“...the past has no reality except for present recollection.”
- Borges
Dear Diary[, Future Scholars and Future Students of Future Scholars],
Are you reading this? I have a difficult time writing when I’m not sure whether anyone is ever going to read what I write. Why waste time, words, bites (sic.) and brilliantly constructed interrogative apostrophes on an ontologically absent audience? The only comfort I find in this exercise is in knowing that someday these entries will be contained within The Norton Anthology of the Unpublished Works of Rex Young. And there will surely be many scholarly articles addressing this particular entry in which the publication of such scholarly articles is anticipated. Future Scholar: Use this sentence as an epigraph to your essay. Or this one.
I killed a bird last night. I wanted to write, “I am an avicide,” followed by some indiscreet allusion to The Brothers Karamazov, but I thought it would be more effective to simply write a sentence describing my desire to write such a sentence. It was Lenore’s bird.
>> Writing Idea #574 – Adapt TBK into a children’s story about a family of titmice.
No, the murder of such a bird cannot be called avicide. Such a murder can only be reckoned avicide by prejudice. But to plead my case to you, my possible reader, I will have to begin at the beginning:
I pulled up to Lenore’s house (in the DeLorean, of course) at 7:30pm. After playing with the car-doors for a few minutes I walked into Lenore’s house without ringing the doorbell (a move that generally tricks women into thinking that they trust you more than they actually do). Lenore screamed when I walked into the kitchen. This, however, played right into my backup plan for a failed attempt at enter-without-ringing-the-doorbell: I apologized (women love this move), offered to get her a glass of water, ran my hand through her hair, and then made up a quote about fear and love which I attributed to Wittgenstein (women really love this move).
>> Writing Idea #575 – The Wittgenstein Seducer: A screenplay about a great writer who seduces women by attributing everything he says to Wittgenstein. In the end we find out that the great writer is Wittgenstein.
After the faux-Wittgenstein quote, Lenore said a bunch of things which I ignored because I was busy thinking about a great idea for a screenplay. I asked Lenore if I could go into her bedroom (WLTM) in order to write down some notes for a poem which her beauty had just inspired into me. 1 She said something about something being hot; I kissed her cheek (WLTM) and whistled the BttF theme song (Ibid.) as I walked away from her (Ibid.).
By the time I got to her room I had forgotten my Writing Idea. This, however, played right into my backup plan for when I forget a WI: I began writing down a WI about forgetting a WI. This occasioned a new WI about a WI about a forgotten WI which occasioned several more WIs of the same nature. I can’t remember what happened next.
>> Writing Idea #576 – Replace the last sentence of the previous paragraph with: And this went on forever.
>> Writing Idea #577 – Change it back to: I can’t remember what happened next.
After that, I began thinking about my feelings for Lenore—about how she alone can see through my façade of self-confidence and survey my insecurities (both literary and non) without letting me know that she can see them which allows me to realize that I have insecurities without having to convince myself that I don’t in order to maintain a feeling of supremacy over another human being. She makes me realize that I don’t have to hide behind long, convoluted sentences and obfuscated diction in order for her to appreciate me. I don’t have to be a great writer to be loved by a great woman.
Suddenly, a voice began repeating my thoughts back to me. At first I thought it was God (which, of course, led to several WIs) but the voice was far too high-pitched for it to be God. When the voice repeated my WIs about it being God (which, of course, led to several WIs), it occurred to me that the voice sounded an awful lot like a parrot’s. And it was. I must have been speaking my thoughts out loud and the parrot must have heard them all. Halfway through considering a WI about the memory capacity of a parrot I realized that the parrot had just stored in its memory everything that I had just thought about Lenore. I couldn’t let Lenore hear my thoughts. There was only one thing to do.
Dinner was a bit cold but I have an insensitive palette so it didn’t bother me much. We had lemon merengue pie (sic.) for desert and a few glasses of port. I suggested (WLTM) that we go into Lenore’s room and watch BttF III. Lenore reminded me that we had watched BttF I after our last dinner date and so it would make better chronological sense for us to watch BttF II this time. I explained (WLTM) that a strict adherence to chronology is detrimental to the aesthetic horizon of any work of art (and particularly one whose very subject is non-adherence to chronology). At this point...
>> Writing Idea #579 – Find the quote from Joyce (or was it Borges?) that proposes a system of mnemonic temporality; insert said quote as an epigraph to this entry. Elsewhere in this entry insert an obscure allusion (disguised as a WI) to the psychologically questionable brilliance contained within the act of epigraphing a diary entry.2
...Lenore gave me one of her I-see-through-your-words-but-I’m-not-going-to-say-anything-because-I-don’t-want-to-upset-you looks and took my hand in hers (I love this move). Walking hand-in-hand with Lenore toward her bedroom, I realized that I was in love with her. I tried to fend off the myriad WIs that assailed my mind in order to think of how I could say “I love you” in a more aesthetically pleasing way. I was fairly certain that Lenore would sleep with me (and not run away before the “sleeping” had happened) if I could just come up with the right words. “Lenore,” I said, “you are my dens—” and then Lenore screamed. She had noticed her parrot lying dead in a pool of red feathers and bones and other little bird-body-parts as the blood was slowly leaving its permanent stain upon her cream berber carpet. There was a small brass pestle lying bloody beside the dead creature.
>> Writing Idea #581 – Consider replacing the previous two sentences with: She had found her bird and it was dead.
That’s about all I can remember of last night. I drove home in the DeLorean and played with the doors for several hours, contemplating the possibility that a poet who lives through WIs doesn’t actually live at all. 4
________
1 It occurred to me (both last night and just now) that “inspired into” is redundant. I just want to make sure that you know that I know that. I am a great writer.
2 >> Writing Idea #578 – Insert a WI that pretends to propose the insertion of an epigraph (although the epigraph has already been inserted) and then make this WI a footnote to that WI so as to confuse the reader’s sense of time. But who is the reader? Are you reading this? 3
3 >> Writing Idea #580 – Insert “Are you reading this?” at the beginning of this essay and then rewrite the rest of the essay to address the question of whether or not anyone is reading this.
4 Future Scholar: Consider writing an essay on the literary effect of ending a story on a profound note followed by a footnote which completely deflates the profundity. You can use the previous sentence as the epigraph. Or this one.
