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On Sandpaper: Rereading Illuminations

04.04.11

, A book about living in the Village, circa 1950-something, by an Israeli painter-novelist-journalist, and even though I’ve never read this book, and never read anything by this author, it’s clear that the book has influenced everything I’ve ever written, and that the protagonist’s lifestyle has influenced my chaotic New York lifestyle, and I find a kind of dizziness, a kind of horror in that. It makes me bristle and tremble a little, makes me stand on end. There are all these women in the book, and I’m worried that some of them are me, like I’m swimming around in my own prehistory. The women are so lonely, some of them. One of them might be good-looking and might not be, the protagonist can’t remember, she has a messy apartment near Fifth Avenue. She sleeps like a soldier, she has a look of anguish on her face. Later the protagonist makes out with Billie Holiday, who’s had better kissers. I’m tired. I wonder if I’m the most tired person in New York City today. Probably not, probably not at all, I didn’t even drink last night, I’m not even seriously ill, I’m not even old or dying. I start to imagine, what if a writer could see, experience, feel, at the moment of writing, the lives of every single person he would ever influence with his work? What if she could know the twisted path the work would take? It’s the afterlife that makes work dangerous, like a golem or a poltergeist, like the creatures a nymph turns into after she can’t be a nymph anymore.

Source: Bookslut