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.Bear with me and I will tell you how this works.Naturally you have to commit to the process because at the time you cannot know for sure how the world will evolve or things are likely to turn out until you are up to speed.Every time of life differs from any other time of life, not because the living changes but the way life is lived changes, and the conduct of life is what composition is about.When a pattern of living has become established everybody does it and everybody knows how it is done and eventually does it without thinking for as long as it lasts.For an artist it is the same, you compose according to convention and without thinking and that is that.The way things are and the way they are composed is the same and nobody notices until all of a sudden the way life is lived is no longer the same and what they are composing is no longer in terms of the present, it is about the past and art built on the past is classical and no longer relevant.Imagine then what it is like to begin from scratch when the world is no longer the same as it was and living in the world requires new terms of reference and a new way of thinking.And that is before we even begin to compose, since what we compose is in the future and until a way of composing is found it will forever remain out of reach.At least that is how it seemed to me.I do not know how many of you are familiar with my work.Perhaps it would be as well to tell you from the beginning.My induction to writing was the book Three Lives written in 1905, of which one life was the story Melanctha about a black woman.This story is told in the continuous present.Naturally I was aware of past, present and future as conventions of storytelling, but this was a story that to me unfolded in an ongoing present tense.To compose stories in a continuous present is now quite normal and has become increasingly normal in the past thirty years.So in telling the story in a continuous present I was doing something which came so naturally to me I did not have to think about it, even though it did not seem very natural to other people.After that I wrote a very long book The Making of Americans of about a thousand pages.Again, it was natural for me to write in a continuous present though to do so for so large a subject became more and more complicated.Once you begin writing in a continuous present you remain in a continuous present, even for almost a thousand pages.Continuous present is one way of composing and beginning again and again is another way.You can choose to write in one way or the other.Or you can write about what and how you are writing in real time.To compose in real time, in an inclusive present, brings us back to the art of composition at the point where we began.In Three Lives and The Making of Americans the reader comes face to face with a story that unfolds in a continuous present, complicated by a narrative technique of constant reiteration of events, and a prose style intended to convey the telling of the story by a real person in real time.In the earlier book it was a struggle to achieve a continuous and inclusive present.I was feeling my way toward a sense of an inclusive and continuous present and combining that with the perception of a world in constant renewal, of beginning again and again.Having done so I read what I had written as you do and from a reader’s point of view it was not quite as I expected and I lost orientation.I resolved to do it differently next time, not change what I had written but begin afresh.From the beginning I decided to write The Making of Americans continuously without pausing to reflect and kept on writing page after page until I arrived at a way of composing more continuous and seamless than before, and richer in content and more thorough in relationships and always on the crest of a wave.On and on for a thousand pages.I began by writing my impressions and recollections of people and things as they appeared to me in one moment of time, each one based on the continuous expansion and elaboration of a striking characteristic or trait of that person or event as it seemed to me.From the process of observing each one as it were through a microscope it was a natural progression to combine these portraits into a bigger unity.However there are limits to composition because naturally it is never possible to accommodate everything within one continuous present whether it is an indefinitely prolonged present or an infinitely extended instantaneous present.So then of course you begin again.And that is what I had to do in the nature of things, I would find a way of starting again.And in beginning again I would naturally find myself in the midst of things.And since it follows from beginning in the midst of things that what follows after is not the same but is changed, what follows after that is also changed and so it goes.When I realised that was the case the solution to reconciling the reality of a continuous present of experience with the descriptive necessity of constantly beginning again became more clear.What follows on is nearly the same but not the same; it includes everything that was before so in being nearly the same as before it must naturally be changed only a little bit and very simply.So I naturally kept it simple.So then what is a simple difference and how can it be made to appear natural.To understand the concept of simple difference led me to compile lists of changes which over a period of time grew into series of changes, and the more I think about my work at this period the more I find a natural tendency toward simple difference in succession [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]