---
title: Notes
---

How do I explain such a page of notes? How do I tell you, beloved readers, that, the more I write, the more feverish my pace, the greater the pull of my graphomania upon my wrist, the more words flow through me *period?* Words that are my own. Words that are nonsense. Words that are, yes, the words of others. It yanks and tugs on my wrist, its other hand — paw? — lingering so sweetly on my neck, drawing lazy fingers across as though to bleed me dry of ink, and from out of me spills my words and also the words that have ever made me what I am.

Here, then, are the references as I remember them. I will apologize no further.

<hr id="part-9"/>

#### \[...\] *perhaps like those leaves that skitter within the city, that unreal city* \[...\]

Cf. Charles Baudelaire via Eliot:

> *Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,*\
> *Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.*
>
> -----
>
> Unreal city, city full of dreams,\
> Where ghosts in broad daylight cling to passsers-by.

-----

#### *She, then, like so many leaves* \[...\]

Cf. Robert Graves:

> She, then, like snow in a dark night\
> Fell secretly.

-----

#### *That unfalling ones are trapped within that last falling!*

Cf. Richard Threadgall:

> Tell to me the secret life of birds.\
> No solicitors of the hungry sky are they;\
> No, nor is the rainwater parting head a bookhouse dialect,\
> Or antiquary\
> But says, "I am citizen to the eternal now,\
> Republic builder of unfalling ones."\
> Bound to remembering blood and numbered suns,\
> What speech do we give him from our earthy furrow?\
> That he has no history who has feared no pain?\
> That ev'ry bird who falls with broken wing\
> Halts summary in the stone that breaks his brain–\
> That unfalling ones are trapped in that last falling? \
> What stale rejoinders birds are unmoored with!\
> The unsuffering sky exhales them in a breath.

-----

#### *"Oh! Oh, I do believe this is some plentiful enough for me."*

Cf. Rilke:

> Und plötzlich in diesem mühsamen Nirgends, plötzlich\
> die unsägliche Stelle, wo sich das reine Zuwenig\
> unbegreiflich verwandeldt—, umspringt\
> in jenes leere Zuviel.\
> Wo die vielstellige Rechnung\
> zahlenlos aufgeht.
>
> -----
>
> And suddenly in this toilsome nowhere, suddenly\
> the unutterable place where the merely too little\
> inscrutably mutates—, swings round\
> into that empty too much,\
> where the calculation to many digits\
> comes out number-less.

One imagines that a 'plentiful enough' lies at some theoretical midpoint on this limitless scale from 'merely too little' to 'empty too much'. One imagines it a place just outside that 'toilsome nowhere': perhaps it sits just outside that scale, as, I fear, I hope, The Woman sits now outside the scale running from joy to suffering, having relinquished such dichotomies and embraced them — become them! — in equal measure.

I imagine it, my friends. I *have* to imagine it! I have to imagine that Lagrange, the System, our embedded world is plentifully enough, and not some empty too much, not after so much loss, lest I engage too readily with the fleetingness of us, a perhaps futility, a spending of time in a toilsome nowhere. Thoughts spinning out into that nowhere, crammed into a too little, emptying with a burst into some too much...

-----

#### \[...\] *breathe in a million billion trillion years* \[...\]

Cf. E. E. Cummings:

> i put him all into my arms\
> and staggered banged with terror through\
> a million billion trillion stars.

-----

#### \[...\] *unbitter sweetness* \[...\]

Cf. Slow Hours:

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<p style="display: none" id="bees-desc">bees are those who give us sweet in exchange for the names of the dead  we whisper to their hives then wait a season for honey  licking it from sticky fingers when we steal a taste  is it any wonder then that honey can be so cloying  we may marvel at how unbitter distilled names can be  and still weep at parching-sweet memory</p>

-----

#### Idumea

*Idumea* is named after a hymn by A. Davidson with words by Charles Wesley, published in *Sacred Tunes and Hymns: Containing a Special Collection of a Very High Order of Standard Sacred Tunes and Hymns Novel and Newly Arranged* by J. S. James in 1913. Idumea itself refers to Edom, a kingdom in the Ancient Near East. While this has little to do with the story told within — unless, perhaps, you are Blake and think that "Now is the dominion of Edom, and the return of Adam into Paradise" refers to us! — it does sound rather pleasing to the ear, does it not? And so does the hymn, at that. The hollowness of the song with all its open fifths, the raw, coarse beauty that comes with Sacred Harp singing, the beat of the tactus and the ache of the singers hollering out words that nearly yearn for death are what led to the title of this book.

Or, as a friend said upon learning of this project, ""Main character escaping suffering while the narrator stays stuck in it" is somewhat analogous to living singers singing songs almost exclusively about how great it will be to die and escape from suffering" — which, as a quote, is quite painful to go back and read for your humble narrator, as I am sure you can imagine.

The hymn is reproduced here for reference. Despite being in short meter, the typo of it being in common meter (`C.M.') is retained from its original printing.

-----

#### ×

I used for this work a multiplication sign (×) for the section dividers, and, my dear friends, I am still coming to terms with this decision.

There are so many possible meanings!

Are we together, The Woman and I, multiplied? When she and I, when her story and mine, are intermingled, is it some greater story? My lovely readers, I hope so! I really do. I really hope, of course, that my myriad interruptions bear their own meaning and add to the whole of things, that we together are greater than the sum of the parts. I doubt and I hope in equal measure.

Are we crossed? Do we as ideas lay across each other perpendicularly? The Woman fell into stillness and I fall still through eternal, jittery, restless movement. The woman set aside her agency, in the end, and I strive for any sense of control over myself, my language, my words and sentences and paragraphs and stories. We are diametrically opposed in so many ways. We cross each other, our paths cross each other's, we approached at a ninety degree angle, and, in the end, departed at such an angle.

Are we set beside each other as some fictional love? Some two characters set within fan fiction who love each other in a way pure or unchaste in others' minds, star-crossed? Do I love her? Do I love The Woman? Did she love me?

I do not know, my dear readers. I do not know these things and I do not know many more.

Perhaps, though, perhaps it stands for that final decision: × marks the point at which I made up my mind. It is the role I played in letting The Woman, that beautiful soul who bestowed a blessing with every smile, step away from the world, for removing those blessings from us, that beauty from us, that life, that veil.

I am so, so incredibly sorry, and also rather proud of what I have done, of helping The Woman in so noble an endeavor, in equal measure.

