Beginning → Middle → End

I watched a programme on TV about Kathy Acker, who I haven’t heard of before and who writes from and about NYC (worked in sex stores when poor in NYC 47th St.). She draws on the Beats and fuses poetry and prose; writes to put ‘meanings in flux,’ seeing no adequate literary form able to describe the reality of contemporary Amerika. Writers like Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth and early Norman Mailer she derides as ‘19th century tradition’ and has devised a style she calls ‘plagiarism,’ directly incorporating Jean Genet, Shakespeare, Keats etc., into her writing and juxtaposing historical and present day characters.

She’d probably regard my obession with the ‘occult’ and hidden moments of affirmation as romantic and slightly old fashioned. . . .

The blank page is before me, but I’m inhibited, as though something crushes me in its torpid grip, and I'm unable to break these bonds and just write . . . write . . . I'm in quicksand; I'm writing not to reach new knowledge but to write the form as an end in itself. It's a nineteenth-century process in microcosm. I write not for what writing confers but for what it becomes. This plodding prose logic further removes me from the Moment, the Now of reality & of experience. . . .

I’m imprisoned by this fear of the rigid form, just a dry, reductive perspective that turns moments into used up written husks like artifacts behind glass. I write and write, and don’t look again at this poor man’s epic that mirrors in two-dimensional form the actual process of my living out my life on one continuum of time and space, on the plane of Beginning → Middle → End . . .