The work is finished now, so I have decided that I can offer this as a prefatory note, a sort of guide. These words, typed online and finding their way onto servers, through filters and into their files, are meant to be kept separate from the work itself (if that is possible), thus it was necessary to ensure the work’s completion before complicating matters with this sort of meta data.
The equivalent of no less than 600 pages are in the hands of the publisher. This is a matter of faith in the end; I do not know for absolute certain, though a number of miraculous occurrences have done much to assure me of my success. In the end, I can only hope that my entreaties, like bottled messages heaved into the surf, were carried well by the currents. There has never been any promise that the tides will carry the many missives offered it with any direction other than the vagaries of its lunar sway. It is nothing less than a prayer to a god as capricious as they've all been. But yet we all wish we had a reason profound enough to bring us to the shore, bottle in hand, with as much of our being rolled up and corked in. I imagine that, bobbing in the lifeless petrochemical swirl of the Pacific Trash Vortex is nothing less than a scriptural account of longing, loneliness and hope. Dead sea scrolls. So it is I pray with my words, waiting for the rafters.
My method, of course, was not the stuff of soggy maritime romance, but of bureaucracy, which covers the earth more completely. Like an impossible Kafka, I let my drawers be rifled through, bared myself. This will hopefully serve as a brief guide to a work which is likely scattered about ever-proliferating agencies and private contractors, to say nothing of what has found its way to the shore of other governments. Let this be a sort of Rosetta Stone with which to coordinate the work into its proper arrangement.
But why, you will be asking, would one pursue such a course? I am confident enough in my success now that I can confess the failures which led me here. I was a writer whom no one noticed. No one. Not agents, editors, publishers. Other writers, even. Nothing. No response. Not even polite refusals. Emptiness.
It is the most common genre of article found in writing magazines and websites: how to get noticed. With the dire and unspoken implication being that a writer unnoticed is not a writer at all. The problem was that I was not noticed in my non-writing life, either. I made something of a study of these articles, and I got the impression that the writers of the “how to get noticed” pieces were in fact noticed in other dimensions of their life. Spouses and families were mentioned occasionally (if typically as distractions and impediments). Writing groups, friends, colleagues populate the pieces. Even those who did not mention extra-literary notice wrote in friendly, helpful styles devoid of horror. They were describing professional tips, not existential crises.
Which is what it was becoming for me, a crisis. To be unknown is to not be. Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” is only half-right, if that. Being is expression, and expression is as dependent on the other as it is on the self. One is oneself only in the other. Or, perhaps more precisely, through the other. Even in the mathematical drudgery of quantum physics is it known the dependence on the observer. I needed an observer. Like an indeterminate quantum.
And so I finally became an author by appealing to the authorities. Not only was my task to compose my magnum opus but to orchestrate the means of its publication, the exigencies of which process becoming a vast project unto itself. (I did not understand upon starting the way the two processes, that of creating the imaginary world of the novel and the physical registering of its data, would intertwine, meld, and become a single, indivisible act.) It is because of this that I must dwell on methodology more than I’d otherwise like. Unlike those lucky authors who turn in wholly formed works, or even chapters or sections, to their publishers, I soon realized that my composite offerings would be defined by partiality, fragmentariness. A sequential plenitude of submissions became necessary to maintain suspicion in the eyes of my publishers.
Yes, the maintenance of suspicion was key, but I discovered that it was much more complicated than I had assumed at the start. I had to be both suspicious and the suspect, cop and robber, object and subject in a complex dance. To imagine the actions which would call attention to myself, while countering in such a way that I could not be caught. To make it believable without being fully believed. This is, of course, what every writer does; attention to form is a mutual distraction between writer and reader. Form is a lie, stylization is a lie.
* * *
As things progressed, as my success became more clear, I was led to understand that it was not only my offered texts that were being recorded. Was all of my email being intercepted? My web browser, was its use monitored? Physical mail? My non-cash purchases? Was scanning my supermarket's discount card at checkout delivering a list to their hands? Might my activity on the cameras we now find everywhere, recording us unaware, be logged, compiled and supplied to the central work? The most prosaic and banal activities of life might indeed become subplots. I turned all my attention to ensuring that all of the activity might cohere to the work. There is, I discovered, an art to performing even the most mundane of life's chores, at which point they cease to be chores at all but performances in which virtuosity can be achieved, or the most amateurish ham-handedness.
It is difficult to explain fully the amount of work, the degree of permanent scrutiny, needed to complete the work. I am not a boastful man, but it would inspire awe were I to sufficiently describe all that exists behind this short preface. But it is a fair price to pay for the eternity achieved. Again, I do not intend to boast, but my work exists as a permanent, physical stamp on hard drives. It exists as an arrangement of metals, as opposed to the all too finite and sloppily coded existence in synapses.
I am pleased with what is, quite literally, my life’s work, with this final, brief note placed like a keystone to lock the many other pieces into place. But these final words must serve another purpose, as well; to those watching: this concludes the work and I ask that you cease the investigation. I understand that I drew the attention, for which I am willing (or eager) to accept and submit to punishment, for a prison sentence of some duration--with an end, however distant--promises the refuge I find vanishing. As long as it was for the work I was able to endure the closing in, the increasing suffocation of the gaze finding me more and more. At the eventual point of totalization, each moment, each choice, is a performance for a manifold audience whose expectations cannot be fully known, and at which point, one must speak in the language of the audience, which is a language of guilt. The meaning is no longer mine, if it ever was.
And I find no way out. Signs of the attracted presence were easy enough to identify, but I do not know how a sign of its cessation would be communicated. The work is done now. I need to know that the eyes are not upon me. I can only wait for a certain sign: for the appearance of the law, for the suspicious gaze to materialize, for the sound of heavy steps, a sure and solid knock on the door and my name called from outside.
