[FROM: V. KALLAS, WORKING NOTEBOOKS, VOL. 31]
[DATED: MARCH, YEAR FORTY-ONE OF THE PROJECT]
I have been trying to write about the window for three days and I cannot do it.
The window in my office. The light that comes through it in the morning. The specific quality of that light, which is not beautiful in any way that could be photographed or described or made the subject of a poem, but which is completely present in a way that most things are not, or rather: in a way that I cannot stop seeing.
This is what I mean when I say it. This is what I have always meant.
I cannot write it. I have tried using the window as an example and the example stops the thing, because the minute I name it as an example, people look at it as an example and stop seeing it as a window. I have tried not naming it and the space I leave for it fills immediately with whatever someone finds most meaningful. I have tried the neutral register and the heightened register and the precisely technical register and none of them get there.
Yesterday my graduate student, R., told me that my work had changed the way she moves through the world. I was glad she said this. I do not believe it is true. I believe she has found something in my work that is meaningful to her, and that what she found is her own discovery, and that if I walked with her through the department hallway she would not see what I see.
This is the problem I cannot solve and the thing I cannot stop trying to solve.
I don't know why I keep trying. I have thought about this. I have tried to locate the desire underneath the project. What I find is: I cannot stand to see it going unnoticed. That is not a philosophical argument. It is just the truth of it.
If I could bring one person to a window and have them see the light on the sill the way I see it, I think I would be able to stop.
I do not think I can do this. I think I will keep trying anyway.
V.K.