Books i didn't write

though i wanted to for a while

With other artforms this doesn’t happen so much: you go around whistling snatches that are going to be someday your next opera, or sketching on napkins the one big history-painting that will make your name, & people are apt to think you’re delusional. In poetry this is perfectly natural. Even Milton drew up a list of topics for his epic poem.

(Or maybe it’s the ones that went ahead & wrote them who are the deluded ones? as Poe darkly surmised.)

To begin like this at all seems a bit self-serving, e.g. to assert the potential value of something that is not to be, is like asking the reader to write me out a blank check. But i think it worthwhile to understand that each of them had good reasons why i couldn’t finish (so i maintain)--not just lack of gumption.

Anyhow, although i am one of those artists who leave a trail of uncompleted projects like a circus parade leaves pachyderm poop behind when it passes, the first was when i was 18 & decided to write a verse play on the theme of Faust. I knew next to nothing about either Faust or verse (like many another 18-year-old poet) but i certainly had the Faustian spirit, having just read Thus Spake Zarathustra. I immediately read all the Fausts i could find (there’s more than you’d think)--Thomas Mann undoubtedly did it best, unless you’re a hardcore Marlovian.

The thing i learned from that is simply that a play is not made of emotions, it is made of situations that occur because of personalities that differ yet are forced into high-stakes conflict; & i was going to have to live a lot longer before i could get a handle on any of that.

(Not before i’d considered going all Oulipo with five lipogrammatic versions, each starring the absence of a different vowel: Fast, Fest, Fist, Foist & Fust.)

It wasn’t a lot longer before i devised the idea of a palindromic novel. Needless to say--despite that having twice been done already (you can check)--among terrible ideas that aren’t medical or political, this is surely the most terrible. Writing palindromes is already arm-wrestling with an octopus, a very unequal fight when it comes to English orthography. Doing so while upholding the conventions of plot, setting, & character is only remotely possible if you imagine you have the linguistic ingenuity of a Joyce & an audience that is more indulgent than your grandmother who barely speaks English.

--Skip forward past a series of things i did complete (& made Grand-Canyons of rosepetal-echo)--

A hard-scifi novel about Pluto (i might have mentioned this once or twice before); the main trouble is not that i couldn’t invent all sorts of beings & even exotic social structures (a sidegame fully absorbing in itself), it was deciding what story i wanted to tell. To what extent would i let my world-historical reality &/or my own life seep into & color the proceedings?

It tended to change from month to month, even after i decided i would write about the desire & the attempt, rather than the book it kept refusing to become. I guess what i learned from that is the reason i am not a novelist: i don’t look at the Sufi’s Moon. I look at the pointing finger.

I started a longpoem in quantitative meter (dactylic hexameter, of course). After thirty or forty lines, however, i stopped. The experience of having to think constantly about vowel length made me realize that this is not a fixed thing in English; it changes according to how fast or slow you read, & even according to other vowel-sounds adjacent in the same word.

So here i am with (besides my genuine accomplishments, which are anywhere from two to a dozen, depending on how charitable i am feeling toward my past-self at that exact moment):

A nonfiction Typological Philosophy of Aesthetics. First, i am talking about Jung’s typology (in Psychological Types) as interpreted by Isabel Myers-Briggs in Gifts Differing--& only that. The tragedy of this idea is that others (who weren’t nearly as smart) went on to turn it into a game & thence a classification system, before anybody even had a clear idea about why there are Four Functions (hint: J. was enamored of Quaternities) & what they might actually consist of. (As it is, it’s barely an improvement on Astrology, & much less picturesque.) I became convinced that all of culture could be understood in this way, & that how the personality-type of the artist influenced their resulting artwork could be usefully described.

Genealogies of artists, but then, who doesn’t want to trace ancestors?

In the end--although people do contrast significantly, & this is worth studying--once you subtract both the fact that we are not all the time (or even from hour to hour) using the same capacities or combination of capacities, & all the projection-mongering that anyone who tries to make a narrative out of a collection of artists & artworks is subject to: artistic uniqueness is more important than artistic comparisons.

Polyvalent logic. I wasted a huge amount of time thinking about what it might mean to have a third (neither-T-nor-F) & a fourth truth-value (both-T-&-F) in logic. I kept some of my notes in case i ever come back to it, because i think there’s something really there. I just can’t figure out what it is. (E.g. is there a viewpoint from which it is possible to decide whether three/four logic is just a transformation of two-logic (as most of the academic logicians who’ve bothered to look at it have concluded) or does it have real-world consequences in using, that are not possible in two-logic?) Anyone who wants to follow Vaihinger (The Philosophy of As If) is welcome to it.

Authority & Persuasion. I figured out that there are several distinct Authority-Basis-Principles, & if i cared to write this book, it could change the world. --Um, not really. If there’s anything the 20c perfected, it was the art of making people believe something that wasn’t so.

Asymmetry. Maybe i will really get back to this, because, while there is something deeply pleasing in asymmetrical composition when it’s done right (as every art class teaches without knowing why), a rigidly symmetrical composition has its own, inexplicable power (ask any schizophrenic artist). Is it as simple as the fact that we are imperfectly symmetrical creatures? What does the Fall of Symmetry entail for philosophy, anyway, since every systematic philosophy (& even our artful arrangements of elementary particles) depends so heavily on the intuition that for every aspect which goes this way, there has to be a complementary aspect going that way? Martin Gardner wrote a good book on this. I pretty much decided it’s all we need.

Glimflash & its Progeny. Having borrowed an old underworld-argot word from Pelham & reappropriated it to mean “one thing done in the style of another” (like Dread Zeppelin--), i began to see it everywhere, from song covers to subcultures such as Steampunk. At some point i decided it would be the one phenomenon that best described what comes after Postmodernism. But it’s too late to write this now, as other trends (some variety--more & less misinformed--of Back to Roots, or whatever humans end up doing under the loving Drone Gaze) have since emerged to complicate the picture. Still, like “skeuomorph”, this is a handy term to have.

A book of autists, among the great writers, artists, philosophers. I made lists. I became convinced that being autistic could explain someone like Simone Weil or Wittgenstein but really, this doesn’t say as much as it seems to. You want your heroes to be like you or choose them only because of that--which has nothing to do with what they actually had to undergo in order to get where they were headed. And the role that accident plays in who becomes famous & who is forgotten, has never really been reckoned with. How is this different from the spot on the globe, the year of birth, the personalities of their parents? The most i can say of this idea now, is that being out of sorts with other people is just another of the frictions (everything that doesn’t destroy you, or anyway not all at once—) that contributes to an original point of view.

When i was younger, i had the absurd notion that a good idea for a book was something to be guarded zealously, lest another person steal it & claim it as their own. I mean, there’s not a few story-plots that hinge on such a terrible theft (always of immense monetary value!); & science in particular is full of cruel cases (many of them tantamount to morality-plays about misogyny). But nowadays, i would welcome anyone who could pick up the riddle where i left off & solve it. Or anyway carry it a little farther.