18.05.00 : drifting

Thursday 18th May

Reading Jane's email was like an instant illumination. It came at a moment when I was meditating on the idea of drifting, and although she divided her email in two parts I felt that they both addressed the same thing: drifting, erring, wandering. And of course she is right when she says that writers haven't addressed this problem (but, is it a problem?) of drifting, or in her words 'dipping in and out,' from a book to another.

I think crossword puzzles are great prototypes for a book project in the sense that they are active (acts of) reading as one goes from clues to dictionaries, to atlases, to amazon.com etc. There should be huge, complex crossword puzzles where a whole fiction (or a treatise) would develop from. Perhaps Borges has already done that but I'm not sure. Or Cortazar.(I'm thinking of 'Blow up' where the photographer discovers a crime through developing a film. He was drifting when he shot the pictures and we, the reader, the spectator, are also drifting in our reading of the book or of the film).

Thus, Jane's book in canon with her friend in Africa is a wonderful idea, and I'm intrigued about the 'gift giving' aspect of it. The distance(s) between the two writers also playing a role in the whole thing (but now I'm drifting again). My own driftings on 'drifting' came about as I was asked to moderate a panel discussion for the School of Visual Arts here in NY. As I let my mind wander for a couple of days searching for a theme a few fragments came together and now they begin to point to something (to itself, to drifting?) that I still don't know exactely what it is but that feels a bit like the music of Debussy where everything is in a state of suspension and there is a fragile understanding of what's at stake but a reluctance in trying to define it too sharply. I guess that this drifting, the practice of drifting, is essential to reading and writing. You know the routine: get out of bed, drink some coffee, feed the cats, collect the dry leaves from the violets by the kitchen's window, read the paper, and then you're ready for the keybord. But then you make some phone calls, play a cd, read a few pages, open that document that you got stuck at a couple of days ago, still nowhere to go, get up, leave the appartment, leave the computer on, run some errands, get back to the text etc. etc. etc.
So, my point is: is it possible to make a point? Is it possible to sit and write a text (or read a text)? Is there a way out of this eternal drifting. I feel that whatever I produced is but a fragment, a by-product of the whole process of drifting. That is how, to borrow Stein's words, 'writing is written.'

I suspect that writing will always go on writing itself regardless of the writer, and it will do so by taking its own time (and place). I just can't rush it. Like that photographer in 'Blow Up' all I can do is to zoom in over and over again and try to read some meaning from these highly abstract shapes.But the scene of the crime (and the scene of writing) is already there, has always been.

We just keep drifting in and out of it.

S.