Beckett

Yesterday was crazy productive. I was working on p. 5 of chapter 1, which I thought I would be done with by 4:30 (I hoped so because everybody was going to a swimming hole then and I wanted to go). Ended up working until 6, eating a fast dinner until 6:20, then working until 8, when there was a poetry reading (Ranjani Murali, Marie Ponsot) after which I returned to the studio and worked until 11:30 that night. But I finished part 5, and I was really happy with it. Not sure if I have the courage to return to it today and confirm that I'm actually happy with it (I started drinking around 9:30 last night, so the last little bits in the end might have come out of a mild drunkenness.

Pessoa says, "If a man only writes well when drunk, I would tell him: get drunk. And if he said to me that his liver suffers because of that, I would answer: What is your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you do, while the poems you write live forever."

Now I'm on part 6, which is exciting because it's the first section I've gotten to that I have brief notes for, but have not yet written a single word of a single draft of. That is to say, I've entered the realm of completely fresh construction, write new, not rewriting. The prospect is scary and exciting.

Part 6 is all about the Law, so I'm going to include some parodies of Kafka and his critics, with some Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' thrown in there.

I leave you with the last few sentences of one of my favorite books, Molloy, by Samuel Beckett:

"But in the end I understood this language. I understood it, I understood it, all wrong perhaps. That is not what matters. It told me to write the report. DOes this mean I am freer now that I was? I do not know. I shall learn. Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining."