We cross so many borders in our lives. Not just from England to Canada and then Canada to the United States, but crossing from one region of life to another.
In each place, you are an immigrant, without papers.
I decided to translate a Duras novel because I wanted to know what was going to happen next.
But what happens next to me? The plot of a fast is easy: you are supposed to eat a certain time in the morning, you restrain for eating during certain hours, and then at a certain moment you eat again.
But the plot of a life? Especially my life–it’s all unwritten, no guide to what should happen to me.
I find myself fixed in locality during the fast. First of all because I don’t want to expend much energy by going anywhere, but when I do leave the house to go to my office or to town to run errands, every place means more.
Perhaps because I am moving so slowly through it?
Plot in my first novel Quinn’s Passage is literally incidental. Quinn is at a beach town. Some things happen, he meets a few people. It’s episodic, but the episodes have sequence and not consequence except internal emotional consequence.
Plot in my second novel The Disappearance of Seth is accidental–events take on significance precisely because everything is consequential; events call to mind other events, sometimes separated by years and continents. The characters’ lives are explored through association, layering of memory and experiences, and their brief and tenuous and on occasion unremembered interactions with one another.
In that sense it could be considered an essay–a fictional essay–on the nature of history.
If the plot of my life is writing then I have nothing but time.
Hours today going over the translation of the weird novel about the beach and the deserted town.
Remembering the times I was writing the novels or writing Bright Felon, how hours would be spent making sentences.
Poetry and essays are different than that for me; they are a part of my normal life, one doesn’t have to be a monk to take part in them. But a novel or a book is like a big cup of water you have to drink before beginning the fast.
And finishing writing–knowing you are at the end of a project–is like crossing a border as well, seeking asuylum. You come into the country without any of your belongings, quite unaware of the customs or language of the new place in which you find yourself.
Day eighteen of the fast, I lay on the couch in the middle afternoon, a little tired of it all. Wishing I could just have a sandwich and a cup of coffee and get back to work.
Also, I felt for the first time I had really sabotaged myself by not drinking enough water. I felt so under the weather that I thought I might get sick or dehydrated and have to break my fast.
Intentionally breaking the fast without good reason (for example sickness) incurs severe penalties. One is supposed to make up the fast, but also one is supposed to pay for the release of a certain number of captives or enslaved people.
I always wondered if it was a metaphor, but whether metaphorical or not it is still a testament to the intended egalitarianism of the Islamic faith.
I calmed myself down a little bit but trying to move more slowly, not think too hard, not get excited or impatient about anything.
Of course I fail at anything important. It feels essential that I fail.
But what if I let go of the desire to fail and allowed myself to come to fruition?
Fruition with twelve days yet to fast?
What happens after I cease failing?