Anonymous, unread, forgotten...
They Said Everything would Be Okay
All books are like this; they stand shoulder to shoulder in the library stacks; perhaps they are “popular” at first, perhaps not, but eventually they stand anonymous, unread, forgotten; and that is how it should be, for that is how it is with lives.
—WILLIAM T VOLLMANN, The Rifles (1994)
May 11, 11:57 P.M.
In my reading chair in my living room beneath my brightest lamp, the rest of the lights in the house off, trying to remember the earlier version of myself who could commit to the optimism of sitting down and writing a thing as if it mattered, could matter, been at it working on this Vollmann profile I’m working on, I’m going to need the money soon and so I know it will get done when that time comes, but in the meantime I’ve just been reading, reading the Vollmanns I haven’t read, or don’t remember well enough to write about, when Max and I interviewed him just over a month ago, throughout that conversation, the transcript of which I’ve been going over and massaging, it’s hard to know what exactly to cut and what to keep, in the Age of the Livestream it’s almost like everything should stay, the pauses, the awkward exchanges, but since it’s for a Publication I’m going to try to reduce it down to Vollmann’s best meteors of wisdom — the clock just struck twelve, I heard my watch go off somewhere across the room, so it’s May 12 now — but Vollmann mentioned a good number of his favorite protagonists throughout that conversation, most of whom I knew, though a couple I didn’t, or didn’t realize the significance of the first time I read the books in which they were referenced, or hadn’t realized they were the book’s hero, this is one of my goals in the piece, to indicate who the heroes in The Ice Shirt, in Fathers and Crows, in Europe Central are, and why, they each have a hero, Vollmann is at his core a heroic writer, I’m realizing, not to mention is himself a national hero— but so I’ve been reading every book with a hero he mentioned in our talk—
But what got me writing this wasn’t specifically the Vollmann, it’s this stuck static slightly confused feeling I’ve been feeling, that I always forget that Proust jolts me out of, a single page of Proust does it, I just woke up from a nap, all weekend I’ve been working on various tasks with more pressing deadlines than the Vollmann, reading and thinking and touching up my draft since I’ll be driving up north to work with Eric first thing in the morning and all week, I worked all last week with him doing carpentry again, remodeling a kitchen, tearing out the old one and replacing it with new flooring and sheetrock and paint and a new sink and counter and the nice new cabinets Eric made—
Paused to roll a cig and now out on my stoop smoking sitting in my fold out chair, 12:06 now, listening to Nils Frahm’s top songs just playing however they play, completely dark night out can’t see a single star, and it’s a bit too cold to stay sitting out here, and I’m just about out of propane for my little Buddy heater I’ll often spark beneath my fold out table so I can sit outside indefinitely—
Back inside and like I was saying it was uncanny how I just grabbed one of the Prousts at random, Volume V, The Captive and The Fugitive, I read them all in college and I’ll reread Swann’s Way but I never randomly open to one of the middle ones, it was only out because I got into a thing on the pod some months back when people were saying Proust was seven volumes and I was convinced it was six, like My Struggle, since Knausgaard supposedly only read Proust while writing My Struggle and that’s why he made his series six volumes, to mimic Proust (it’s because “the Captive” and “the Fugitive” are sometimes individual volumes, but more commonly are a single volume, making them total six volumes…)— but I read a single page of the Proust and immediately wanted to start writing in this immediate curious way again, it was amazing—
How it starts, day is finally dawning, I wonder if this is the same night he tries to go to sleep in the first volume, At daybreak, my face still turned to the wall, and before I had seen above the big window-curtains what shade of colour the first streaks of light assumed, I could already tell what the weather was like—, it’s gotta be the same night, what is it about this mode, which Bernhard, which Fosse, do so well, where no time passes real time, very little time passes, and we fold our memories and scenes and observations and whatever scant wisdom we were able to pick up along this short blip of time we’re here into that limited stretch of book-time, I just love that mode, and I realized it’s not just that Proust moves so patiently and perceptively and clausally expansively through time in his work that makes it infectious, it’s the combination of this sort of enforced myopia, the limiting of one’s purview to what you’re focused on — some type of bird chirping layered over this sort of metallic organ in the Nils Frahm now, I’m tempted to look up to check the song title but want to keep my fingers typing, this just feels good to let things flow and bleed and leak out like this, I’ll check back on it and let you know later — but so it’s something about Proust focusing on his memories and knowing, as a reader, that you’re going to stay locked in on his core memories and him sitting in bed thinking about his dead mom and himself as a child trying to go to sleep, to make it through the night…
and I’m now naturally segueing into the second part of what makes Proust and good literature good is his melancholy, his Okayness with the sadness, I’ve been editing the talk I did with Max, I’ll post it soon so you guys can flame me in the comments and in your tweets when I’m literally just gifting you gleaming nuggets of light in this dark bleak unforgiving world, but I don’t know if he or Harold or anyone for that matter agrees with me, though that’s neither here nor there, it’s probably a temperamental preference, but when you don’t avoid the melancholy with mania, when you just sit and dwell in the melancholy, find a quiet strength despite it, this is what Proust does, this is what good Literature is, in any case it’s what made me start typing this now.
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12:22. A calmer Frahm song now, just piano with a bit of reverb, I just put my feet up on the coffee table in a weird semi-leg-crossed position except I’m too far away so I’m sort of elongated, I feel a bit like a praying mantis, or a woman in labor, but it’s comfortable for now—
I think I’ve just been feeling such a deep core cosmic sadness about some recent developments that I won’t go into fully just yet, but will if I’m forced to, it’s just that so many people, I feel, experience such crushing hardships, and are in so much pain, and there are so few things that can ameliorate these facts of life, the strange courses our lives take, the actions taken that you can’t take back, conditions you find yourself in that you can’t, for the life of you, just bootstrap your way out of, and there are so many lazy toxic fake remedies to these facts that are pushed on us, that we push on each other, as if there’s a cure, and there are so few things that can induce any lasting calm, and one of them, I must believe, is to try, however you can, to shape these core pains into some type of concerted action, some type of crystallized art, mold them into concentrated compact communicable text-blocks, and it’s just so nonsensical and maddening all this chatter about
