Waking this morning at 6:00 to write three pages of Zyxt, the last section of The Alphabet, out in the notebook – it will probably translate down into a single page of typescript when I get to that – leaves me drained, exhausted. The process only took an hour, maybe 45 minutes, once I subtract the time it took to rise, brush my teeth & shuffle downstairs.

I began with a sentence describing a scene from a dream, not one I had last night, but rather the night before, that was still nagging at me. I had described the dream yesterday afternoon to Krishna, who commented “Well, that’s a nightmare,” though it had not felt like one to me. It had seemed more strange than repellant. Because I had described it to her yesterday, I retained enough of the detail to sketch out what I wanted this morning, then proceeding from my Palm Pilot to add an additional 23 sentences from the 156 currently stored there for just this purpose, plus two others I wrote on the spot because they seemed necessary. It will all appear as a single stanza.

Perhaps because of all the blogging I’ve done of late, I was paying attention in the back of my mind as I worked as to why I was placing this or that sentence into the specific sequence as I did, recalling Chris Stroffolino’s words about the nature of meaning, thinking (quite vaguely, I must admit) that I was after what I could only call – at least at this close proximity –a music of emotions I had some sense of attempting to orchestrate.

When I initially write (or, as I often think of it, “collect”) sentences that I might use in work, the process often feels pretty casual – there is, after all, no requirement that I actually use one if later it doesn’t feel right or I can’t find the appropriate position for it in my work. Often such sentences are things I’ve heard, or (more often) variations on things I’ve heard. I can collect these sentences in the middle of business meetings without losing the thread of discussion & have even composed in the middle of eye surgery. But the process seldom has the “feeling tone” of writing, as such.

Putting sentences together, on the other hand, is heavy lifting, an exceptionally intense process that I can’t do every day – unless of course I have set up some system to enable that (the exact same system I’m using these days for the blog). Which is why, when I was asked/told by that questioner earlier this year that my work was all revision, it did not ring true. No, this putting together is for me the true act of writing. Everything else is adjunct.

I chose the 23 sentences I ended up using from the oldest of my collection of “raw” material – going through maybe one-third of the total group at least casually before I honed in on the ones I wanted to use. One sentence that I’d initially thought to use, I held back – it comes to close to the territory of the dream and would make more sense to me to put it into Zyxt later, when it will serve not only all of its internal functions & whatever other local ones I decide that I want it to play, but also to harken back to this particular instance of the dream. Yet that sentence deferred is itself perhaps six months old & could easily be another six months older before it gets used.

Of the 23 collected sentences, I made changes in no more than six in incorporating them here. Most were minor corrections – and awkward phrasing or a missing word – but in one I added a single word that I’d not thought of previously that made the sentence suddenly lock into the “music of emotions” I was after. That one word made me feel enormously happy – it proved as important as the raw sentence itself – which was interesting in part because this is a relatively somber moment in the work and I was able to work on that while experiencing a very different sense toward the writing itself.