a delible mind

When I read at SFU on Thursday, Mercedes Eng was there and asked a great question — or made a great point. In distinguishing the earlier (two) novels (jacks and Hush) from the later one (Delible), I’d said something along the lines of how the earlier works had more in common with poems, and in each short novel, I’d tried to sustain a single note or pitch (chord, more accurately, as both of those novels are multivocal). In Delible, by contrast, I’d aimed at more than a single note (or chord). Mercedes pointed to a passage I’d read that day about 15 year old Lora, who takes to (sometimes) wearing her missing sister’s glasses after she is gone. Is that how you tried to achieve more than one note, she asked, with the glasses? And, yes, — I realized, the glasses concretize something I was getting at. In the earlier works, it occurred to me then, one might mistake perspective for ontology, but that’s less likely with Delible.

Last month, I visited Roger Farrs’ contemporary-literature-for-creative-writing-students class (he’s teaching Delible). The students asked a lot of questions, some quite good, about everything, including my intentions in writing that book. The other day, I came across an old notebook, and in it, a series of notes I’d kept while writing jacks. In reading those notes, I came across a mention of Hermeline (the narrator’s name in my first novel). The name, I rediscovered, is an illusion to a female demon that an eighty year old priest was accused of invisibly keeping company with for some forty years. If someone had asked me if that were the case, I wouldn’t have remembered it before I salvaged the notebook (from a cycle I then called the syphilis notebooks, a massive scrawl of notes ranging from Pythagoras’s thoughts on squaring the circle to his admonition that his followers keep their hands from beans to meditations on 15th to 18th century representations of syphilis). So much for authorial intention. And retention.