Replication made easy
With replication made easy, one loses the need to commit oneself to memory. The lover with many loves has no need to commit, to treasure over and over again one story among others: it is as easy as visiting one’s bookshelf, entering one’s library, purchasing titles from one’s bookseller, borrowing a book from a friend. With so many possible loves and so little time, one begins to assure one’s self that these possible loves exist somewhere, will come sometime into one’s life. There is little panic, therefore, concerning beginnings; there exists much distress over completions. It is easy to begin an affair; it is difficult to tell your lover, “I no longer wish to read you.” Frank O’Hara wrote, “It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like the final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.”
Only two possibilities
In reading and in lovemaking, only two possibilities: the first time and remembering. The professor envies his students one thing: that this is their first reading of Tristram Shandy. The professor admits then to pitying himself and his students one thing: that the book is not being read in its original: meaning, the black, blank, and marbled pages are all reproductions of the idea of those pages but never the actual pages their significance begs them to be: meaning, Tristram Shandy no longer exists, and the only way to prolong its life was to transfer its significance into a simulacrum’s life. The used one envies the new one: the new one has yet to come into the rite of her first opening, unveiling; the used one admits then to pitying herself and her lovers one thing: that the book is not being read in its original: meaning, it would be lovely to live serially, to await patiently the next chapter instead of acquiring a book completely bound, its ending already fully dressed and departing before the completion of the love act.
The manner in which the cosmos revises
The advent of moveable type meant that the world would slowly become more and more forgiving. If words are not etched and set to be changed nevermore, then mistakes, if discovered, are easily corrected. When someone leaves me too early, I console myself: the cosmos opened a leaflet not meant for me, and departure is the manner in which the cosmos revises. Omissions are often the act of a hand higher than ours; seals set in wax signify that the sender can be tracked; moreover, seals ensure that the enclosed documents or correspondence are authentic. To ensure that one remains authentic in the act: never reveal one’s signet, never stamp the proof of “I love you.” Omit words that find their tongues touching in the darkest and dampest of places; blame it on an oblivious typesetter. The first products of the Gutenberg press were penance pamphlets. Mass reproduction, coupled with the ability to change, produces forgiveness in massive amounts.
A text with endless omissions
In reading and in lovemaking, the memory fails, gives way to self-made omissions. In rereading a book, I have a vague sense of feeling both at home and homesick. What I remember afterwards, I approach again joyfully and, like looking at snapshots of a past trip, nostalgically relive what I lived so wondrously before. What then of all the plot in between I have honestly forgotten? I feel a nausea of panic that I will die soon. I think of (a) all the books I have yet to read, (b) all the books I have read and don’t remember clearly or at all, (c) all the books I hope to write, (d) all the books of which I have no knowledge, and (e) the books that may be trying to find me. I think too of how love works, as I have loved many books whose characters, places, plots, and long scenes of ponderings I can’t recall, which means, shamefully, that I must be a bad lover. A nausea of panic that I will die soon and the one I love will not remember anything about me other than a few trifling details, such as my name or the memory of a gesture, and that is how I will exist: a text with endless omissions.
Erratum
In an ideal world, we would be able to furnish our lovers, years and years after seeing them last, with an erratum. Although we really mean whatever it is we mean when we say what we say, we realize often, after the fact, that perhaps what we really meant was something else entirely or perhaps we should have said what we said in a slightly different way: perhaps our fates are tied to how we punctuate. My errata: Where I left you with a semicolon, I meant period; instead of slay, please read stay. Passages and passages inadvertently omitted will now read, making possible the binding of two mirror-image yet truthful texts: the text of what is and the text of what should have been.
How to Write on Grand Themes
1. Keep your audience in mind.
As there will always be writing solely for one. It is easy: imagine that just for once, for you, your beloved begins to have pity. (He sees how you eye longingly the hands of the pampered and plush, the groomed young ladies. You think, This will never happen; this will never happen to me.) For this one and for this one only, you age; your journals are projected into some lonely future, where, huddled and cold, you have only one can of soup to last you. The focal point in the room is the door, through which your beloved may or may not enter to save you.
