Self Awareness of Self

In the beginning there was nothing. There were no molecules, no neuron pathways, no light. Or more precisely, there were no distinct molecules, no experienced neuron pathways, no darkness to delineate light. Before historians there was history, and before history there was nothing. So it has been and so it will be again.

Until I decided, with the stroke of a few keys, to put darkness on the page, patterns of darkness that gave meaning to the light.

And light there was. But the light reveals and illuminates and shows there is more here, more underlying these ink-blot lines that make up my creation. And it brings up questions like What is nothing if there is nothing to define it? What is creation before there is anything to create with? And how can I, with my writing rhythm, set up this narrative before there is anything to narrate? Who am I, and what is my vision?

My vision is this: that the page will divide itself into words and spaces, and the words will be given names, and word itself is a name. My muse is endowed with dominion over the words and spaces, entrusted with the continuation of existence.

I should explain that this story does not exist without my fingers pressing through the mechanics of it, and it is my duty to keep it as simple as I can--itself a gargantuan task--lest it gain too much mass and implode on its own gravity. And so as I write this, my greatest struggle is to find out how to write this.

The problem with this method is that the story writes itself even as I ponder its nature, even as I give life to its life, and there are times when the narrative escapes me, and I find myself running to catch up like an antelope fallen behind the herd to nuzzle at some curiosity suddenly realizes its naked vulnerability.

This is the story of a woman, a woman trembling with the pulse of life, a woman borne of woman, a woman whose womb contains everything in the narrative. And well you might ask, astute reader, how the woman's womb can contain everything and the woman herself, and to answer that I would need to kick up a whirlwind of words to distract you and myself from those most fundamental of unanswerable questions. How can creation create itself? Where is the beginning? Does the Ouroboros snake stop for breath? Does it sip coffee with dessert?

It is not until the words are down on the page that I realize how inadequate these words are. But the narrative is already spinning, taking its own direction, following its own laid-out path even as it lays the very stones it walks upon.

And so wondering whether I've done wrong in this creation, failed in defining a story, caused irreparable damage, is an impossible thing because the story is there, with all its secrets and implicity, all its truths and simplicity. It is there, whether it likes it or not, whether I like it or not, and so distracted by these existential questions I've created with these words I've defined, I've gone and missed the transition from nothing to history, and all of a sudden I find myself the historian.

The woman, the story, the word, unfold before me, flooding and burning, decomposing and budding, turning and turning, and with a surprise wave of vertigo, I realize I'm caught up in it myself, and where once I thought myself omnipotent, I discover I am utterly powerless.

So why do I write at all? And as those words march across the space, a bigger question emerges from the hot slippery canal, and the mirror asks me, Can I stop writing? Can I turn away from the page itself, from the words themselves, from the indelible marks in the nothing? What happens if I lift my fingers from the keys and turn away completely?

There is only one way to find out. And I will do everything in my power to make it come to pass.

***

Can a novel be written with total unreliability and self-reflexivity?
(There was a dead man in the stall--or maybe not. Depends on the draft.)
(Raymond was always going to leave. Or die. Depends on the draft.)
You've given yourself to me, put your whole trust in my words, and I don't exist any more than you do.
Your wife was always dead--otherwise she's a character with needs, instead of a plot device.
Confronting the ghost of his past. Rhyming events.