The effort to begin again. To mark what? To say what? Tuesday afternoon, summer. Tasks I set myself: to organise works in progress into the six drawers of a tallboy. Pompous phrase: works in progress. What does it mean? Bad half essays and bad notes towards essays. I entirely lack the temerity to finish what I've written. I've lacked it for a long time.
Do I believe in what I've done? Did I ever? How did I ever raise myself above the page (rather than being collapsed alongside of it). Above it, and in command, letting sentence follow sentence: how is that possible? How to finish a single, determinate line? Half-essays, notes towards essays, three dots constantly turning any sentence from finishing. A few phrases, and then three dots.
Incomplete thoughts. Thoughts of incompletion, unfinishable, uncontainable. Sentences cored out and worn away. I lack the temerity to finish. The belief. I believe in none of it. Still, there they are, half-essays and notes towards essays. There they are, more than essays in lieu of themselves. Perhaps they believe in me, I tell myself. Didn't I write them? Don't they attest to my power to write? A power, it is true, that has dispersed in all directions.
There's no one here, I tell myself. Perhaps the half essays, the notes towards essays, will bring me back to life, as a mirror image conjuring an original. Once you raised yourself above the page, I tell myself. Once you were capable of that. And now? Every beginning is arbitrary. Nothing can harden itself into a origin.
Half essays, notes towards essays: how to mark what does not allow a beginning? How do you mark it, the incapacity to begin?
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