down; and you will feel sad, remorseful, you will feel full o f
grief. Y ou can’t sustain the loss. A ro o f over your head is a sort
o f suburban idea, I think; like that i f you have some long, flat,
big house with furniture in it that’s all matching you surely
also will have a ro o f so they make it a synonym for all the rest
but it’s walls that make the difference between outside and
not. It’s a well-kept secret, arcane knowledge, a m ystery not
often explained. Y o u don’t see it written down but initiates
know. I type and sometimes I steal but I’m stopping as much
as I can. I live inside now. I have an apartment in a building.
It’s a genuine building, a tenement, which is a famous kind o f
building in which many have lived in history. M aybe not
T rotsky but Em m a Goldm an for certain. I don’t go near men
really. Sometimes I do. I get a certain forgetfulness that comes
on me, a dark shadow over m y brain, I get took up in a certain
feeling, a wandering feeling to run from existence, all restless,
perpetual motion. It drives me with an ache and I go find one. I
get a smile on m y face and m y hips m ove a little back and forth
and I turn into a greedy little fool; I want the glass all em pty. I
grab some change and I hit the cement and I get one. I am
writing a certain very serious book about life itself. I go to bars
for food during happy hours when m y nerves aren’t too bad,
too loaded down with pain, but I keep to m yself so I can’t get
enough to eat because bartenders and managers keep watch
and you are supposed to be there for the men which is w hy
they let you in, there ain’t no such thing as a solitary woman
brooding poetically to be left alone, it don’t happen or she
don’t eat, and mostly I don’t want men so I’m hungry most o f
the time, I’m almost always hungry, I eat potatoes, you can
buy a bag o f potatoes that is almost too heavy to carry and you
can just boil them one at a time and you can eat them and they
fill you up for a while. M y book is a very big book about
existence but I can’t find any plot for it. It’s going to be a very
big book once I get past the initial slow beginning. I want to
get it published but you get afraid you will die before it’s
finished, not after when it can be found and it’s testimony and
then they say you were a great one; you don’t want to die
before you wrote it so you have to learn to sustain your
writing, you take it serious, you do it every day and you don’t
fail to write words down and to think sentences. It's hard to
find words. It’s about some woman but I can’t think o f what
happens. I can say where she is. It’s pretty barren. I always see
a woman on a rock, calling out. But that’s not a story per se.
Y ou could have someone dying o f tuberculosis like Mann or
someone who is suffering— for instance, someone who is
lovesick like Mann. O r there’s best-sellers, all these stories
where women do all these things and say all these things but I
