Palimpsest

June 26, 2006

Dearest Hubert,

Gil here.

I am tartly aware that it has been a long while since we have spoken or written but now that we are both dead perhaps the distances between us are lessened by our necrotic state. That black stone that you carried with you and that eventually carried you off came next to me. And yes, we did both invite that first unwelcome then hated entity into our lives but we were were we not ever prepared to live with the consequences of our own actions artistically as well as physically. Well do I recall those evenings at the Royal and the subsequent nights and early mornings in your '41 Dodge although for me the day I finally got rid of my own car and was on my way back to Brooklyn was my best.

But I ramble. It's been so long. I did have something that I wanted to talk about with you. You remember those long talks we used to have? Of adverbs? Of the interchangeability of characters? Of Catholicism and Catholic writers? Do you remember my "eye disorder" that I feigned in homage to Joyce? Good times - the start of better times. Perhaps you remember my obsession with O'Brien's blackly comic work? Enough of that - let's on to the matter germane. Allow me to explain.

When our own black stone brought me here across the Styx I was not quite prepared no I was prepared but I was not ready. The day before the crud in my lungs choked me to death I had had a notice from the good guys and gals at The Dalkey Archive that some guy out there in the grand wide shallows of interconnected nonsense that they call the internet has adopted me as a major character in a parody of my own parody. Some new writer was writing me - not some biography or hatchet job but a real novel - and I did so want to encourage him and peer into his creation. But the stone weighed heavy on my chest that day and the very next it crushed the last gasps of breath from me and all of my creation and brought me untimely on to your domain with things undone.

Since crossing into this shadey place I have boned up on this work of his. I am confused by it. It feels like some of those experimental works that the Brits were turning out in the 60s but doesn't so much as nod to the physical restraints that those brave explorers (Quinn, Johnson, Nye, Brooke-Rose, Heppenstall et al) were all mastered and bettered by - the internet has allowed him to lift some veils for the reader and crush some of the writer's traditional barriers. I confess I am not sure whether he is any good at all but you have to admire the size of his gonads for trying it. The boy's got the balls of an elephant. And he knows his onions but like I say I'm not sure ...

OK, get on with it Gil! One of the things he's pointing up is the parallels between ourselves and Trellis and De Selby - now there's a turn up for the book - and me as Trellis! I like this because he plays with the greek word trellos and the character Trellis - the greek meaning mad or insane - sounds a lot like me. And then you become De Selby the mathematician (maybe he doesn't know as much about you as he should) and bizarre philosopher of Flann's inner darkness. It's a nice axis he has there.

He is inviting other writers to take part in the making or crafting of this text as he goes along. Also he has picked up on the bicycle molecule theory and is extending that outward into quantum physics (don't ask - just don't) and that, trust me, is a very neat idea. On top of all this he's taken my crap writer/ out of control character scenario and turned it loose on my own parodic novel. But the thing I really wanted to talk to you about - we've covered enough background now - is his exploration into the nature of that piercing relationship between fiction and reality and how they might be capable of reciprocal influence. We know that art can influence the physical world and clearly the "real" world leaks into art but what he is talking about is a more direct touching - think some of those sci-fi stories where the hero journeys back thru time to change the past and the ripple effects that that has on the then altered present produced from that now changed past. It's like an assignment for a creative writing class - "Your hero goes back in time and kills the young Hitler as he prepares to take the cloth - project the present that your hero returns to find.!"

You'll see why this concern me, how this concerns me, personally! If he is writing me what might he not do to me? And you!

For now I'll leave this with you - it has no doubt come as a shock to hear from me at all let alone that I am dead and have a quandry left back on the farther bank left unresolved. I shall be in touch soon.

Yours, ever (literally now)

Gil

PS - where can you get cigarettes here?