El año y el ano

It isn't the war per se that has driven me mad. It is the miasma of lies that now permeates the world. We enter a new year with an empty execution, with no feeling of relief or hope. Even anger is wasteful of what little energy remains.

I wrote a new novel this morning as I drove for four hours through the countryside. I tried to see how language emerges when it is spoken aloud, composed in audible, solo vocalization. It took a moment to get started. I didn't force it. I waited, as in meditation when the mantra manifests of its own accord. Dictation is how Richard Powers writes his books, at least in part. But he has learned how to tap into the stream of genius.

That stream is out there. I've slipped and fallen into it from time to time. Few there be who find it.

As I drove and dictated, I found that the novel shifted, not only in style and tone and purpose but also in language. For a full half-hour, the novel, taking itself in a more philosophical bent, turned out to be composed in Spanish. This was a refreshing change, stripping away the lax and unnecessary connotations and limiting underlying echoes of meaning. The voice began to take on its own life. The composition began to write itself in the third person. All questions were stripped away, consciously.

The language flowed until dawn. And he became his own audience, his only audience, a novel disappearing at the moment of its manifestation, nothing recorded, nothing reclaimed, nothing transcribed, a novel as valid and final as any other lost on dusty library shelves.

He came home. He ate breakfast and read the New York Times, page by page, doing the crossword puzzle in his head. It was Monday after all. Parker Posey was an answer. He wondered if she knew yet, that her name was a New York Times puzzle answer, if anyone called her, if she was proud, or if it wasn't the first time, or if she felt miffed because it was only in an easy Monday puzzle, or perhaps pleased that she was well enough known to be in a Monday, rather than a difficult Saturday puzzle.

There were a thousand pictures of dead American soldiers inside, tiny postage-stamp snapshots. Lots of people are dead. Lots of families will never be repaired.

He read through the list of Broadway plays and musicals, noting that most of them he had already read or downloaded cast recordings. There was no need to travel to actually see the plays. Just the day before, he had read David Hare's new play, The Vertical Hour, imagining how Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy would perform the roles. No need to attend that. He had listened to Spring Awakening and Grey Gardens.

Today, perhaps, he would start the second play in Tom Stoppard's Russian historical trilogy of the 19th century, Shipwreck. He looked out the window, the view blurred through the insulating plastic that puffed out when the wind gusted. There was some promise of sunshine and little traffic for the holiday.

He should sleep, perhaps. He had changed the name of his new book to East Bend Must Die. It would have to be a comic novel, perhaps a collection of emails. Somewhere he would have to use the chapter heading or subtitle Nineteenth Century Nervous Breakdown, a title he was too fond of to throw out.

Most things got thrown away, falling not in a forest but in the middle of a flat and deserted country road, no ears to hear them, save his own, but even of that, he could not be sure that the sounds made held meaning or that he had even uttered anything at all.