This was the life assigned to me
I don’t know how

— Fanny Howe

You ask me how I write. This is how I write. I get rid of the lizard.

— Leonard Cohen

Yesterday, in the span of a few hours, I read Giorgio Agamben’s self-portrait (now in book form; excerpted on the wonderful blog of Paris Review). Parked less than 12 miles from the house the owns my time, my mind, my body. There is nothing unique about these demands. The only uniqueness came with the reprieve of the book—- and the longing that crawled over my shoulders as ambulances flew past and joggers sought their daily adrenaline from the city sidewalks.

A highlight to mark a hesitation:

Among things from the intersections of yesterday’s notebooks, scribbled in a parking lot in Birmingham, Alabama, between pages of Agamben’s self-portrait and the uncertainty of my own.

I have many times thought about writing a book that was only the proem or postlude of a missing book. Perhaps the books that I have published are something of this sort — not books but preludes or epilogues. (Agamben) I winced. Like blinking away the thought that hurts. As if to pick it up with a tiny pincer and drop it outside on the asphalt. The feeling of touching, not touching. Flamenco, and what the dance wants . . . is nothing like writing. The dance seeks to avoid the hand that could slow it or mold it; heat is the friction of what could happen. But you can smell the other dancer; they are not an abstraction. “Tangibilia”; from tangibilis, "what can be touched, is palpable." On the object reduced, tamed, made familiar by the encyclopedic enterprise. Margins where semiotics creep in.

A writer's secret lies entirely in the blank space that separates the notebooks from the book. Hypervigilance; hygiene of grammar when editing begins. Will do nothing with October’s Sacrifice to Priapus. So-called. As if naming itself provides evidence of its existence.

Notebooks as a form of study and study as essentially unfinished. Bowie, no end to “the heart’s filthy lesson.” Filth assumes any form it can find. Messy; consigned to the pile of disorder and decadence. “Essentially unfinished.” And then —- shadows on tiny feet, speaking immaculate French. Roland Barthes, eyeing the word, “deliberation”; making a heading of it. Offering that word in a section in The Rustle of Language: "I can rescue the Diary on the one condition that I labor it to death, to the end of an extreme exhaustion, like a virtually impossible Text: a labor at whose end it is indeed possible that a Diary thus kept no longer resembles a diary at all." Barthes mounting a stallion to ‘rescue’ the Diary that is his love; the text that is Love entire. Dante and his friends grinning inside Vita Nuova, whispering, “all he needs is a 9 and he’s nailed it.”

The 'form of the research' and the 'form of the exposition', notes and draft are not opposed to one another: in a certain sense the finished work is also itself a fragment and research project. Formal variants on the use of the heading to behead the rest. What deliberation does to the body (Barthes’ corpus). This rustling, wrestling, wondering what will be left of the magic once the grammar is tied for consumption. Setting the table with forks, knives, and good manners. Saving the Diary requires one to decapitate it. Headless, as in ‘no trace of the “I” that Walter Benjamin avoided, for fear of not seeming scholarly.’ Head at one’s feet, as in rolling around. As if droll up the rigor that feigns invisibility to slip into the aesthetic of authority. A podium voice needs a plural pronoun that establishes itself in neutrality. Or a tweed jacket and effacement. Yi-yun Li’s line, something to the effect of "sometimes a man sees better once he learns how not to be seen." I’m paraphrasing. Picking up pieces that inch across the windshield. A man carrying an umbrella on a sunny day; his other arm in a cast.

As in music, every ricercar ends in a fugue, but the fugue is literally endless.

Dice. No dice. Enter the music of silence as scored by John Cage. Enter Baudelaire’s flaneur, a stranger to his own cityscape. Enter Georges Simmel turning the study of alienated Parisians into sociology. Put Rilke, Walter Benjamin, Derrida, in the margins. “A page of the album is moved, deleted or added according to chance–this chance that it is precisely the function of true literature to abolish,” Jacques Scherer wrote in The Book of Mallarmé. Because those dice must be on the table.

So arduous is the task of the poet—being skinned alive in order to sing.