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1.

There’s that one Magritte painting that depicts the back of a man’s head twice. Once in the real world, once in a mirror. A reflection which is nothing of the sort. Maybe it is this very closedness that I am referencing when I talk about inability to find my way into writing; an impossible-to-fulfill expectation, the absence of my own or any face…

July 23 2023

1.

Yesterday that was all I could say. The rest got ruined, my feelings a billowing stain. Anyway, I’m seeking a pathway into the fictive mode.

(Tangent: I told someone I wanted to write fiction and they asked “does that mean real or fake?” I’ve thought about the arbitrariness of it before— the divide between fiction and nonfiction. After all, can any writing come from an unreal place? [Tangent within a tangent: maybe ‘uncreative writing.’ I digress.] It seems meaningful, serendipitously and cosmically so, that the terms fiction and nonfiction so frequently need reclarifying for those who don’t engage with them constantly. Watch how the blurring of the right lines turns into a way in.)

I need to live the story then write it. The protagonism of my protagonist must stand up to interrogation. I must create characters and use them to observe each other. (At first I accidentally typed “muse” instead of “must.” So perhaps I need that, too.)

So many projects are happening but not happening. There is also the multi-part essay I’m writing about Blackness and avant-garde poetics. I guess I’m saying the only thing lacking is focus, not time. Which is to say I’m all optimistic.

2.

An image I love: that we could turn into the trees. Most recently I read it in a piece from Lyn Hejinian’s My Life:

I would be aloof, dark, indirect, and upsetting or I would be a center of patience and material calm. So that later, playing alone, I could imagine myself developing into a tree, and then I yearned to do so with so much desire that it made me shapeless, restless, sleepless, demanding, disagreeable.

See also: “Longing” by Czeslaw Milosz, “Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America” by The 1975, an entire section of Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour…

I wrote this in my journal while sitting in the park a few weeks ago:

The nature of the world is a surrounding. My dance is a cattail swaying, my immovability as still as packed dirt, all lit up in the company of stars. As I walk thru the source of my healing, connected to varied immortalities of breath, I am present. A dandelion has no secrets, like my heart. Every step challenges, then opens. Birdsong and wind, this whole process of relief, quickening and slowing with nowhere to be, no truth but the visible and metaphysical experience of here-ness.

Not a very beautiful or smooth paragraph but journals are for capturing exactness, the moment. And in the moment I would’ve been content to turn into a tree.

July 24 2023