More notes toward The Route by Jen Hofer and Patrick Durgin

3.

I took The Route with me on a recent road trip and was glad to have it to refer to of an evening in the cabin overlooking the lake and or beach and or rainforest. And as I went along the way, I thought of its tricks, tendencies and conclusions about the writing or written life.

4.

epis
self
con
she
us
figure
at
if
con
tent
or
vent
shun
travail
logged
pique
mystique
each
next
best
beast
sees
sheer
seer


But should we?

5.

Write? How to go on despite the world, the war, tragedies, compromises, boredom, being ground under the wheels of capitalism, being "too in it," being completely "out of it"?

How to regard writing as life and the exchange of ideas as affecting one another so that there is speech, meaning writing, and then change on the part of your interlocutor and your self.

Sample epistolary paragraph by Jen (pp 36 & 37)

"About our collaboration, I used the phase ‘(eclipse in the transparent sense?)’ with the idea that the layerings within each text should precisely (however imprecisely) function to illuminate each other, rather than obliterating each other. The idea that proximity to difference is luminous rather than blinding, illuminating rather than eliminating, transparent as a complex multitudinous body layered visibly, not transparent as self-evident, as clearly no ‘self’ is ‘evident’ not should be. …


“The ‘self’ (selves) neither evident nor escapable. Yet the self is a porous container. Perception (experience enters through the ‘I’ and flies right past the ‘I.’ I don’t think perception can exist without the body, and it is always this body, isn’t it, ‘my’ body, and at the same time, this tool we are born into, the body, opens limitlessly if we(mindfully, curiously) let it.

Can we make of perception a form of explanation?”


Sample epistolary response paragraph from Patrick (p 40)

“Perception describes but doesn’t explain. We can only intend an explanation, otherwise it won’t occur. Perception describes the inexplicable—trauma isn’t the only effect (of what we’ve ‘seen,’ for instance). Neurology etc. grapples with this as a problem, as though perspective does eclipse/obliterate—but you’re right I think to recognize it the other way. We learn as much from what we don’t know as from what we do. An eclipse illuminates the form and the ‘dark side’ in relief. It’s a dark relief.’”

6.