“Every library is exclusionary,” Alberto Manguel says in his new book, The Library at Night. I’ve spent the day wandering through the library of my own private and exclusionary self, and I’ve lost my way again. It’s surely not that I can’t think and write about my life. I never seem to stop doing that. It is more this: I can’t meet my own standards much of the time – and the rest of the time I simply misplace whatever I rendered onto paper. I still need paper and the ragged shapes of words emerging and being deposited there. I am conscious of a physical need to write with my cramped left hand, a hand that has ached my whole life because I must inscribe plunging into the page while the right-handed pull away from it, into the freedom of empty space.

In any case I wrote an essay last month and the two before that too, and every word is lost somewhere in the bowels of this hundred-year old house. In the six weeks between June 7^th and July 21^st, this house was assailed by workmen who chased out our raccoons and bagged their excrement, took down the chimney where they had bred three times, dug up our lawn from the street to our front windows after a clumsy city worker broke our water main, and replaced the roof thousands of raccoon feet had scrabbled across nightly to stand atop our chimney like finials, finials the size of baby bears. Somewhere in the rush of spending several days next door drinking rosé and nibbling deli and regretting the need to be an adult and worrying myself nearly ill with all that was being done and undone, I lost pages and pages of my own self right here within these walls.

The simple truth is that pages and pages of my own authentic self have gone missing as if apprehended like Persephone while she was out picking blossoms, just carried off into the underworld of chaos and forgetting. And I am having trouble accepting that.

So I am doing what I usually do – looking for clues to myself, wandering through the library at night. Right now I am working on a shadow-box for my neighbor Gordon. I like to make something for him each August when he returns alive and well from RAGBRAI, which I imagine as a combination of the Canterbury Tales and Jackass the Movie. Last year’s box was flat and concerned itself with Proust and clouds and one year later I found to my horror that the glassy letters I had glued on against the blue skies had already fallen off. Over at Gordon’s house I tucked them nervously behind the quotations from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, and vowed not to get stuck again with a dud.

I’m sitting now in front of a large glass-fronted box filled with fragments suggesting alchemy and the soul. I’ve got Gordon photocopied in colour and black and white, Latin phrases in glassine envelopes, black and terra cotta butterflies and an eye amulet from Tibet. Work notes made months ago suggest dervishes, the Catherine wheel and the Book of the Dead. I have absolutely no idea what the hell I meant. Today I found three postcards purchased in the same time frame. There is a Francesco Clemente painting called Priapea, a strange riot of oranges and ivories that on closer inspection appears vile and degraded, a Delvac black and white photo from the early 1950’s that shows a French family picnicking alongside a road covered with Tour De France riders. The father of the group lifts a baby bottle above his head in tribute to the athletes. The third postcard is an Ed Ruscha word print that declares: “I was gasping for contact.” From these three I clearly meant to distill some essence. But there is no sillage, no trail of what I meant to do.

My words and my ideas from the last several months have simply evanesced. I hold in my hand now several pages from a photography exhibition of Seiichi Furuya, the Japanese photographer who recorded the suicide of his wife Christine. In June I discovered the record of his work from the time of their marriage until her death several years later. I was most moved and unnerved not by the photos of her fallen body crushed on the street, but by the fact that during their years together he made four hundred images of her and neither artist nor subject ever saw them. He didn’t develop them until she was buried. After her death, he recreated her with the images, brought them into the world from the bath to the line. Across the pages I’d photocopied I wrote these words: “The twin maras of pain and pleasure; self control versus self creation,” and this: “To be not just one’s self but a performance of the self.” I might as well be living inside someone else.

From the ninth of The Emerald Tablets of Thoth: “Know ye, O man, that all that exists is only an aspect of greater things to come. Matter is fluid and flows like a stream, constantly changing from one thing to another.”