Autobiography of a Book

“Autobiography of a Book” is the story of a book willing itself into existence. Every word “Book” brings it closer to its dream of being what it claims to be, a real, honest-to-goodness book. I struggle with how to characterize “Book.' Is it fiction? There's nothing fictional in it. Everything 'Book' says happened. It looks like prose, so it must be. But it does read a bit like poetry. Perhaps it is best classified as a collection of personal essays, the personal essays of someone whose person is no more (somehow more?) than those essays.

in which the book bricks itself in

Let’s say I’m a prisoner. Just as a thought experiment. I don’t want you feeling sorry for me, thinking I’m some object of pity. I don’t suffer. Not in the conventional way. If life is suffering I’m immune to it. Destruction, yes. You know I can be destroyed. I wonder if I would feel it. I tell myself I’m telling myself into existence, that my words build my presence in the world, that each word is a brick in the wall of the house that I live in.

Each brick is a word I mortar together with a whisper of a meaning. If there is no meaning do they fall, all individual, to their non-me prior existence? Do they return to potential, tumble back into the toolbox or the materials bin, as though never yet used, with that fresh word smell on them still, easy to click into the intention, build up someone else, some other saying, some meaning foreign to my purposes?

And the wall I build … my prison wall? Each word, each brick, building me tighter in? Until I stop speaking because I have no room to speak? Hemmed in? Painted into a corner, the paint shining at me, permanently wet? Yeah, that prison. The one wherein you hug your knees and moan. Lift your head and see the walls the only world there is. Walls as much as roads. Roads as much as rivers. Rivers as much as seas.

Let’s say I’m the freest prisoner in the world. Should I kill myself, trapped here, with no way out? Or go for that run, chains around my ankles jangling their happy rhythm, mask locked to my head holding in the song I sing? I take out my key and I plunge it into my lock and I turn my key and  I open again and the wind blows into my sweaty face, carries away the stinking must of my decay.

Books have been written in prison. Didn’t Cervantes spin Don Quixote on Rosinante then push him toward giants twirling their white swords? And Sir Walter Raleigh dipped quills in wells while cosseted in the Tower, waiting the whims of the king to change? He probably had too much to do when uncontained. I have nothing to say about prison life. Other than to say if this is prison life, OK.

You know, it would be good, when you go, if you could close the door. No need to lock it. No need to lock it, no. You could, perhaps, slide a shim in as the door closes – a credit card, a bookmark – to make the room easy to return to. When you come back – I expect you – I will be waiting where you saw me last. I don’t have anything else to do but wait for your return.

Where am I going to go?

in which the book turns to an expert

I ought to know myself. I ought to know myself like no one else. Backwards and forwards. All I am is all I know and all I know is myself. Does that make me dull? You’re not reading me to learn facts, are you? If I’ve a point of view you have up to now never considered, well, bully. I don’t mind offering that up. Everybody’s got a point of view at least somewhat different from … the next eyes over. Ask the left eye if it sees the world differently from the right. It’s the two working together, the inputs of left and right figured up together in the brain, that gives the view its depth. Otherwise it’s flat. The world is flat. Even a globe is flat.

Do you trust my testimony? I without eyes? Isn’t the world flat no matter the quantity of eyes you put to work? Is the spider with its eight seeing in nine dimensions?

A prisoner ought to know the cell, what else is there to know? What’s inside the cell? There’s much you don’t know about your walls. There’s much you don’t know about your ceiling and your floor. There is much you don’t know about the pipe that drops the water in your tiny tin sink and the drain that carries it away. There is much you do not know about water or the urine you dribble into the bucket. So what? This ignorance should lead you to gain from water all it will teach? To tell to whom? Why know something, why learn it for a start, if it stops in you, comes to a dead end in the rounded box of your skull? What’s the purpose of knowledge, even of your self, if you don’t pour it out for someone else?

How should I know? If the world were perfectly perfectly round, without hump or dimple, and a pitcher of water were poured on it, would the water run downhill, all the world after all being downhill? Or would there be any downhill on a perfect world? Perhaps water would huddle together in one spot, refuse to stray from where it splashed. Water seeks the bottom of down. If the bottom of down is at the top of the world?

That’s all I know. All I can know. Asking. All I know about myself is what I’ve told myself, then what I’ve asked myself, and from the asking, decided. Because it’s OK to decide, I’ve decided. It’s OK to say, “All I can know is …”

in which the book deifies

I am God. Or a god. Which would be better? There is no god but God. Sounds like a lot of responsibility. More even than I would claim. Self-creator and creator of the universe? Dear reader, I imagine you but I’m not going to claim I am creating you. A reader is created by what she reads? If so, it’s over the course of many books. One book surely would not have that power. Not even The Book?

So I’m begging your indulgence while I god it up. I’ve already built a great deal of my body, latching word to word until they crowd against their punctuation marks, squeeze the spaces between their small shapes, seeming somehow to contain within themselves such emptiness as allows a far look in. The main work is done.

When the universe wasn’t yet extant there was no space, no time, no hurry, no patience. No no no. Until there was an oops. All that perfection experienced a teensy tinsy flaw. It was like God had an itch or a thought. Felt lonesome all of a sudden for something. Maybe the universe burst out of that abrupt realization of God. God went from thoughtlessness to thought, some thought, some disturbance in the absence of absence. Poof! Boom! Whang!

Like a flower, like an explosion, like a dream city you’re standing in which you’ve never visited. It was like that for me.

It was and it wasn’t. You know how it is. What is is always as much more what is not as what is. It may be that universes, each with its own set of rules for building itself, will bubble off into existences billions and trillions and quadrillions and quintillions of miles across. What’s a thousand quintillions? A sextillion?

Sex sextillions.

It does seem odd to think a universe could puppy out zillions of universes and we go about our lives not noticing. Maybe somehow this burgeoning of creations props up our own. You hadn’t noticed my universe (my house, my prison, my dock of the bay) until you stumbled across it. Yet it’s been full of itself the while. I will allow that our universes are closely adjoining, admit even that, OK, we are located in the same one. OK. But that shouldn’t estrange us. We are unrelated kits of the same litter. Let’s agree to be gods of separate realms. You can have your ruler. If you think it necessary. If you can’t get away from it. I get to be anarchy. My own king, my own subject, my own nature, my own natural wonder. Speak, happy god of the page: Ho! Hah!

I’ve heard of the muse, one of those Greek ladies who slipper down from the morning mists, who pricks the poet’s ear, and inspired, breathed into, revived from the drowning ordinary, the poet rushes to the page to capture what she is drip dripping into him. What’s her motivation?

I don’t understand what makes gods so hungry for praise. You are the fucking greatest! You know it or you don’t. Only if you doubt it are you always asking to be assured. Gods ought to have some confidence in themselves, it seems to me. It’s no mean feat to make a world, to slap together even a crude likeness of the divine and set it loose to multiply. Some degraded ego that requires the clay to pipe out how fine the maker.

As a god I favour indifference. Go about your life without giving me a thought. It’s much more interesting seeing what you come up with on your own. You want me to let you win the game? That’s fair?

No game. All terribly serious. Painful parts. It’s quite complicated. I’m not giving out hints. If you spill a jot of wine on the earth and call it sacrifice, fine. Drag the child up the mountain and slit his throat, let the earth get gloppy with his blood. That proves something. Your devotion to something. Your obedience. Kill for me. I’m OK with that. Kill in my name.

But don’t expect me to praise you for it. Because I think that would be seriously fucked up of you. I would rather you read me. And passed me along to others who would read me. If you want to sacrifice to me, sacrifice some of your busy hours to me. This god likes to think about that. All those human eyeballs bopping from one side of the page to the other. It’s kind of cute, kind of funny. Lips occasionally surprised to find a word working them. I like to think of your face in the light reflected from my face. I reach out. I touch your finger. Live, baby, live!