Parsing Book
It’s becoming clear to me now that what I’m doing here is parsing. I’m parsing books — and also time. Like Zeno’s paradox: the more you slice up time, the more insurmountable it seems. How can we move from this moment to the next one, if we are forever dividing this instant into ever smaller instances?
After a year full of nothing but worry, I don’t want time to pass too quickly now. I’m eager for every instance. And, so I’m making more of time by dividing it up. One essay per day. This is a kind of time-keeping.
I often hear these lines from Annie Dillard in my head, full of emphasis. In my mind, I even hear my voice breaking when I recite it:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.”
My box of books is a schedule and a scaffolding. The dailiness defends from chaos, but the deeper I dig in the box, the more whimsy comes out. This feels like a very good thing. A delight, even. Ross Gay’s Book of Delights inspired this balance between consistency and caprice:
“So today I’m recalling the utility, the need, of my own essayettes to emerge from such dailiness, and in that way to be a practice of witnessing one’s delight, of being in and with one’s delight, daily, which actually requires vigilance. It also requires faith that delight will be with you daily, that you needn’t hoard it. No scarcity of delight.”
Back to Zeno: in the parable, there’s momentum, which carries the arrow from one still slice of time to the next. Questions are momentum. Curiosity propels. The more I ask, the more I want to know.
I picked up this Parsing book a couple days ago, but put it back in the box after turning the pages aimlessly for a while. Its brown paper cover didn’t photograph well. No secrets fell from its pages. But other books have given me momentum and now I feel as if I’m slicing through the air like time’s arrow. There is a strange poetry to these words sprinkled on the pages. Their organizing logic is not sense, nor even nonsense. They cease to have meaning, except as illustrations. These are words play-acting.
Gertrude Stein parsed her own box of books for How To Write. This is the sound she saw:
“What is a sentence. A sentence is a part of a speech.
A speech. They knew that beside beside is colored like a word beside why there they went. That is a speech. Anybody will listen.”
