I know you have a little life in you yet

Hello,

There is a Kate Bush Universe and a Maxwell Universe. You can live in both/either but not none/neither. Do you think a new universe is created each time a song is covered? I cover, by which I mean I sing aloud, multiple songs every day. Is every new cover a new universe, or just a new song within the one universe? Mixtape by Endria Universe.

I've had a hard time writing. Words don't come easily. Reading doesn't come easily. I've read the introductions, chapters, of dozens of books this year. I've pillaged them for their argument. The point of the reading, this kind of fast reading, is to pass over all of those hundreds of thousands of words, to slash the time needed to cover the space the words take up, to draw a line through straight to the meaning, which is not the words, but the distilled idea that you ought to be able to say, in a sentence or two, not the time spent struggling and lost, the time that needs to pass while you have to stay in place, in the blandness of your unknowing, knowing your own unknowing, your inertness that you can't escape–you are never so much in your body as when you are reading a dense and difficult book, untransported, stuck, no transcendence or insight in sight, just mucked in the stubbornness of time, time dredging itself past you, carving you, and maybe you can be still enough to notice, maybe, that small wearing away of what you thought you were.

But yesterday, I read Claudia Rankine's Citizen, the first book I've been able–had the time and attention–to sit down and read all the way through. It is a short book, full of short pieces/poems/images. I don't know what it means or what it argues. I just felt grateful to spend the time with its words, with the inside of Claudia Rankine's brain, with the way in which a person gave time to death and sorrow and rage.

And still this life parts your lids, you see

you seeing your extended hand

as a falling wave–

I they he she we you turn

only to discover

the encounter

to be alien to this place.

Wait.

The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.

Maybe because I have not been reading full books–just fragments, sections–it has been hard for me to think in full thoughts, to take the time it takes to think the thought out. I've been sitting in front of this computer trying to write another sentence to follow this one, on and off, for a lot of the hours of today. Time doesn't always open out to you. Sometimes it shows you how you are still closed, still close to, but not at, the place you want to be at.

What feels more than feeling? You are afraid there is something you are missing, something obvious. A feeling that feelings might be irrelevant if they point to one's irrelevance pulls at you.

How to write when feeling feels irrelevant? I feel hopeless, and it feels hopeless–and pointless–to write that I feel hopeless. But here I am. I don't know for how long. I can only hope I have a little life in me yet. Time does its best work on the living.

Until next time,

Endria

PS

>> For the next six months, I'll be reading around 170 books for my qualifying exams. If you'd like to join me in reading any of them, or you'd just like a very long list of books, here you go. Ignore the interrupted chronology (I've removed some of the categories for easier listing).

>> You can read The Human Animal online here. The Spring column is online now, Summer will be out in print next month.