OK, I have been going kind of crazy. I have several new writing projects going this year as I take some courses with BookFox Academy to amp up my fictional writing skills. So I will be experimenting with all sorts of writing techniques this year.
I mentioned Tender Buttons previously. But there is also a new story I am working on based on Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph.” He wrote a 475 word sentence that was an example in the course on sentences. It was a list sentence of 32 elements that the story charactor saw in a vision. I am using the 32 elements as prompts to write a series of short stories that I am calling The Thirty-Two Stations of the Aleph and I am also working on a story called Arelune set on the Mediterranean, and one called The Hidden Hours and another called the House of the Listening Orchard set in Normandy and I just finished the Hole Company story set in Los Angeles (15,000 words) Listen to it on speechify.com here. and am working on a volume 2 called The Cornucopia House.
All of these are roughly the size of novellas - 20,000+ words. Not to mention the other ones I have been working on, the Exquistite Family Records short stories and the Commonwealth of Elsewhere, and the three volumes called On Living a Life of Art of the articles about the Creative Lifestyle I have been posting the last two years. These are compiled and in the revision stage to go though them one sentence at a time. That will take a while.
So as part of The Thirty-Two Stations of the Aleph One of my experiments was to write an extremely long sentence and I must say I am very proud of this one so I am going to share it with you. This sentence is 813 words long.
The longest sentence I know about is by Donald Barthelme, “The Sentence.” 2,569 words
Station Twenty-Six: The Drawer of Letters
“I saw a drawer of letters written in a trembling hand, obscene in their honesty, unashamed in their desire.”
I saw a drawer of letters written in a trembling hand, obscene in their honesty and unashamed in their desire, and when the drawer slid open with the soft resistance of old wood swollen by time it revealed a stack of envelopes bound with a ribbon that had once been blue but had faded into a restrained gray, the paper shifting under the weight of its own arguments as though exhaling at being found, the letters not arranged but pressed there in the haste of propriety, as one might smooth rumpled clothes after the unexpected knock of a stranger, and when I lifted the first envelope and drew out its contents the handwriting was unmistakable, slanted and urgent, each line driven into the page with the pressure of someone who possessed more vehemence than the paper could reasonably bear, the ink feathered along its strokes so that every word seemed ragged with unrest, like the fine residue of a passion burned too fiercely to remain contained, and as I unfolded it a scent rose that was neither the expected waft of perfume nor the mildew of age but something sharper, a scent of collapsing trust, and the words themselves leaned toward desire the way a dying flame starved of air reaches for its last thin thread, sentences tangling into declarations with no exit strategy, as if a wounded animal clawing at a snare meant for another, meant to capture the lover’s heart through animal guile, words written with an intimacy so unguarded it bordered on violence, a voice that revealed hunger and fear without apology and without protection, rehearsing its grievance and revisiting its regret, circling in rumination and restless self-justification, revising and rewriting the wrong remembered as though the persistence of pacing back and forth might reverse it and, as I opened another letter and then another, the pattern deepened into plea and accusation, claims of victimhood deployed to solicit pity if not sympathy, revisions that softened a sentence only to harden it again with a sharpened edge, phrases repeated so many times they ceased to function as language and became instead a repetition of prayer, until it was clear these were not love letters in the gentle sense but letters of desperation and a humbling neediness, written at the moment when longing and loss become a cruel clarity and the truth one cannot speak aloud scrawls itself onto paper instead with something bordering on fury, and beneath that urgency ran something colder, the recognition that the one addressed had already withdrawn, that every page was written into widening silence, that the pressing of pen to paper was an attempt to reopen a door that had closed long before the first envelope was sealed, and the drawer itself seemed less a piece of furniture than a narrow chamber of the heart where such relics are kept not to be displayed and never to be relinquished, held as one holds a sacrament, not because the passion was pure but because the force beneath it was irresistible, and as I read I felt the faint and unsettling tremor of recognition, for the rhythm of the repetition was not entirely foreign to me, the rehearsals of regret not all together alien, the resistance to release not wholly confined to the hand that had written these pages, and it occurred to me that the voyeur is never as distant as he believes, that to read such letters is to risk recalling one’s own revisions and retractions, one’s own inward arguments rehearsed in the quiet hours after departure, the same recursive reach for what has already receded, and in that widening recognition the drawer ceased to belong to the writer alone and became instead a reliquary common to all hearts, for who has not kept some residue of a refusal, some remembered wrong, some unrequited reaching that refused to cool into resignation, and whatever distortions had taken root in these pages they were not born of indifference but of heat, of passion, and passion even when misdirected is nearer to love than the repose of apathy, and when at last I returned the letters to their place, I did not cast them away or leave them exposed or reduce them to ash but restored them to their rough wooden chamber with a kind of reluctant reverence, acknowledging that what they contained was excessive, flawed, and unresolved, yet unmistakably alive, and as I pushed the drawer closed it released a faint regretful sigh, like something that wished to forget but was not yet finished reconciling or releasing the heartbreak remembered, still carrying the residue of a fire that had once burned bright and refused to cool into indifference, and in that closing I understood that the drawer belonged to us all, that narrow chamber the human heart keeps for what it cannot bear to relinquish, even while holding the uncontainable.
Regarding your work with sentence structure, Fascinating work Cecil. I am reminded of László Krasznahorkai and even Molly Blooms soliloquy in Ulysses.
Well done, Cecil, what a writing feat!