One fails to grasp the significance of one’s writing by necessity. This failure enables further writing. Anything understood cannot be written. On the other hand — my grandfather’s hand remains untaken — my grandfather’s hand now bones in a box in a grave — or so I have increasingly come to feel, we understand far more about ourselves than that of which we allow ourselves to be cognizant, and so, in a sense, that which we understand and keep secret from ourselves represents precisely that about which we ought to write. And yet writing, as with understanding, makes life worse. Art doesn’t save lives. It ruins them. Most artists’ biographies bear out precisely this point. The relentless contemplation of the self required in order to make art or even engage with it on a serious level is frequently destructive of the very will to continue to be oneself, which is why those who undertake a life of reading are infinitely more guilt-ridden, morose, and prone to bouts of absolute despair than those who don’t, why poets jump off bridges and stick their heads in ovens and why writers drink and why novelists like me fail to do their laundry and instead lie around all day naked in bed while most people, which is to say those that don’t write or read, spend the greater portion of their lives studiously avoiding doing anything which might draw them into contact with themselves, such as aesthetically or intellectually ambitious art, and is the reason why most people hate writing to start with and writers especially and literature in general, for the very function of writing and writers and literature is to bring people into contact not with others but with themselves, and this contact, for most of us, is unbearable, because we find ourselves unbearable, because what we find when we find ourselves is that thing we know better than anything else about ourselves even though we hate knowing it and do not want to know it — our pain. When I avoid art, when I avoid reading actual books, when I avoid my own thoughts, as I often do the more depressed I become, I do so out of a desire to avoid me, which is a desire to avoid my pain. I am exhausted with my pain, which is why I am exhausted with myself, and the trouble with pain, or so I now think, writing this, when endured over a lengthy span of time, is that it’s monstrously boring. There is nothing inherently interesting about pain. It just goes on and on sanding the edges off anything that might cut through the awful boredom of pain itself. It’s probably not worth remarking that in the sentence immediately preceding this one where I wrote pain I should’ve written depression, which is nothing more than pain stretched out and endured for an indefinite period of time. The Thanksgiving day sun is gone now. I did not stop writing where, a few paragraphs ago, I said I was finished writing. Elle woke naked beside me there on that south Florida beach and I told her about the twink and his member and mine and she laughed. You just came out to me, she said, didn’t you. And I had to say that I supposed that this was so. The boy was drunk, she said.

Rereading the initial version of the previous paragraph, written yesterday, my mind amended the sentence “This failure enables further writing” to “This failure ennobles further writing.” When I think of the word noble, the first writer to come to mind is Thomas Mann. Earlier today when reading Mann on the back porch of my parents’ house, both Mann — in a different translation than that mentioned earlier, this Mann bound in paper rather than cloth — and I were shat upon by a bird. I have always heard that being shat upon by a bird means good luck for the one who has been shitted upon, but it seems probable to me that this truism is merely the inverse result of how one naturally feels when another creature evacuates the contents of its bowels upon one’s person, an attempt to slough off bad fortune by calling it a good omen. I also now wonder whether Mann would still be Mann if he, while writing The Magic Mountain, had been regularly shitted upon by birds, or if he had, instead of writing his gigantic and generally mirthless novels, instead allowed himself to submit to certain urges, such as the desire to touch the naked skin of young men — perhaps glimpsed at a beach shower nearby a salt-filled slough — rather than that of his devoted wife, or so I now wonder, writing this at 5:09pm the day after Thanksgiving, though the word day is not technically accurate because it is already full dark here in this city in the South, not of course because we are far north, but because we are close to the invisible line dividing the eastern time zone from the central one. This is the furthest east I have ever lived, just north and east of that state where I read in the back of the car about the open season. Yesterday, after I finished writing the initial versions of several of the preceding paragraphs my father and I sat on his back patio and he told me several hunting stories which I had heard previously but whose details had faded from my mind. I bring this up only to mention two facts of which he made uncharacteristically precise note. We were talking about how quickly darkness falls here. You killed your first deer at 5:35pm on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, he said. That nine point. And I killed that buck that hangs in the living room of the house the next day, on Sunday, also at 5:35pm, right at dark, he said. The author of Ulysses, in a letter to Nora Barnacle his wife, once wrote: “You say you will shit your drawers, dear, and let me fuck you then. I would like to hear you shit them, dear, first and then fuck you. Some night when we are somewhere in the dark and talking dirty and you feel your shit ready to fall put your arms round my neck in shame and shit it down softly…” While there are many ways to give oneself blue balls, as I mentioned above some pages ago, this may be one way of relieving them. John Berryman once wrote in a letter to a younger writer that the whole reason, or at least one of the reasons, for his incessant attempts at seducing the wives of his friends, emerged out of a desire to be close (close!) to them. (His pals, or so in late middle-age ((his old age)) he called them: of all the words we use to refer to our intimates, the most desexualized.) James Joyce wrote lovingly of Nora’s farts and of wanting her to shit her drawers before she fucked him. At the moment I have nothing further to add on either account.