I must take pride in what I have managed to salvage from life, or even work into an impassioned narrative. I am cognizant of how I have foisted off on many listeners, things they later could later claim as their own.  I consider these seductions as worthy efforts, in my always novice efforts to participate in the world. There is vouchsafed also a type of pure, spirited invention, gathering a sense of eternal glory, if I might put it that way–and it is as if I assume my readers are even up to date on that ambition for permanent selfhood. I position them. They are going to receive the very latest and most problematic of my whims, with proper caution–which means latent, and excited comprehension. Or even better that they may appropriately frown, when a sentence dips, when I misstep, dally on the sidewalk, turn back and merely look like a schoolboy, and fail to provide them with something carrying into the next scene.
——The point is, though I operate strictly on my own terms, and at full capacity, I bring the imagined audience along with me, anyway. It’s a contradiction, isn’t it?  Unlocated as all those people you carry around in your mind are, I mean scattered and irretrievable in any daytime–hard as it is to gather them, nevertheless if one should actually find these listeners, this frolicking audience, and speak directly to them–well, it would be like one were dead, or something. Impossibly beyond this life, out of this constant situation upon situation.  It is not really ever to be considered that one can rally in one place all those to whom one wishes to speak. But not really to speak to, just yet.  Am I putting this too clumsily, or inelegantly?  Perpetuating too many an ecstatic dialogue?

——-Events, they are what rule the immaterial world, where you are running errands.  They only rarely combine into stories in which several people visibly participate, but still a relentless barrage of small events have you marching around, and pausing in wonder at your own outlandish storehouse of references.  I am not one who can foresee these events that, later, have me ensnared, but I can sardonically argue that I saw them, or the shape of them, coming.  At least enough, say, to have buffered and virtually absorbed the impact, made amusement even of any seeming consequences. And then I can also quickly adjust the future, such a hero am I, so that I appear to be still roughly in stride with my own life. But it is alot of shadow-play, and reckoning with mystery, and constant rephrasing.
——-Unseen events are shooting through time and space to the center of a persons’ life, and arriving, They are made of nothing at all, but combine things that were waiting in some realm of unfinished meaning. Everything is tending towards ultimate meaning, on the level of the most personal. Events in my life are intangible, they are connective tissue, shadows on a wall.  More untraceable than thought, for thought–though it is also unreal–has an immediate partner in simple actions. Thought straps one into comical action, I have noticed. While events, what are they?  They are simply comprised of floating meanings, encircling and directing and charming us, or ensnaring us within their unfinished storylines.  Where one is, likely or not, punished for being attentive.
——-Punished, I am punished by this life, which will not let me relax. I am a person who is always trying to devise and determine the world from the point of view of others. All I do is think about other people. And so, I get my fate. A person like me will always be lamenting what seems like a lack of events on the horizon. The master irony is all consuming, others seem far more busy, to the person who is always standing around with the most analysis, the most ideas–which he could turn into plans, turn into events (it seems), if the right people were listening. But they aren”t, they are turned to the wall. Lost in shadows. Such a person sees the vast emptiness between events, and that he cannot master the way they occur. The man of action is forthwith stalled. This is because events themselves are nothing real, but are wholesale fabrications formed by earnest behavior, suggestions that mostly do not come to fruition. Events, they are borrowing from sources beyond us, and  connected on a plane transcending any one person’s ability to perceive, and quickly rearrange, or judge.

——-“Every person is clearly, oddly unique–a triumph over all definitions of humanity. Such a one is perpetuated as if guaranteed to outlast any fate, really, any limiting notion others might have of them–which must prove secondary, if you consider the sheer fact of their own self. There is nothing more odd than a person, when you come down to it. The self is pre-eminent, I think it must be, because you just can’t get around it.  Especially, it is especially so, by this line of thought, that death surely is an insult, very rude, by this token. Simply impossible to foist off on any one person, safe within the citadel of their own thinking . It is a point of view situation, one has to think.  Even though people do not outwardly display such valiant, inner confidence, and even appear quite vulnerable, and fragile, like they could be run over just crossing the street, it not true that they can just be knocked off what is, for each, an imperial center, a pedestal, where they are immune to most all the problems of the world, really.  I will go even further, and say a person must know that what happens in life cannot even claim to be the full story.  For even once life envelopes a person completely, and all their activities have them running from one place to another, they still have endless, pleasant refuge in their thoughts, they are a walking citadel–there is my image. For it is always totally strange to be conscious, and so present in every moment. Surely this is why no one, really, wants to be anyone else.”

——There is no question that I believe–I keep coming back to it in my reflections–that a person who comes to my work with high expectations will read it differently from one who comes to it randomly.  Though sometimes I think quite the opposite! That a person who comes to my work with no expectations, will read it differently from one who already has delusions, I mean decidedly false hopes–of whatever variety they must be. Or, need I say it, there is the one wearing a ready frown. One way or the other, I am hopelessly confused, as to what state of mind I expect, or hope, my reader to be in! But the further and deeper truth is I generate more content just from thinking about this shifting, wary, expectant, hypothetical reader. I like that! My hypothetical reader!  Perpetually, I am in a very agitated state, I have a highly frivolous relationship with any reader who lights upon these passages, which in themselves are always propositions. My writing largely consists of an explanation of itself; it is essentially a defence, of a lifelong project, a drawn-out strategy, like an acceptance speech I keep giving, or a sermon couched in apologetic terms.   I am preparing notes, examining my own working methods, questioning my own logic, presently, for one or another of these meandering, though artful talks, which are considered in advance, then caught up in their own confusion.  This is the score, and the constant paradox, that I am preparing myself for what appears to be a spontaneous address, profoundly without regard for the actual audience. Because–strickly speaking I am going to be responsible to that audience, right around the corner,  just if and when I decide what the long prepared for occasion requires. I will have become totally voluble, just as I arrive at the abstract question of my usefulness. Abstract indeed, and swarming with a kind of promise. A cascading light.  One cannot tell from what direction this powerful, I want to say illicit, illumination comes. Whence it originates. In my path, though, are translucent buildings, somehow blotted out from afar, and yet bursting through the interior. It’s an expansive moment, in a vice grip.

——-The setting may seem to be lasting, but it isn’t eternal. The impression is flowing from one moment to the next, on this streetcorner where I arrive once again, stop and pivot.  The abberrant thought always hits me, right here. I think that reality cannot be witnessed by those who have left reality; for the vantage point is gone. Only the living can witness life, time is a medium all around us . . .   It could be that these great souls, the dead, these people who have passed out of life, have an alternate view of it. But that is just it, isn’t it? It would have to be quite different, unheard of, and  just to the degree that I hear the silence of the night around me.  Life is a  privileged arena, a totality without escape routes.
——No aerial view exists, that drumbeat scene just persists, and slightly alters its messages; the damp shadows, the unfocused moon beyond the splintering red lights, the brick wall–this is obscurity, tenuous, and it is all we know. It was the silent happening of the traffic light changing that quietly informed me, once again. A thought already formed, it just jumped into my head. The dead, nobody in history, knows I am here.
——I get the chilling idea that this world is on its own, and many others have gone off to join a different, majority view of the universe at large. This obscure street corner in time is abandoned to the only witness of one who passes by–whose forcible thinking drives him to dire, but spectacular conclusions, severing the moment from plausible eternities, condemning it to shreds of  memory.  Then I have to ask, where is this held, and how can it compete? I mean with the superior arrangements the dead have already discovered? I think to develop a superior attitude myself, as one who is stranded in life. In a mocking tone, in surviving, I challenge the baseline mystery.
——Many songs convey the idea, a scrapbook of emotions can be teleported to the longed-for dead, who are pictured as grieving.  Quite sincerely, with faultless lyrics, he or she absurdly tries to reckon a radical isolation, but in reality the night has louder voices.  There is no place to stand outside this whirling of artificial lights, there is no upper atmospheric view of things happening down here, in a skirmish.  As I bend down and pick up a nickel on the sidewalk. Or decide not to move, but stand rock still, which gets me only more into the center of this .  . . infallible universe.
——Time surrounds you, is jealous, it has sewn up alternate routes, including those in your thoughts. Memories are time-stamped, earthbound,  labelled in chronological order first of all. Oh yeah, that is the truest thing I have said yet; one knows more or less when it happened, even when they forget the what.  What might still be under discussion! I know exactly the order of my emotional discoveries, and cannot be controverted, in that arena.

——These old movies –it is hard to believe they were once brand new movies. They seem to be just thorough-going old movies. Like it was even obvious to anyone who sat down in a theater to see one of them, these projections, hoisted up in a kind of remarkably rickety medium, that these were historical in the first sight of them, which means that these movies were preliminary and they projected a future. The audience knew that they were viewing the beginning of something, and beginnings are sentimental. The first movies put you in a mood. Movies had a future, and the first try-outs were obviously that, so no one could have thought they were contemporary, but they immediately viewed them as old movies, spinning in time. People watching could laugh at the primitive techniques, the blatant plots and familiar characters, the incompetence, the miraculous dissembling of the obvious. I stay up late at night and watch old movies sometimes. And I think, what a treat to see such innocence.  I think, it was a more inventive time back then, people allowed ideas, roughly formed, knowing it was the inflowing of the future–which is where we are now. We are in the future of those old movies!  And we don’t allow anything like that, we are sophisticated. Is that it?  That we require . . . new movies. We even remake old movies, which were, as I said, old to begin with. An astonishing reversal has occurred here, and in a relatively short span of history.
——The cogent thesis I wish to explore (to come at this another way) is that the old movies were old to begin with. This may be hard to comprehend for people nowadays, who live as if they were in a present tense movie themselves. But what I am doing is speculating.. I speculate that people in the past were excited to watch the original movies as tentative explorations, ordinary scenes just borrowed from life, miraculously projected in a very tentative fashion, handled quite badly in a ridiculous form of presentation, meant solely to amuse. Cranky traditionalists at the time thought that movies could never make new content like privileged art and literature always had.. But the dichotomy is more profound, there was technology, a driving force of nature, ideas about reality, driving this new medium.  People could create the historical back then, whereas nowadays, so desperately creative as we are, we conceive of the absolutely new, and we can contemplate the past as a category, and invest our imagination in it, for one motive or another.
——I think it is only now that we indulge in what is brand new, but only if it is utterly spiffy and pain free, sparkling. People in the past limped along under a burden of being in the past, I think, and I think, and am saying over and over here, people who made these old movies actually made them as old movies. Here me out. It is like furnishings were needed. Everything was invented in this way, to get furnishings for the present hour. And now we lapse into wonder at the the sight of anything old, as if to ask: how did it get here? I am thinking they brought it in deliberately, or at least half-consciously, with a sense of destiny: to make a future world. This is the future world these old movies were meant to be seen in, repeatedly by modern audiences.  Now it is that certain point where audiences are watching so many old movies, that some genius, glutted by this inheritance, gets the bright idea and finds the gift of artistry, to make a new movie. One which resembles reality scene by scene so frightening in verisimilitude, that it will be a red carpet–virtually a transition to . . . where imagination spins its wheels.
——Originally movies were clumsy improvisations, they were modern art, of course–or they were art’s cousin, advertising and propaganda. They are driven by either high motives, or low motives, but the point is they were actually new. But what is actually new is done in light of the future in which it will shine. You see. But now we have reached the apogee, the brick wall.  But now, now virtually all movies are made with pretensions to be like life; the artist is gone, and everything is commercial. Even the technology has taken over. And the content is entirely recycled from the past, even incestuously feeding off old movies themselves, but more often off old books.  It’s a sub-genre, anyway, and I am not sure why I am challenged to figure it out, except that it is so obvious that the old movies were never new, and that the new movies will never be old . . .