June 2nd 2012

Miriam Henderson in July of 1903 walking home at midnight from a meeting. I’m reading her this time seeing how young she is. 

June 21

At the player’s cue, the fabric of the game-world suddenly warped and shifted so that the landmass seemed to be refabricating itself from the inside out. “That’s the fourth dimension,” ten Bosch said.

Sometimes very briefly imagining the world as locked and moving patterns of invisible non-substance – how that would look, a visualization.

June 22

I like the moments before the sun is over the horizon, when the hills glow evenly bright. It’s 5:30, that early light beyond the window’s wide frame.

When I was climbing over the sill yesterday and earlier when I was trying to jump onto the counter a sensation of quiet surprise that my arms don’t pull me up the way they did and that I’m so awkward getting down again. What I mean is there’s a childish silence in it, it’s dimly conscious. Is it because it has happened before?

Something like it when I’m writing. When I read over an email I've written I’ll notice I’ve left out a word or miswritten one. Writing here I erase more and ponder more, there isn’t elastic drive.

June 30

So far today – cooling at nearly five – a lot of Deadlock. Thoughts I can have about it while I’m being her. Thoughts she can have about her work in the form and time of me. 

What I notice more than I did forty years ago is  the shapedness of her books and the ways she’s remembering young uncertainty and provinciality. When I read it first I was sunk into the pleasure of intelligence described from inside, so many thoughts voiced I’d had silent. Something I’m more conscious of now - that comes from her method? - is that it’s meta-conscious and so situates itself behind the language self to include nonlanguage, what I’d now want to call the whole body. Meta-consciousness is an idealist stance it seems, like LSD: she describes changes in light and space that are actually changes in herself, so that the room she’s in expands and contracts, dims, brightens, wavers.

July 1st

In Deadlock she 25 and Shatov is 22. Her friendship with Shatov is a marvelous story, conversations told in detail, Shatov so really discovered. The way he plays straight man to her ignorant excesses but then also leads her along, she marveling at being led. Their young open-heartedness with each other. The way she is embarrassed to be seen with him but constantly finding him beautiful.

She's funny, the interior way she shows Miriam getting tipsy on her first glass of beer.

She passed, talking emphatically, out into the wide dimly-lit sky-filled East End street, and walked, unconscious of fatigue, carrying Mr Shatov along at his swiftest plunge, mile after mile, in a straight line westward along the opening avenue of her new permanent freedom from occasions.

It’s a story in which she discovers she’s a writer.

The early sentences were forgotten and unfamiliar. Re-read now, they surprised her. How had she thought of them? She had not thought of them. She had been closely following something and they had come […]. They were alive, gravely, after the manner of her graver self. It was a curious marvel, a revelation irrevocably put down … reflecting a certain sort of character … more oneself than anything that could be done socially […] and not oneself at all, but something mysterious, drawn uncalculatingly from some fund of common consent, part of a separate impersonal life she had now unconsciously confessed herself as sharing. […] this something would continue, it was herself, independently. It was as if there were someone with her in the room, peopling her solitude and bringing close to her all her past solitudes […]. Never again, so long as she could sit at work and lose herself to wake with the season forgotten and all the circumstances of her life coming back, as if narrated from the fascinating life of someone else, would they puzzle or reproach her. […] Those strange unconsciously noticed things, living on in one, coming together at the right moment, part of a reality.

It starts as she’s running upstairs after her first meeting with Shatov. She comes into her room, looks at the sky, and then grasps how the meeting has been. “Philosophy had come, the strange nameless thread in the books that were not novels.” 

In my immersed reading I’ve never thought of her narrative designs. I haven’t thought of the books or sections as such.

- In there a grasshopper lights on my forefinger: its perfectly marked little back seems a gentleman’s tweed in the context.

I’m reading what she wrote in London in 1920 nearly a hundred years later in a place where there are open miles instead of thoughts. Breeze from the southeast swaying the canopy. Chair facing blue Cuyamaca Mountain with its much-dotted foothills. Fields now the color of wheat.

She’s interested in mistakes. Miriam gets something wrong, as when she’s playing the piano and assumes Shatov has come into the room and proceeds as if he’s there but it’s someone else – that sort of moment recognizable and never mentioned by anyone before. No it’s not mistakes she’s interested in, it’s those sorts of unspokenness.

In under a spotlight now. The sun directly overhead, even a bit north of directly overhead, shining white on the page through a hole in the canopy.