A Kind of Public Statement

This is no doubt premature, and more than likely moot, but I've decided that-- whatever my future, in any sense-- I do not want people going through my notebooks after my death. I've been thinking about this a bit lately, thinking about the notebooks of Frye, the letters of Eliot and Stevens, and so on and so forth. Should I become a writer or an academic of any significance (yeah, right...), I don't want people ferreting through my books looking for previous editions of poems, or notes for articles, or outlines for lectures; I don't want people trying to 'get at' the unknown nooks and crannies of my being. I don't want people looking for biographical information; I don't want them trying to figure out 'what I meant'; I don't want people charting compositional histories. I don't want my meanings fixed. I don't want my work reduced to biographical explanation. I don't want my work riddled through as if it were a crossword puzzle. I don't want whatever private thoughts and confessions I may have had used as a template for categorizing me, especially since, as Heraclitus reminds, you can never step in the same river twice. I don't want my unpublished work scavenged, and released posthumously, as was the more thankful case with Emily Dickinson.

Plain and simple, I don't want anyone raiding my tomb. What I publish or deliver will be a matter of public record; what I do not shouold never see the light of day; it should die with me.

I say this here partially in response to the tendencies of people to scavenge and to look for Rosetta Stones in a person's archives. I say it, too, so any of my friends and colleagues out there who are reading this will do me one favour, should anything horrendous happen to me before I have a will put in place: please, please, please execute with extreme prejudice anyone who tries to do dig into my archives for whatever purposes. Sometimes, the worst thing we can do to a writer or a thinker is to know them too well. I find it interesting that so much of the best writing these days is about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poem about whose author we know very, very little, not even the poet's name. Sometimes the less we 'know,' the more we can truly understand.

It's important, I think, in the final analysis that we all maintain a bit of our mystery, a bit of our unknowability.

So there, that's on record, at least somewhere. And, yes, I count this blog as a kind of 'public' record.

I feel better now that I've written that.

(And no, the Dr is not feeling morbid or anything like that. Call it a pre-emptive strike, even if, when all is said and done, it's probably moot anyway.)