Wandering Energies

14.XI.23

Now that the publisher’s editors have reviewed the manuscript about the Russian-American author that was submitted a year ago, the digital files can be given a final polish and sent off on their journey to the printing press in Latvia. For the first time, I have not only managed to start but also to finish a new book during the waiting period – one considerably slimmer than the essay that will return with a wide spine and polished exterior in a few weeks – so now I feel no melancholy, no precipitous emptiness after a job done. I am unsure, but the gentle electricity that tickles my armpits and midriff most closely resembles the joy parents associate with an adult child: their offspring has left home, is managing on its own, and has secrets of which the older generation knows nothing. Is it a matter of liberation? Certainly. Personal agency? Definitely. But above all: an independence marked by intimacy. For both parties.

As I flip through the manuscript of what will become my next book, I do not get further than the epigraph – »... sparkling electricity near his solar plexus ...« – before I realize that the energies have long since moved on to this new work. Yet it is the same writing nervous system, twined from anxieties and emotions which – bold as ever – take on different forms.