email for nothing

It has been a few some many years since I have posted on this Substack, and it feels like the right time to start again, though it escapes me what I should be writing about. I have the sense that if I write it, it will come, whatever it is, that I will know it when I see it, when I write it, and then it will no longer be it at all, because writing will be a verb again and not a noun, a participle, I guess, I used to know the terms for parts of speech, you could have called it my job, and could surely remember them again, but I choose not to, because even the act of minor fastidiousness is an interruption to whatever this process is. The writing process, you know. More than a decade ago, before I knew anything about meditation or no-self, before autofiction was a thing in America, I realized that writing was, for me, an inquiry into the self that was or was not writing, the self I could not find, the I I could not find, the God who had abandoned me. Where was writing coming from. Not from thought, whatever I might like to think, but from some place where thought collapsed, usually under pressure of a deadline and a minor breakdown, and something else started to come through. I found myself places. People showed up and talked to me. Words appeared at the cursor. Now I would be tempted to speak of channeling or the higher self or the waking dream or some other term from the New Age or Theosophy or, vaguely, woo, but even that is just a gesture without ground, one turtle down the turtles, until we finally get to the unmoved mover (Himself a Turtle). That is, only God or divinity can be writing this, filtered down through various planes or bodies or enfoldments of awareness and consciousness (to use jargon once again), and thus and therefore through me and my fingers, with my mind only inflecting things, like a work in piss-poor translation. I can only corrupt the signal, and the work is to do less, to get out of the way of what is pure, or to expand my capacity to hold the tones and overtones at once, and let them be concentrated into a single verbal vibration, let’s say. Childlike openness with an adult nervous system, capacity to hold a harmony without needing a nap or throwing a tantrum. It seems to me that there are levels to this vanishing back into the childlike. Perhaps multiple voices can stream in and argue with one another or traverse the worlds, and then you have the makings of a Musil or Gaddis or Bolaño novel. But I do not speak from experience. I feel I am finally approaching the not-knowing whence I can finally begin to say anything true or to lie in truthful ways. Humility and ignorance, surrender.

Art is short, life is long. A few years ago, I cannot remember how many, some hack told me that everyone thought I had gone crazy and was never going to write again. I told him I felt saner than ever and I was learning how to write again. Of course we were both wrong. I’m going to publish something short or long on here every day until the end of the month, after which, no-idea.