Distance is the arena.

[…]

Fill this space with writing.

—Peter Gizzi

sitting there on the seat back of my hand on the steering wheel all I have to do is put the beige notebook between my fingers dream book built in dream vanishes me I’m there it’s real if I write in my car

my autobiography will be

my AUTO-FICTION

—Serge Doubrovsky

Sitting there not in the driver’s seat but a lecture theatre at University College, Oxford, 20 June 2024, my hand writing on the first page of my notebook: how do you invent (form)? One hundred and seventy eight days later: the sentence flew eighteen thousand kilometres clockwise around the world. To translate this note to language as easily as I can bring it across time; that tree I saw in England is a tree I could never have seen in Sydney; your blueberries have a different smell and taste. The act of reading is its own story, the story of the time you encounter the text, not then (that air we formerly breathed) but now, when the encounter is brought to life, prolonging those moments swallowed by the spiral. I’m writing this sentence on the last day of the year. I’m writing this sentence on the fourteenth day of the year. I’m thinking about what makes two things cohere: a sort of dream of distance in which the self is displaced from the centre of the work and the teller disappears into the telling; the backtime of remembering slashed forth to the time of writing. Today I read Jack Spicer’s letters to Lorca: things do not connect, they correspond, he wrote, and afterwards I typed into this document: I think it is the approach to correspondence that shows the personality of the text, an approach that is both a pleasure and a struggle, because correspondence can also be a dialogue of incongruence, different as any two things existing can be. So what do you want the form to do for you? I wrote in my notebook two hundred and thirteen days ago, a follow up to my first question of invention. We’re driving; we’re kissing; I’m pressing go on a lime bike thinking about criticism as the blurred and lovely living of us, and after a long time, midsentence, still we’re here incompletely naming the whole of everyday life. Do not try to make it all cohere do not try to make it make sense stop finding formations everywhere stop making sense stop it it’s fake that’s what happens when I’m typing into this document I want the incongruence to fan out everywhere so motion not capture is what happens. Yesterday, you said: no one’s thinking about genre when they sit down to write, why don’t you tell me something I don’t know. Now I’m writing this sentence on the fifteenth day of the year. I’m thinking about old news, being in your car, pit stop for boost then intercoursing sunburnt through the wind; what world we invent can make us last. If there are any aggregates in my demand for life they form the denuded pages of my notebook; months pass. Leaving to remain like a wind wouldn’t lose momentum. Huge corner. Start over (that air new to us). That’s how far the arena.

Oxford, England – Sydney, Australia

20 June 2024 – 19 January 2025

Acknowledgements
The text includes appropriated quotes from Mary Cappello, Anne Carson, Anwen Crawford, Chris Marker, Marcel Proust, Jack Spicer.