Odilon Redon:
The Lost Angel Then Opened Black Wings, from Night (1886)

" … he noticed a shadow falling over his finished product …"

An Apoplectic Angel oversees my daily production. An even more apoplectic one supervises publication. Neither can quite comprehend what I'm doing. My work follows no standard development pattern: no plot, no protagonist other than the forbidden observer and The Muse, and no apparent purpose. The implied purpose does not seem well supported by the result. Readying my Cluelessness manuscript, posted initially as my CluelessSummer series in the summer of 2018, has taken five-and-a-half years to reach pre-publication, and even then, those ApoplecticAngels second guess my intentions. They compare what I've produced with what some other writer might have created and seem to have weighted their judgments in favor of the other fella. I hesitate, perhaps fatally, at the prospect of publishing this book.

I want to reread it, hoping that a sixth time through provides the experience the first five times didn't yield. I understand that I can never experience the work as anyone besides me could ever experience it. I lost the opportunity to discover this book as I created it. Even reading the first draft was spoiled by my prior experience and personal involvement when writing it. Another reading would doubtless yield yet another version, for each re-read inevitably discovers fresh shortcomings, if only minor grammatical issues needing correcting. Two versions ago, the work passed muster with some sample readers. They reported positive experiences with it, along with a few well-intended and gratefully accepted suggestions, primarily minor grammatical corrections, which, I understand, will always remain essentially endless.

The gestation time seems to have passed, yet my ApoplecticAngels and I continue second-guessing each other. Acceptance still seems preliminary, premature, and unwarranted given the substance, or perhaps just the extreme lack of substance I've produced. I have been crawling through the contract, struct stupid by the small print and the proliferation of extremely picky details. I need a manager to take care of the business end of this business. I imagine only a disappointing reception. The numbers guarantee invisibility, given the competition, projected at something exceeding four million.

I hadn't even intended to compete, just fulfill a simple intention. How would it be to write a book about Cluelessness from the perspective of someone embodying that cluelessness? Not someone inhabiting overlooking meta space, peering down upon with sophisticated disapproval, but someone unable to see the water he's swimming in like some fish suspended in his cluelessness. He could produce no suggestions for improving his lot, just spare descriptions of the world he inhabits. There are no twelve handy guidelines for ridding this world of unnecessary cluelessness, but simply stories from his daily existence. For me, a certain subtle wisdom emerges from this context. Not so much embodied in knowledge or intelligence, those over-employed indices of utility and worth, but in ragged understandings and observations, perhaps ones similar to those imparted by ApoplecticAngels, angry at the way the world insists upon being yet continuing to engage as if it could become better if they only tried harder.

I feel like the man who crossed a continent on foot only to discover disappointment at the end of his effort. He arrived to wish he could just be home again. He gained experience only to miss his innocence. Had I expected to conquer my Cluelessness by merely writing a book about it? Had I wished to 'get better' because of repeating what initially made me worse? Was a transcendent wisdom supposed to emerge from publication? Was courage? The man who walked across that continent came to see that nothing changed for his dedication, the human condition in all its cluelessness definitely notwithstanding. He could not see the ending when he started and was surprised that no ending awaited him upon completion, so he understandably ended up with a few questions. Holding those, he noticed a shadow falling over his finished product, the familiar shadow of that ApoplecticAngel overseeing his daily production or the even more Apoplectic one supervising publication.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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