Preamble. — And from the bowels of the tiring house, Elohim enters solus, and immediately declares it all His Own. In principio erat verbum. And sunbathing, Elohim said, Let there be Light, and diving, Elohim said, Let there be Water, and running, Elohim said, Let there be Flesh, and so on, the prime Visitor, intrepid Tourist, and He wrote a travel guide, sold it to the natives, and made a mint. Sure non prima causa sui, sure nulla origo sui, all creation is legendary, all biography hagiography. Before the world was, the World is, We come before Ourselves, 'tis ever thus. Mary marveled the Creator, Who thought He had created Her and All the Universe, should tell Her also that He might create Himself again in Her, bound His whole Creation in a little O, Merry Mary, laughing at His muddle and small-mindedness. For a god to write a universe is even less of an accomplishment than for a man to write a book, likewise We, although we are already Us, We nevertheless cry out, But let there be Us! We colonize this life, Whoever it already is, and this is Our Book. AOI.
That is the opening of the tenth book of The Swan Of Antares, aka “The Book That Ate My Life”. It has occurred to me this week the several ways in which the creation of this journal may be compared with the writing of Book 10.
I’m sure I’ll go further into this in a future dispatch, but here I’ll just say that, despite its great length, the Swan is not just a sprawl, there’s a lot of structure to it. At the grossest scale, it consists of two “volumes”, each comprised of seven “books”. I’ve written each “book” in a different “voice”, employing a different narrative technique, a different timbre. Some are fairly straightforward, others more psychedelic. The conceit of Book 10 is that it is the journal of Gaven Dekkman, one of our two heroes. So in this sense Book 10 could be called epistolary.
(Dekkman’s symbolic number is 5 — so it’s fitting that he authorially debuts in Book 10, just as Book 5 was the first book centered primarily on him, not the other guy. This is how my mind works.)
Drafting the first nine books has taken me from six to eighteen months apiece. I’ve been working on Book 10 nigh a year. It’s been a struggle — in several ways — not least because, as you can see from that excerpt, Dekkman’s style is eccentric, even tortured: densely allusive, digressive, paradoxical. (But then again, so am I.)
Now Dekkman’s journal is aphoristic, taking its inspiration less from ships’ logs than from philosophers like Nietzsche and Cioran. His entries are titled rather than dated, and like our journal it begins with an entry called “Preamble.” I hadn’t thought of this echo when I wrote and titled the first dispatch, but there it is: the creative imagination is always getting up to tricks, and now and then, to my amusement — or my shock — I catch it out.
Dekkman never settles on a name for his journal, just calling it “Our Book”. It is “Our Book” rather than “My Book” because in it he refers to himself in the second-person plural. And it is “Our Book” in the sense that it refers both to his book and my book; therefore, insofar as I am writing this section of my book through him, we, Dekkman and I, are co-authors. And it is “Our Book” in the ergodic sense that the book solicits the reader’s active cooperation in its imaginative construction — it is yours and mine together.
And the thing is that Dekkman, while keeping this “journal”, is also cracking up. His writing is both a defense against his psychic dissolution and a record of it (cf Gogol’s “Diary Of A Madman”). In another entry he says,
Yet There Is Method In’t. — We write whatever lies upon our minds, with no particular respect for chronology, each entry on a single sheet, sometimes both sides, and arrange them all together to our likings, cutting and trimming our puny sails of paper to our whims, like eyelids, tossing and pasting, shuffling off and shuffling on, these are the days of our lives. We totter upon the brink of recursive absorption, the more we scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr. Monkey, the more our scribbling lies upon our mind, our mind, a singular word for a multifarious effluence, a singular flock of flying thoughts, our mind is like a swarm of hornets from which we flee into a lake of fire. AOI.
Likewise I suspect that one of my impulses in undertaking this journal is self-defense.
It’s a curious thing how we both reveal and conceal ourselves in language. The tornado is our anxiety that perhaps the only thing we actually are is this shifting constructive effort: what we secretly fear is not that we are not the story which we’re telling but that we’re nothing other than the teller telling — that, just as a dance exists only while dancing, so when the teller falls silent she vanishes.
These selves which we think we are, they’re like houses built of words, mortared with grammar, whirling in a tornado. The writer’s work is to pull these bricks in mid-career and rearrange them. Perilous creativity! These days, writing a mad book in a mad world, I feel myself, with Dekkman, coming unjointed.
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