First Thoughts

… i am up too early… awake at 2 AM, then again at 3:15 AM… out of bed at 3:45 AM… Fiona acts like she will come with me then resettles on the bed… Chas stays asleep until after i am downstairs making coffee, feeding the cat, taking my BP meds… i hear the substantial thump of Chas jumping down off the bed… i put on a coat and shoes on in anticipation Fiona will come too and i will have to take her out for a walk, but she does not…

… i let Chas out… let Chas back in… give Chas some treats (what he really woke up for)… pour some coffee… we return upstairs and i quietly let him back into the bedroom… Fiona stays put… now, here i am writing in my journal, thinking i should put the garbage out…

… back from putting the garbage out…

… i think about Georges Perec, An Attempt At Exhausting A Place In Paris… i think about Denton Welch… i think about Proust… i think about this journal… i think about rendering life through the quotidian… i think about the differences between Perec, Welch, Proust and this journal… Perec chooses to maintain a clinical detachment from the details he notes and writes down (at first i wrote “details he describes” but then realized describes is an overstatement)… he doesn’t attach them to a human being, himself or anyone else… this is relative of course… one cannot be completely detached from ones direct experience…

… the result is the construction of a skeleton of happenings the reader will begin to flesh out by inserting the organs, muscles and skin of their own experiences… i wrote yesterday that i thought it would make a good “avant garde” play, a solitary performer, center stage, reciting the contents of the book… the audience is left to flesh out the skeleton with details remembered from their own lives…

… while i am very interested in reporting out on the innumerable quotidian nonevents, as Perec writes… i am not interested in detaching them from my subjective being or playing the clinician who’s job is to report experience with as little judgement about that experience as possible… what i am trying to do lies somewhere between the clinical reporting of Perec and the recording of the minute and personally grasped details in Denton’s journals… i am interested in what my preconscious self deems significant enough to do a double take on… i am interested in the feelings provoked by the scenes unfolding in front of my eyes, ears and nose… i am interested in the thoughts that flow through my mind as i see, feel, taste and touch the world around me…

… today i go for a covid test as prelude to a colonoscopy procedure next week… i also stop taking supplements, eating leafy greens, nuts, seeds… sadly, H just baked a loaf of bread encrusted with seeds which maybe i can cut the crust off of to eat…

… Notes On Attention Paid, the monumental writing effort that nobody will ever read end to end… few will even read small pieces of it… that nobody reads it was getting to me a little yesterday… i keep reminding myself that readership isn’t the goal… setting myself down in words and images is the goal… whether anybody reads or looks is distantly secondary…