A projection and a centrifuge

Such that I began to write a book about the real, breathing body of Ravicka, which I couldn't reach by walking toward it and couldn't reach by attending to it, as I might attend to any other subject in my books. I couldn't reach this Ravicka, which was two-dimensional, a projection and a centrifuge. I couldn't reach Ravicka, because it lay in a book and I had placed it there and put inside it the Ravicka I could reach, the Ravicka of our days and our coffee. I wrote the real Ravicka into a book and put inside it the only Ravicka I had. Yet, inside that Ravicka, the one in which I wrote my books (and L. and Z. wrote their books), was that of the first, and though it was placed in a book and had a fiction growing out of it, it was real and breathing: it contained fictions but it breathed and remembered us and held out the possibility of future architecture, where, even though our buildings were in motion and the terrain was constantly reshaping itself, were were part of a conversation. You looked into the book to say these things but the language you needed was outside in the physical city, in that theatre that would not show itself.

Somehow (how? what was I looking for that day? was it possibly to do with The Taiga Syndrome? I wish I could connect the dots, trace the line from the book or author and the keywords I used to search), I fell on a then-freshly-published article (and this tab, along with 112 others, has been open ever since), "The New Patron Saints of Lesbian Fiction" (which namechecks Lauren Elkin — is that how I got here?), which captivated me with its nondefinition of a type of book, my go-to genre: plotless fiction. 

How the fuck had I never heard of Renee Gladman before?

That very afternoon I head to the library to research Havana, and in a slight detour, I find Gladman, and based on the book's size and cover image I choose to bring home with me Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge, as if maybe I am crossing some metaphorical bridge, I've always loved bridges; the first of the Ravicka books is not available, and I hope it is not essential to my understanding of this, the third (why would I even think that?).

I am obsessed with this book, I don't understand it at all, like it's all white space and I don't have enough distance to see what's revealed in relief. It's very spatial, I keep thinking of Mieville's The City and the City, like it's a topography overlaying something else (also the paths mapped out in Auster's City of Glass, how many books of late have me hankering nostalgically for a mysterious quest), maybe it's an invisible city a la Calvino, a fiction atop a reality. (I misspell reality as reliaty, as if it's something you can rely on.) 

As a country this was our crisis: getting other people to see what we were seeing.

Weeks later I return the Havana books and decide to recheck the stock of Gladman and find nothing Ravicka-related, whereas my memory has a clear visual on the Houses of Ravicka, which I remember deciding against, because houses versus bridge. I check the online catalogue, and it shows as available. (Mysteriously, yet another Ravicka book is listed but "not available" — not checked out and due to be returned, just not there, I speculate it was never returned.) My intuition leads me to the French shelves. And there it is. One English novel nestled among French translations of Gladman's other work. I leave it there. I'll know where to find it. Only when I return a few days later, it's been correctly reshelved.

It's about writing a book, and the title of the book and the first sentence of the book, and all the words and what the words mean, it's a book about architecture, and the physicality of writing the book — the position of the writer, the space within which the writer is enclosed. And then people are leaving, an exodus, for creative reasons or political ones, they're burning down their houses, but they're not burning. Maybe the houses are metaphorical. Or the burning is.

(I don't know how to write about books anymore, do I want to write about books anymore?, books are mysterious things to write about, what do I hope to prove, not to summarize or convince, maybe distill and understand, sometimes just to remember. I could write about art but I don't know how to write about art, I'd need to learn the language of art, and the language of writing about art, much like I don't know the language of writing about books, look at me writing about writing and about not writing and about not knowing how to write.)

What is the crisis?

There is breathing and not-breathing, the books are bodies, and sometimes the buildings are bodies, and Ravicka is a breathing body, but also the bodies are bodies, and they are lines, like the buildings are numbers, but along with the leaving (disappearing, maybe being disappeared) there is also love and longing, something clandestine, I think.

We were holding space and making space through stillness, looking for structures to reflect what we were seeing, which was nothing.

I want all the Ravicka books so I can tear out their pages and lay them out like a map, and then eat them.

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