Errata Page 7

  Day 21

  I’m not naturally drawn to cemeteries, despite the plentiful above-ground variety in New Orleans. Ornate headstones, much less gravestone rubbings don’t hold appeal. Funerals especially repel me. So, I must come to terms with why the place, a crude burial spot, appeals. Why am I drawn to go back to the place and dig up the body, potentially attracting troublesome attention? Since you aren’t me, you might think it no more than an obsessive compulsion to confirm that he remains there, not resting but decomposing without dignity. You might also speculate that I hold a deep need to get caught, so returning to the place would be for the chief reason of an alert to my complicity. There may be faint strands of both those assumptions at work, but one can only admit to what one knows.

  I know I’m drawn to dig up and rebury the body, at least in part, to reexperience the initially-unexpected euphoria of the taboo. I know that the physical exertion, the power over another human, the expected approval from a woman I desired (and still do), for at least these reasons, I reached combustion, became drunk on the action, and crave that fiery cup again. I know that the rationale for this notebook is partly an excuse to return to the place, an act of necessity providing justifiable cover for a weakening into craven impulse. I know if I give in to a follow-up visit after the second trip to bury the errata notebook, then it’ll become occasional habit, which will become repetition, which will become routine. I know I’m of weak stock and therefore must restrict myself in the same way of the other, older, restriction. I know I knew this around a decade ago, that although gravestone rubbings don’t personally appeal, human rubbings do, with my role both that of paper and pencil. I know I avoid crowds, force myself to walk unoccupied sidewalks or in the streets, never take buses, stay away from Mardi Gras parades, and generally hermit myself from what I like, which is what I am. In New Orleans, anything goes, until it doesn’t. This is a difficult city for innocent excursions anyway, what with all of the con artists of desire lurking around, trying to hide in public. Since this notebook may never be seen, I can divulge what cold introspection has revealed. I‘ve justified this ongoing compulsion with a convenient theory rather than admit to actual arousal, legitimizing it away as an art project of life, although one mostly resisted, an updating of Max Ernst’s technique of using frottage to add texture to his works, my version no more than a dismissing of conventional forms of public interaction and replacing them with traces of sensual tactility, hoping for the spontaneity of a pleasing stranger who might reciprocate, all of this deconstructing society. But really, the rub turns me on. Don’t let my excuses and jostling belie a booming self-disgust. I know this transmuting of expression, hopeful cry of communication, wouldn’t be seen as that of a visionary mind but a diseased one, a frenzied goat perpetually rutting. I know certain tendencies are considered –ism and –mania aberrations although seeming to me like perfectly natural behavior, so I cloister. I keep from certain situations and cloister, which is how I also must handle the place and the inclinations it’s provoked in me. I know.

  There’s little doubt, at least in my mind, that the writers Cabrera Infante, Melville, and Bruno Schulz, as well as the artist Vachal, would fully understand the indicting impulses and searing cravings that arise, the chance for ruination, knowing we’re all linked to this common story by different thirsts, all patriots to a nation of taboos (Who isn’t, other than those who are anomalies or in denial?), and they’d cumulatively advise that one can either feed or starve the craving when it arises, though it can also be used to seed artistic work. Is there any question that this defined group didn’t infuse its own work with impolite stirrings, that one impetus for their creativity, in fact, was as a means of sublimation, to release the capped-up cravings? I feel one with the ones who once sat as I sit here now, with the police scanner’s volume turned to a hushed intimate cadence. It seems perfectly clear that what is in me will come out from me in defined form, so I’m obliged to free it, harness it, and purposefully tame it in certain fashion, if not respectable, at least presentable. Otherwise, I’ll be one more Scorpio fallen into ruin from my own stinger, if I’ve not done so already.

  Day 22

  An unexpected change in behavior has come about over the 22 days I‘ve written these pages, initially thinking I was spending quiet mornings in cliché, weakly languishing in torment, hoping for modified composure, trying to correct perceptions that potentially wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t made a mistake of desire and dabbling. Do you have confidence in me, in what you’ve read? I’ll miss the errata notebook and can’t imagine burying it, though I must and this needs to happen quickly. That’s no urgency scam. The notebook has become me, though, another form of Raymond Russell, but from a different observational angle. The notebook is Raymond Errata and, though parting with it’ll be like losing a limb, I hope to be able to read properly again, hope that a writing dabble hasn’t ruined the sustained pleasure of a good book. Since starting this notebook, it’s become distressingly impossible to read with focus. I become jabbed with thoughts of the notebook, then return back to the book page at hand, stopping often throughout to jot down an exceptional phrase, ruminating over an idea that might be adapted, and critiquing how a particular sentence might be better written. It appears that I can’t be both reader and writer, which isn’t the same as a writer who reads. One suffers for the other to flourish. Of this, there’s no middle ground. Not only is it troubling for the sake of sabotaging escapism and slowing down my learning tremendously, but also because of alarmingly turning my own pages into a closer resemblance to literature than the intended mere telegramming of events (granted, telegramming seems to be the highest aspiration for the present day prevailing breed, that mouth of rotting teeth, it’s a pity when writers don’t value words, attempting little beyond a 4/4 time plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk in print, and more so when readers seek no more than those writers).

  It’s time to change out the books bricked into the support piers. The weather and bugs have left only wiggy pages amidst intact covers, but I don’t have replacement titles ready to insert yet. None of this is to say that I consider myself any sort of emerging writer (that would be a flimsy unworthy title), to which the proper response would be sheer mirth. Who am I other than a lazy but committed scribbler, conveying a core specimen of first draft faith, but letting the letters labor to do the real work, the form-altering nature of things? Any lucky eloquence is due to the letters themselves. Who’d be interested in my dim insensible thoughts? I’ll never be a writer or a cousin to mankind. No, I’m not confiding speciously (a lovely word for an ugly manner) when I say that I’ve no wish to be a writer. There’s surely no market for pastiche-strewn pages. Leave the mortal arts to me. Let others perform the wound-picking struggle, claim alleged virtues, be confident in their weaknesses, and libel their friends and neighbors. Likewise, let the nocturnal habits of the alphabet speak with the tongue of the moon, transmuting and reversing my common speech, skipping beyond the heroic, back to the core to evolve forward, but let this happen after my part with it is done. Let the names be named in the dirt and may they never be uncovered.

  What if the notebook might remain buried, never found, if I could merge with it and make Raymond unnecessary? The two of us as one. Never found. Raymond Errata, Errata Raymond, alloyed for language. Language that no longer communicates. This our mutual devotion. Would that it could be done, but I must bury the notebook, Raymond Errata. Its importance will have been served by doing so, both as a self-imposed drying-up of my counterfeit encounter with the pen and to bear the original purpose of an incrimination remedy. Yes, Raymond Errata must be buried. Though it’s obvious that I’m of mixed mind about this, follow through is necessary. If my pilfered books can serve two purposes, aesthetic and pragmatic, as literature and as bricks, then why not bury this notebook as mutual tribute to text and a righting of the record? C, t, b, d, r.

  But what does it mean to bury a book of this sort? And what does i
t also mean that solitude, insomnia, and a corpse as subjects by themselves, much less as an unbridled triumvirate, are considered well-

  worn? Despite being in my sunrise years, I’m quickly learning that clichés only exist until they first become personal, then possessive. My solitude, my insomnia, the dead body I buried (believe otherwise at the moment, but wait until your strength withers and you recant your confidence). There are no clichés of life, only in language, which is no more than lazy language, folksy homilies of sloganed familiarity. Life, on the other hand, surprises when an individual’s gathered fragments gain the coherency of strength, and startles when its unpredictability permits or is unable to prevent the occasional chance clustering of those who lean toward common tribes, these endlessly rippling constellations linking naturally to the unnatural, and it’s more so surprising when any two or more individual’s imbalances allow for any sustained sharing of the echoing fabric of peace and madness, tragedy and triumph that presents itself, cleaving us like a written word, goaded, pillaged, and occasionally restored. Flux stars fall into the internal laws of syntax.

  Lavender Ink Titles

  0-9663846-2-8 Lower 48 Joel Dailey

  0-9663846-3-6 Rogue Embryo Camille Martin

  0-9663846-4-4 Abandoned Premises Joy Lahey

  0-9663846-5-2 Black Market Pneuma Andy di Michele

  0-9663846-6-0 Guest Chain Bill Lavender

  0-9663846-7-9 Mine Andy Young

  0-9663846-8-7 The Snow Poems Dave Brinks

  0-9663846-9-5 What’s Your Sign Alex Rawls

  0-9710861-0-9 Days Hank Lazer

  0-9710861-1-7 Boink Richard Martin

  0-9710861-2-5 The Caveat Onus, Book One Dave Brinks

  0-9710861-3-3 The Caveat Onus, Book Two Dave Brinks

  0-9710861-4-1 The Caveat Onus, Book Three Dave Brinks

  0-9710861-5-X Year Zero NOLAfugees

  0-9710861-6-8 Fish Log Randy Prunty

  0-9710861-7-6 Tender Box: A Wunderkammer Marthe Reed

  0-9710861-8-4 The Caveat Onus, Coda Dave Brinks

  0-9710861-9-2 Ready to Eat Individual Frank Sherlock & Brett Evans

  978-1-935084-00-6 Memorial + sight lines Megan Burns

  978-1-935084-01-3 æpoetics Thaddeus Conti

  978-1-935084-02-0 My Psychic Dogs My Life Joel Dailey

  978-1-935084-03-7 +love Brad Elliott

  978-1-935084-04-4 Portions Hank Lazer

  978-1-935084-05-1 screamin meme Jesse Loren

  978-1-935084-08-2 Cyclones in High Northern Latitudes Jeffrey Side & Jake Berry

  978-1-935084-09-9 The Loup Garou Moose Jackson

  978-1-935084-07-5 Altercations in the Quiet Car (with Fell Swoop) Richard Martin

  978-1-935084-11-2 Whatever Passes for Love is Love John Stoss

  COMING IN 2013

  What Else Do You Want? by John Miller (with Fell Swoop)

  Industrial Loop by Joel Dailey (with Fell Swoop)

  Under The Sky Of No Complaint by Richard Martin (with Fell Swoop)

  Copyright Information

  Errata

  Copyright © 2012 by Michael Allen Zell

  All rites reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced without the express permission etc.

  Print edition ISBN: 978-1-935084-14-3

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-935084-15-0

  Lavender Ink, New Orleans

  lavenderink.org