I posed
I posed to myself today two reasons why I write the way I do of late. Both involve countering of disappointments past.
1. In primary school my instructor proposed an exercise in which we would place ourselves inside an ordinary 3×5 index card. My thoughts were stimulated by the transformed landscape of the card as I dug my way through its pulpy thickness in my tiny form. In reality the exercise was a mere trick of cutting the card in a particular way that allowed it to stretch like a belt that I could fit through. Would not the imagined and transcribed experience have been more fruitful to a class of layabouts?
2. After reading “The Fermata” by Nicholson Baker (a fine text!), being inspired by his adolescent fantasy turned literature, I sought out his first book “The Mezzanine” which was purported to take place entirely in the span of an escalator ride from the ground floor of a lobby up through its atrium. In reality the text took off into many detours of memory, analogy, and inference that drew us far away from that lobby and escalator. Would not it have been more provocative to flesh out that brief experience of the escalator ride more explicitly (it was as if this space and this time did not offer enough!) with the five (5) real time senses, the immediate, the present, matching the ennunciation with the act!