Mar. 8th, 2012

thisnewday: (Default)
The possibilities, when putting together words or groups of words, can seem almost infinite. Which, if you fixate upon it, can push the task of writing beyond merely daunting to nearly impossible.

Which, I guess, is what I've been experiencing lately. The dauntingness of it, not the impossibility. Not yet.

Because it's been a long process, with some of these entries, to allow them to say what they need to say instead of what I once thought I wanted them to say.

Anyway, I've been thinking again about trying to move some of them to that next level. Which for me, and for them, is to find that arrangement which creates both harmony and dissonance from the proximity and sequencing of their individual notes.

Which is something that can happen between pairs or groups of words or between the segments of an extended piece or between the distinct parts of a greater whole.

It's that greater wholeness that I'm struggling with now, and the question of which entries keep their integrity, in that moment when they're read aloud, like drops of color fallen into a vortex of spinning water, before blending and disappearing into the neutral void, the background noise of listeners breathing, papers rustling, a pencil falling.

And, conversely, which others come alive with a discordant voice that mocks any silence or any harmony that might have ensued and through its discord forces us to reconsider what we've just heard or will hear next?

I know I'm mixing metaphores here, and that usually turns out badly, like all those colors of leftover paint mixed down, from their recognizable values in wavelengths of refracted light, to something as soundless and indistinct as mud.

But that's something else we need to discuss sometime, that if sound has color (a common musical description), then surely color must have sound as well...

LPK
LiveJournal
3.8.2012

Chapter Ten

Mar. 8th, 2012 10:06 am
thisnewday: (Default)
In her book, Paris Without End, Gioia Dilberto calls it, "...one of the most famous calamities of modern American literature." She's referring to the unsolved loss, on a Paris train, of a valise containing nearly all of Ernest Hemingway's early writings.

His young wife, Hadley Richardson, had packed in it "...the handwritten originals, the typescripts, and the carbon copies..." for the trip from Paris to Lausanne, where Ernest had been working on assignment, to show the influential writer and critic Lincoln Steffens.

You know it's waiting there in chapter ten, because you've read the book before, but she's a diabolically skillful writer and so it still sneaks up on you. I've come to love Hadley and to hate chapter ten. Thanks, Gioia. I guess...

LPK
LiveJournal
3.8.2012

Profile

thisnewday: (Default)
thisnewday

March 2025

S M T W T F S
      1
2345678
9101112131415
1617 1819202122
23242526272829
3031     

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 10th, 2025 05:37 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios