she asks, “what is the work?”
blanchot had this idea of the writer erasing himself in the act of writing. that the writer in essence disappears as a person, as a living thing, thrown into a cavalcade of history and memory and desire and culture in the act of writing, that the writer is no longer there. and i found that appealing as all these french ideas were and are to me, something romantic about disappearance most likely, but i understood and still understand it as well, the disassociation between the self and the act, the giving over, where you become not-you, the confusion ceasing to be an issue between the self and the act. this is not to say writing becomes impersonal, no impossible that, stupid to think it actually, but becomes other, as jabes writes in The Book of Questions, writing as the desert, as exile, or as i had echoed in “Restoration”:
in the desert one becomes other…
far from excluding us, the desert devours us,
swallows our being entirely,
and consumes us whole.
to be consumed by writing, to be devoured. how many times have been i shaken by what i found before me on the page, on the screen, that came from me, so surprised, how did i write that? did i really write that? some metamorphosis, some transmutation, some transubstantiation, some translation of you to not-you and thwarted back again amongst the living. it was also blanchot who intimated that it was only through writing we understood our mortality, we write because we know we will forget, we will be forgotten, we will die and the act of writing, as michaels points out in Fugitive Pieces, is to throw a “brick into the future.”
ah, to bruise the future, smack a brick into its face over and again, a million times, to make it scamper. that is the work.

there’s nothing as beautiful as the fall of summer, the turn from summer to fall, the wind kicks, shakes the trees, they rustle and whisper, cicadas chatter lullabies, a certain kind of peace, the lack of a certain kind of stammer, the frenzy of pointed heat dissipates, abates, all things returning home briefly for a short while, before migration, before the harsh closure of winter.
i will always remember reading faulkner during the fall, my graduate seminar on the author in albany, the one course where my writerly instincts were not thwarted or dismissed, where they actually came in handy. sitting on the stoop, cigarette in one hand, Absalom, Absalom in another, ridiculous mug of coffee beside my feet. a lifetime ago, before that too was shattered for me by the fissures that were echoed in all english departments across the country, the politics of writing versus the politics of literature versus the politics of cultural theory. that rhythm again here, of that kind of life, of solitude and yearning, of being part of a vast stream, uprooted and buoyed, gentle and mysterious, knowing there was so much out there to learn and not being intimidated or threatened or bullied by it, but rather excited by the challenge, invited almost to wade in, to swim with or against the current.
and now fall again, sitting on the porch, different and the same, having changed again, writing again, on the work again, hand skimming the surface yet once more.

sitting outside, writing, the little one comes out.
“what you doing daddy?”
pitched cigarette smoldering on the grass
“nothing baby, just getting some fresh air”
she scrunches up her face, “but there’s nothing outside”
i smile, “sure there is. there’s the wind, look at the leaves, the trees.”
she settles up next to me on the bench, takes my arm around her
“yeah,” she says.