Isolate and out of context, these words mean other things. This is a matter not so simple as it might seem. Paul Horgan: What it comes down to, for a writer, is to discover for himself how he sees the world. Virginia Woolf: But I have written for particulars. The Snow White pricks of my finger with the binding needle, and, across the covers, in the tuck of seams, into the discrete corners of painted endpapers, the X-Acto-knived words of writers who kept writing. Scored concertinas measured lengths of ribbons, cord. I am now not writing books but building them. I have kept my obsessions behind bindings, shoved my drafts out of sight, used words like lavender for lavender and red for red without traumatizing paint tubes, and white space has been my glue.īut in the silence of quarantine I have been unstoried. I have crowded the house with books, not with tools. My room of my own after all these years in this antique house where he has been the artist and I have been the writer. The pipes are artifactual, stubborn, and these, too, he says, must be removed, and he is the one to do it. Now the room is just a room, empty but for the old spinning wheel and the chalkboard art, the modem platform and the modem, the long narrow table and the two stools where I will stand and work, but also: the two periscoping pipes that rise through the floor where the radiator had docked. The floor takes a measure of its measure. The arctic air blows through the open front door as he lugs each liberated iota of freighted history from the room, down the hall, and out, and again returns-heroic, romantic, his ancient waffle shirt stained by rust, his jeans pocked by dirt, his glasses steaming with the indoor and the outdoor of this winter operation. With an iron wedge and a dumbbell hammer, with hands and head and heart. It is a presence begging for an absence, the question being how. The thing has been heatless for years, its hundreds of pounds sinking the thin floorboards, its valleys and hills and cul-de-sacs grimed with hair clump, paint chunk, the claustrophobias of dust. The defunct radiator in the sunny pocket of the room is twenty-three cast-iron quanta long.
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