The difference between actually writing and merely copying previously written words is founded in an author's ability to disassociate itself from the narrative persona. What is the real relationship between author and narrator? The author anticipates the judgment of a reader...because of this...that which is judged is not the author, but the narrator, a character evoked in words exactly the same as all other fictional characters.
I threw coins for a bar and it said that I could expect great good fortune...I can't imagine the pendulum swinging quite that far for me, but I turned off the monitor and went for a drive.
A room around a bar with television screens playing the same three or four sports channels...speakers playing the same 10000 pop songs...posters with no discernible content...signs and mirrors advertising brands of alcohol...poker machines...people sitting in front of these en annoyed, distracted, and absent...
What are you going to do tomorrow? Tomorrow is work: dead time. Tomorrow, I'm going to go through the motions. Everything will happen as if I was watching it from far away. It will be as if it had already happened before it ever started.
A woman in a black dress with long hair, smoking nervously. A pair of waiters with their white shirts unbuttoned, white t-shirts underneath...a chubby girl with dirty hair and her bald boyfriend, playing plastic darts...two post-college aged men talking about wireless routers and mediocre bands they pretend to be enthusiastic about. The voice of someone to his date about his work...A voice which is easy to ignore, thankfully...
The author and the narrator...which of these do you know the most about? Which of them is dictating the words that follow you as you move from place to place? Which of them is controlling the events that surround you- arranging the world into forms, settings, characters that are compromises between what is real and what is desired. The difference between actually writing and merely copying words is something that evokes importance, even though how it might actually be reached and how it might actually be depicted.............................This important thing, this object of desire itself... this is something that, despite all of its self-contradictions, must actually be real- more real than what cannot be effected, which is all around us and means nothing. The difference between copying the old forms and gaining novel ones must be something that is opposed to the author and its efforts...there is a balance that exists- certain experiences belong to depiction and others remain outside...If we are to win any new ground, we have to confront something that provokes fear and desire. There are words and there are things. But there is only one reality and all divisions have exceptions. It's commonly thought that things happen- and then they are described. The notion of a cause...of a reason. But can it be thought that things are described and then they can therefore happen?
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