Unknown Artist:
Daikon Radish and Accounting Book
(19th Century)

"I'm still wondering."

I create my series off calendar. I begin each on either a solstice or an equinox so that the ends of months and years never mark the end of any series. The twelfth installment of this iAlogue Series falls on the last day of this year, 2023, and it feels right as well as proper to pull over here and at least try to take stock of what this year has wrought or what I've managed to wrought this year. Reviewing my work, I'm first taken by how little I crisply remember. It seems to have left little in any way resembling a permanent impression. I have written daily, ninety-some stories each quarter, at least two-hundred-sixty over the year in parts of five different series, yet I have to reference my archive to even remember the names of the series I labored so diligently to produce.

What must it mean to have produced so much while remembering so little? For the record, for dedicated readers with perhaps better memories than mine, I was already well into my Success Series when this year started. I then moved on to a series titled Publishing before moving into one I labeled Honing. I ended the year completing another series called GoodNuff, then began this present iAlogue one on the Winter solstice. I continue pumping out unmemorable stories each morning, the sum total of which seems, in retrospect, to have been zip. But perhaps what I created cannot be counted in accumulative terms. I might have been writing for those moments rather than for posterity. Maybe there was no unifying story. Perhaps I was only (I said, "only”) trying to evoke some response in those moments rather than create a work filled with horizontal or verticle knowledge.

I have characterized my practice as one of discovery. I tend not to hold forth about what I know. Instead, I inquire into what I'm wondering about. I notice something that attracts my attention, so I follow the provocation to see where it leads. With this story, I noticed that my latest four series didn't seem to stick with me. I could not even remember the titles without some prompting. The details, which were many and various, not even prompting helped me recall the details which always felt so significant in the moments of creation. They evoked the sensation of having stumbled upon something while I wrote them. And often, through the few days following, I'd keep cogitating on their message, their meanings. This year, I became much more diligent about creating my Weekly Writing Summaries, for I sensed greater importance lurking within them than I'd earlier ascribed. The narrative arcs of my work tended to show up there on a weekly scale rather than over a month or quarter.

Somebody, maybe myself, told me that a body of work should exhibit a narrative arc. A detective novel, for instance, must take the reader toward concluding something, from crime to retribution, from mystery to resolution. Likewise, non-fiction should be crafted to leave the reader feeling better informed, from innocently ignorant toward knowing better, producing a sense of progress by the end. My books, my series, do not even attempt to create such experiences, for they seem scaled at a different, tinier focus. I focus on facets. Narrative arcs, when discernable, were never built in but appeared as emergent properties. Upon careful reflection, like with my Weekly Writing Summaries, some arcs emerge, but I never attempted to build them in. I diligently avoid anything even vaguely resembling plotting or clever staging. I apparently write in the moment for that moment. Each piece seems to carry a similar pattern. I begin with a question and move toward some resolution, often in the form of acceptance that the question might not evoke an answer or resolution, but some deeper appreciation than it initially sparked. This might represent a back-handed sort of progression.

Evoke seems to be the operant focus. My stories seem to focus on realization. They begin with an observation and end with a sharper or at least a different focus. I might be trying to evoke some reaction and response from me and my reader. I do not usually dabble in purpose, leaving that up to my reader. Like in dialogue and, by extension, iAlogue, purpose must be an emergent property, not explicitly built in, but somehow resulting from the experience. I get to find my own meanings, and my readers remain just as fortunate, I guess. I often appear as a somewhat confused inquisitor, wondering after some curiosity, like: How could I create four complete books this year and struggle to remember even their names? What might be the narrative arc of such a narrative arc, and what might that mean? What do those questions evoke for me and my reader? I'm still wondering.

©2023 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #iAlogue , #PureSchmaltz