Clean out your damn desk.

"Clean out your damn desk" has been on my to-do list for roughly three months. It's technically not even off the list now because I only did a cosmetic job of it this morning. The drawers still lurk, over-full with maybe-dry pens and maybe-dead batteries and maybe-expired gum and maybe-salvageable post-it notes...it's been a decade-long dumping ground. You can see why I hesitate to dig in.

This morning, though, I went through the pile of papers on the surface and found the check I'd been meaning to deposit and the clothes I'd been meaning to exchange and the books I'd been meaning to shelve for a few weeks. I came across some half-full notebooks from ages past--I'd actually dug those up a few months ago in attempt one to clean out my damn desk, distracted myself thoroughly with the reading of them, and never put them away. Fortunately, that meant I had no interest in them today and was not similarly derailed. Putting them away, though, I found 7 empty journals I'd acquired over the years as gifts (and as unmet-goal purchases). I seem like a person who journals, I guess. All blogging evidence to the contrary, I am not really a person who journals. Amanda introduced me to the five-year journal, where you write just three lines a day for five years. I couldn't even keep that up consistently, and gave it up completely after like two-and-a-half. I have intentions of starting fresh in a new one this January 1. We'll see.

If you know my reading habits, you know that the stop-and-start journals are in good company. I found three books I'd begun reading and never finished--that means I'm wading in seven right now. I picked one and brought it with me to Pannikin this morning in order to dive back in. It's glorious. I'm not normal.

It's the inspiration for the post, though. I've been reading a lot lately: a few clever memoirs, powering through all six of John Green's novels (two halves to go!), and some non-fiction essay anthologies. I've been sort of uncharacteristically deep-novel-less. What I mean is that while John Green's novels have deeply influenced me--The Fault in Our Stars influenced my relationship with Jonathan literally overnight--they are young adult novels, and therefore aren't bursting with fanciful sentences like "The lamp hissed in the silence of the room, eloquent looks ran up and down in the thicket of wallpaper patterns, whispers of venomous tongues floated in the air, zigzags of thought..." that close a chapter, ellipses and all. I've re-entered Bruno Schulz' Street of Crocodiles, the impetus of Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, which I wrote about here.

The authors I've spent the summer and entered fall with--John Green, Rachel Held Evans, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Dave Hickey, Terry Eagleton, Elias Khoury--just haven't spoken to me in this manner. And in case you're somehow still curious as to how I feel about the act of reading, it is precisely these varieties and vagaries of literature that keep me alive.

[The S]tree[t] of [Cro]cod[il]es

I haven't been feeling much lately.

I didn't know it until just now.

I just sat down to read a book, Tree of Codes, the latest creation from one of my favorite human beings, Jonathan Safran Foer. What's amazing about this book is that it is part of another, The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz, who I'd never heard of before but now understand as one of the most important authors of the 20th century. JSF took Schulz's book, his favorite book, and by process of exhumation, erasure, scissors, literally, physically cut out the words that were not part of this story, leaving this story only.

It's as brilliant as it sounds.

It's 134 pages, and it just took me about 25 minutes to read because it's one or maybe two sentences per page. Do you understand? It's mostly cut-away.

I've got to read The Street of Crocodiles now, because I need to know from whence this came.

But as I read, even though the pages sort of catch on each other and you've got to go slowly because the sentences don't necessarily make literal sense and yet they're beautiful poetry, I began to see the story coming to life in my mind. And quickly the cut out ceased to distract me but rather contributed to the brokenness of the story it told and I was there with Father and Mother and the crowd and the city and sky and the masks and lies and the whole world.

He's a genius, I'm telling you.

I began to cry, as I am wont to do when I read something just so. I am in awe of the power of the human mind and human soul to create something such as this. Normally I would be appalled that someone had cut a book to pieces but instead for The Street of Crocodiles it is precisely the fate of this text to have been cut apart to become Tree of Codes, I think.

Lately I have been getting a lot of my schoolwork done and being fairly serious about it. I haven't been going out much because I am reading, instead. Or exhausted from the thinking, instead. Or exhausted from the weight of the world around me. The world is a place, I've said.

But having read Tree of Codes tonight has reminded me that the world is a place. The world is full of brilliance and feeling and beauty and pain and death and love and life and fear and people and things and words and wounds and trees and books and water and smiles and me.

The words of Tree of Codes are on the page in a way that is different than any other book and therefore come off the page in a way that is different than any other book.

This is what it feels like, I think, to feel.