three posts from mastodon
by uzwi
In this nightmare of yours, the book you’re writing discovers you as you discover it. You both discover a “self”, but retrospectively; & by the time you’ve finished, both you & the book are obsolete. All you’ve found out is who you used to be. That self can’t write the next book, which is already waiting around whistling tunelessly & looking at its watch. The process is circular & cyclic, with an emergent product always delivered late. Worse: any sense you have of yourself as being “in control” of what happens between you & the book is always-already undermined…
In a subsequent nightmare, you go out fishing & after a struggle land a gigantic fish. The fish turns out to be made of a thousand ill-fitting bits & pieces: you, the fishing rod, the bait, the lake, the trees on the shore of the lake, a man on a horse who was riding past up to half a mile away &–most of all–the intention to fish.
Only the most reckless fisherman would take that home & eat it. & yet you dream you already have.
the m john harrison blog 
Love this.
Thanks Marko.
Taking that last sentence as pivotal, it occurs to me that this is what all those Viriconium short stories were about… the recognition (or denial) that you have eaten the fish, identity as a kind of teratoma formed from your attempt to experience your own experience…
“All you’ve found out is who you used to be” – which is possibly not necessarily a good thing…
What Lacan calls the “assomptions” and the partial incomplete manner we manifest them. Also subjective destituion and obviously play. Sig.