"You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls do you not think?"

The mapping project mentioned previously has begun, and you can follow its results in Of Maps and Such That Wander. The formatting's a hellishly monotonous process, and so, if I'm to do anything else with my time, what was meant to be a daily excursion will need occur less frequently. Still, it's fruitful, and already the novel's opening paragraphs are taking shape in my head.

In fact, I do little more since school has ended than work upon the novel. Every book I read is a compromise: chosen for the field (the exam that precedes the dissertation stage of my program) and that field itself formed to support the novel. Vicki has mentioned that this is - once upon a time - how criticism strove to function. Analytic and synthetic at once. But the days of Eliots are over, I'm afraid. If ever such days existed.

There's a risk in all of this, of course. Not of being a failed scholar, for scholarship comes easy to me. But of producing a failed novel - or, what is worse, a brilliant novel that no one cares to read. Last night, Jordan accused the prose of The Library's Grain of being "nonsensical." "Inaccessible" also (though the two are not compatible). I would have agreed to inscrutable, but not to the words he wielded.

If The Library's Grain is inscrutable, that is so because its substance is propadeutic. Not necessarily for me or for its readers, but for the novel itself as it grows. That being so, the site neverthelss follows a logic, and each of its postings is complete and largely self-sufficient. Though it lacks the clarity of a novel's space and time, it is not without grammar and syntax, nor without the form and matter of a medium - though that medium is not (and cannot be) novelistic.

The truth is, that unlike this blog, I care little whether The Library's Grain is read at all. For that too - the openness of a writing that is not the openness of a novel - belongs to The Library's substance. And as such belongs to me. Which is to say that The Library's Grain is not meant to be read as one habitually reads the texts one encounters. To read it is rather to become involved with it, to be read in it and by it, and so be made to appear in the reflection of its frame. One can read it, thus, accidentally, impressing oneself upon its pages without ever having opened to one's vision a word.

If I appear, in this post, to hold my work at a level that it has not yet proved it deserves, I do so of necessity. For the work is not yet a work, and to entreat it with less than an absolute insistence is to bequeath it in its very conception to those who are neither its readers nor writers. This I will never do. Writing, I have come to believe, is a loyalty to what has not yet arrived and to what has, thus, not yet proven its merit. And so I have come also to believe that we should know the world in writing, or know it not at all. Everything I choose to value - friendship, history, protest, desire - can only as writing take place.