Something Else

This fall, I'll have a new book coming out, and one of the things I think about having a new book coming, and having to talk about that book, is how anything I say about that book will be inadequate. It will be taking the thing and reducing it some way. Based on two folders filled with word documents, it appears that I began writing the novel in August of 2018, shortly after my wife and I had put our marriage back together. The novel is about that. It seems that it took me about a year to write. It's composed of four sections, following the seasons: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer. The novel is quite literally about the near-destruction and then regeneration of a marriage (our marriage), and this destruction and regeneration followed, almost unbelievably, the seasons. We also created it ourselves. There are things I can say about the novel, about why it was written, about how it was written, about the philosophy informing it, about my understanding of the nature of consciousness, and about my understanding of the natural world that was born from the book, but none of that gets to what the novel is doing on its own. So, I feel some hesitation, some resistance in discussing the book because to discuss it is to limit it in some way. The novel is saying something, but it's doing so in a way that is open-ended, up for interpretation and consideration and reflection and contemplation. And yet, at the same time, I know that I'd like to talk about it and that I sort of have to. But ideally, I'd just like it to be experienced. This is really where my hesitation comes from - it's the experience of a book, just like it's the experience of going on a hike or riding a bike or doing whatever, that is most interesting, and it's much less interesting to say something about it.And yet here I am saying that it's much less interesting to say something about it. I feel this little predicament is a constant one, kind of informing all life, but I think articulating it helps, lets the listener know that whatever I say about the book will be inadequate, and to go to the thing itself. Even the book itself is pointing beyond itself, beyond language and storying, toward something else. Really, it's this something else I'm most interested in.