I am after that sense of America (the way that Uwe was), and I am reading Walden now
and ‘time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.’
But what will I find among these newly shaken urban canyons made of glass and steel and (way downtown after the coming of collapse and then of death) dust?
‘Wherever I sat, there I might live [I am trying to work, I am trying to make, I am trying to write], and the landscape radiated from me accordingly.’
To live along that grid the way that Bernadette Mayer once did. Back in 1971, and it’s July. The way she lives in (and constructs it) Memory.
‘wow/you know what street that is? you wont believe it/i’ll figure it out. yes i do/what?/canal street/oh shit/right?/yeah ahhah/doesnt look anything like it though, i know, someplace outside nebraska or something, that’s what it looks like/that’s a dream a dream i had/is it? you took a picture in it?/yeah/ i took a nap the afternoon of july 4th….’
‘When I first took up my abode in the woods . . . which, by accident, was on Independence day, or the fourth of July 1845’
‘[M]y house was not finished for winter, but was merely a defense against the rain’
A list of impressions perhaps, and perhaps what these might be, as missiles into time and space and rock.
‘This frame, so slightly clad, was a sort of crystallization around me’
‘intransigent prose…communicating in great waves like an apparition’
‘And sometimes, in writing [or in attempting to write] a full American paragraph as it speaks and thinks itself,’
Am I writing down in paragraphs? or are these ‘pieces’? or are these ‘blocks’? Discomforting, it is, that word, unless one is a child. ‘Blocks.’ That thing torn down and yet contained. A feeling (even before Solonga’s monumental window) that’s totally walled up
in side.
Stone slab. Square concrete. Something ‘tomblike.’
‘Booklike.’
‘A book like this is like a dream, or perhaps like one word: in a month, or even, I am certain, in one day, there are enough references, enough proposals, enough innuendo, simply there’s enough stuff!— the usual weekly load—which, if put into language, encompasses, if not everything in the universe, which is what I believe, at least everything in one’s own life, everything “autobiographical.”’
marginalamericannotes.com 