I only write with my back against a wall. It’s a ritual of purification. A blood-letting, predicated on the idea that by putting down on paper my confusion, the confusion will leave me. This is the exorcist dogma: what has left the body, cannot also remain in the body.
Whoever one day flips the sparse pages of my journal will find only a record of my failures and self-excoriations. The other chapters are all absent. You will know them only through interpolation. You run a line out from point to point and slowly between the epicenters of my failures there arises, quite spontaneously, a self-portrait.
The self as it meant to be—the self manifested—is hardly manifest. To find it, work backwards with the rigor of a detective. Map frustrations with mathematical precision. Pin disappointments to the bulletin for examination. Here, the pooling blood. There, signs of struggle. Here again, a bent lock that would not yield.
See this contraction in the diaphragm? This invisible pinning of the breath? It is the impulse to love. Look, this inarticulate rage, spent and aimless: it is the muted call of the brotherhood. Look again. Look closely and you will begin to see the self as it meant itself.
I want to tell you that all this was a misunderstanding. I meant something, but it went sideways and I don’t know if any of us will ever guess at the meaning. The problem is always in the delivery. First and foremost with my delivery into a world that couldn’t hold a question as inarticulate as the one I meant to ask.