What will the spider do, suspend its operations, will the weevil delay?
All things in moderation; while extremes of sleeplessness lead me eventually to total physical and mental collapse, I find I can't write if I'm well rested. Similar, or different from the (frequently and ostentatiously debunked) principle that you can't write if you are lucky in love? I think different, really I just can't write unless I'm tired because there is a kind of logic that only exhaustion can create, I think, and that is the kind of logic that goes into my writing.
I guess it depends on what and how you write. Some people write like they are building things and other people write like they're throwing things away. And other people (me) write like they are building things with what they threw away. O defenestration! you are a way of life. Perhaps on the same principle that when all the heat in the universe has found its level and its proper place, we will all be dead because that great stillness is entropy, where nothing moves and nothing happens, ever. So perhaps you need some disequilibrium for anything to be going on, and for some people you have disequilibrium in the heart, and in (heartless) others, one must make do with disequilibrium of the mind. - Or maybe it's just that you need to be exhausted and half-dreaming to be trying to build anything out of trash.
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I had a dream that I was back there again. Or I was there again, and I was watching myself (older, later, traitor) and I was glowering because - have you ever considered how much you would hate your future self if you saw her? Every day is a betrayal. You are moving away from everything that makes you yourself. All that you want and fight for now is something that other, later self may cast away without care. Who will protect from this betrayal? Your only fortress is itself compromised. This later self will read your own words, that you write now, as if they came from the heart and hands of another. - which of course they did.
I wrote myself a letter once when I was thirteen. I think I was supposed to keep it five years, til my eighteenth birthday, but it was useless long before then. I had more to say in it but gave up at the end and simply wrote: THIS IS REAL NOW. I threw it away a couple of years ago. No, this is real now. It's no good obsessing about immortality. That being, a decade, a year, a few months from now, has little to do with you save that it knows everything you know. But what use is this knowledge, in memory? If we hear another person talk about their pain, we say, I feel badly for you - or worse, I feel your pain - but we don't, and I'm not being overliteral here, I mean, pain is something so personal that you can only appreciate it intellectually. You can find the words for it, and you can probably approximate a reasonable mental simulacrum, but it's something so visceral, so wordless that you're never going to get close. Not even to your own, in the past. Not pain and not happiness and not this other thing.
I don't often dream about my future self (why jinx it, and anyway, I hate guessing) but I am often preoccupied with what I'd say if I could go back in time and talk to me. "Sorry"? I'm not, (and I think I would understand that, even then). Usually I dream about going back in time and socking my past self on the jaw to divert myself from the course disastrous. There is a poem in the Eye on the World anthology that says different, and includes a much more ambiguous, decorous and useful/instructive scene, but I wrote that to someone else, and anyhow, there is little poetry in a sock on the jaw. The general conclusion is that I would leave things as they are - quite apart from concerns of inadvertently warping the space-time continuum - but because I guess (sometimes grudgingly) that everything has had a good purpose. Or enough things have proven that they have, that I am willing to trust that the rest do too. Or perhaps just that I am loath to give up or take away any knowledge, or educational experience (however unlikely, hideous or surprising), which warning myself away from the crooked path would surely do.
So in my dream I saw myself walk through that dim dusky corridor and past that fountain which means so much to me now. And from that other room I heard someone offer the choice, again, between cleverness and wisdom. And I heard her choose wisdom, and I was afraid. I would have chosen cleverness, without hesitation, and you can see it in all I do. What kind of life must you have led to make such a choice? What kind of life must you have led that you now value wisdom, over its brighter fellow? What places have you been, that you know cleverness is no help to you? - or simply no use. She walked through the glass doors and up those midnight stairs and I watched her go. She didn't stop.
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Sleep has not been forthcoming lately. Four days to study Literature is too long; I don't know how I thought I might have borne it for three years. I was at Amanda's house avoiding discussing The Tempest and we were talking about different academic disciplines as a key to the mind. Moving away from the standard, trite (and inaccurate) view of it as imprecise, the subject of the heart - Literature demands a logic that I have variously described as the logic of irony, of 'fittingness', of parallel and opposition. Literature is the logic of patterns, not causation. But it has a certain appeal: all things in their purposeful and proper place. But if it is not the subject of the heart, it is the only one where the head does the heart's bidding - who else should determine the 'proper place'? The trouble with the study of it is that its protean quality quickly and easily becomes Procrustean; who can study the unfixable? Tie it to to your bed and cut off its head and feet; pronounce this well done.
How else should you keep this traveller in your bed? One must have a little sympathy for Procrustes, whose name means he who stretches; called Damastes, the subduer; called also Polyphemon. He who harms. All these.
Times like this, one must look to the future. Strange how sure I was that I would love Economics. Too little detail, detail which I easily and gratefully mistake for precision. Its models too wordless; its calculations too arbitrary. Why did I take it for granted then that I would know and understand it? As if such things were passed on in the blood. I'll tell you what decided me against it finally: not the numbers or the models, not even the (subtly appealing) underlying assumption that the success of what this subject advocates depends on fooling as many people as possible (while simultaneously assuming some kind of limited inborn wisdom in them); but the realisation that in this discipline nothing happens in isolation. Shift one curve on this graph, somewhere else (impossibly distant to my mind) a curve on different axes must shift in reponse, and more and more curves shift to answer the change you have described here; how do you encompass all this change? To my mind, trees are always falling in the forest, and it matters only to them.
A butterfly trapped in my study flaps its wings, the only air that moves is encompassed by these walls and closed windows - miles away, nothing changes. This is a grave mistake to make, this ignorance of change, the assumption of permanence and of constancy. It doesn't do to dismiss it.
Two down. What is left? Law, that's the very opposite of Literature, and (I would imagine) good for the ailing heart, if strong enough. If the desire to fix the unfixable is a failing in Literature, to pin it wriggling to a card; in Law that is surely a virtue. Literature! All things to all men, that it might by all means save some. Not me. - and History. Oh, History. What have you? Many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, guides us by vanities. History may be servitude, History may be freedom. - See, now they vanish, the faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them -
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
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Things
There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.
-- Fleur Adcock