I didn't put an exclamation mark after "Eureka" because what I have to say does not warrant the dramatic affirmation of such a punctuational point. What I am about to say is merely a wee thought that has occurred to me, and then grown into something that I wish to express on this darling little blog.
Here goes.
My recent 'book lists' (
this one is and was my first) share many parallels with poetics. I don't know if you can say that poetics is a more conscious scrabbling for a less-knowable sub-conscious truth (of course the word 'scrabbling' offers connotational derrogatariness that isn't intentional in an
ad hominem sort of way), but certainly in many of 'the ways of poetics', one can find oneself believing what one says, being
inspired to write, being totally and utterly ready to continue (having asked permission), and yet act in a completely contrary way - which would suggest a difference of opinion between consciousnesses perhaps. I think I'm going to elucidate this in a separate post with particular respect to poetry, 'watch this space'...
But my point is that in
buying a book, are we not saying (unless we are 'fetishists' or, to use a term I am perhaps more semantically familiar with, 'objectivists'. 'Collectors' would probably have got the job done without wasting so many words...), "I want to read this book." And yet, why do we buy some and show such limp desire to ever read them? Why does it take us so long to read some of them, after being so excited to buy them? As I write this, I begin to doubt myself, but then I feel empowered again; there is a similarity - a disparity (though not necessarily a necessary one) between the act (of writing poetics/buying a book) and the 'follow up' act (the next creative work/the next book you read) - respectively.
Maybe this all depends on what you intend to do with the book. Maybe it depends on whether you buy a book with the specific intention of reading it within a certain time frame; if you buy it because you want to read it 'sometime' then maybe there's more leeway. But then you can still have more definite biblio-intentions one minute, only to change them then next. And then, sometimes we write poetics when we're trying to write something else, so maybe none of this is that clear cut.
I'd feel a bit of a cheater if I united book-buying and poetics-writing under the banner of 'human changeability' or whatever... Maybe I've just looked at book-buying from an overly writer-centric point of view... But then this is a mostly writing focused blog isn't it?
I think the ratio of questions to answers has grown too large now. Time to
stop.
