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Monday, September 26, 2005

From the Guyana Project

Just write it flat, I told myself, write it, as it were, in a monotone, don't be distracted by anxieties of style. Don't try to explain what you didn't understand. Press on, though you can barely see what comes next and can't see what comes after that. Make it clear how confused you were, how scattered your thoughts, how patchy your knowledge, how arrogant your assumptions. Don't be distracted by anxieties of truth. This is all a fiction you've been assembling in your head anyway, trying to make yourself believe you really know where you've been and what you've been doing. Already you're inventing apprehensions and motives to fill the gaps in your memory. Already the phrases in your notebook, however hastily or petulantly you scribbled them, take on the authority of history, supplying details you cannot dispute because you cannot remember them otherwise. Already some sensations saturate and overpower others, and you rewrite your untidy fictions under their influence.

New working title: Imaginary Roads

Rejected working titles:
Strange Name for Stones (after A.J. Seymour)
Cartography of Stones
Imaginary Maps
Imaginary Countries
Imaginary Journeys
Empty Maps
The Map of the Savannahs Was a Dream (after Wilson Harris--but too long. Make this the working epigraph instead)

All of them attempting to name the tension between physical & mental landscapes....

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