draughting

i put together a book--sort of a frankenstein thing--of poems i'd written just before/as i was redrafting the novel for the first time, and find it interesting, and a little frightening, to see how my philicosophical bent has changed as regards words and imagery. i'm not going to put it up yet, because i like it but i don't think it's strong. i feel like what i've been writing recently (aside from all this rambling prosody) is strong, self-confident, but what i wrote then was enraged and self-immolate, and it's hard to let that go again, if that makes sense.

this is neither here nor there. what i wanted to say is that i feel like my relationship with words has changed, and i can see it both in the poetry and in the novel. i don't think i'm going to try to publish the novel. it's good--i know it's good--but it's also weak, like the poetry. at the time i was trying to deal with the arbitrariness of language, which sounds like a pretty dull and overdone concept, but...yeah, in conjunction with both death of some people i loved, and love of someone, that arbitrariness became painful to the point of concretization, of specificity, which is important. the novel is to some degree about the way in which nothing makes sense--the procedures by which nothing makes sense, a little like the man in the high castle, but, you know, i hadn't read that yet when i was writing it, and also nothing like because that high castle book is awesome. and the poetry, i feel like, expresses the same sort of idea, of the extreme detachment between symbol and meaning, and a person's helplessness before that detachment. this is either over-simplification or over-glorification, but it'll stand: as usual, the argument goes, i might as well take my crap seriously because it doesn't hurt anyone else for me to take it seriously.

i feel like now i write like a person who believes that words are...disattached enough from meaning that one can create one's own connections. not necessarily will-you nil-you, but the sheerest implication can be gotten away with if one treats it like a fact (this is de man, to some extent, right?). i'm big on smells right now: words have odors, or they function as odiferous. it's like combining beets and walnuts, or leeks and sweet potatoes, or trying to think of a recipe that involves the showiness of black lentils in the taste of their possible beauty--odor leads to taste, recombinant and sharply correct or sharply not so; color leads to odor, or maybe, factually, the other way around...

why am i writing about this? oh yeah--i don't know why.