Washed up on a bank, high enough that I can’t see the river going by. The sun.
J. has her academic work, with dates attached. So we both have paths that are supposed to branch into other paths, though it all seems a bit trackless at times—if the road on the map turns into an unpaved dirt road, does that make it false? What if the dirt road is only an abstraction drawn over a landscape of sand?
Another map of the interior in here. I do know how to draw maps of other things, but most of them are going into the fiction. There’s a certain kind of gaze on the wider world that is alien to me right now: to insist, this is the literature of the present, these are the politics of the present, this is the emblem of the present. For some reason it’s important to be contemporary. As if disappointing books disappoint because their forms don’t reflect the present, and not because their execution is just plain boring. The books that are self-conscious about the present are the worst of all. And then the theories of the present: someone says, the culture is sick in this way, someone else says, you’re ignoring the other way in which the culture is sick, and so back and forth, a doctors’ squabble in the ER while the patient croaks. I will say both that there is no saving the patient, and that fatalism is easy and no help.
If I’m not for cures, or snake oil labeled as a cure, then I must be for elegies—as I think I’ve said before. Elegies are no help either. Then they differ from fatalism how? It might be like the difference between a) a simple materialism, and b) asserting that this world is the only world, but wanting to address it as one addresses God. This is deep water now, but of course no one asked for my help anyway. If you want to help, you could donate to Pakistan, like Manan says.
