I started timid in water and I started timid in the worldly. I started timid all over. I had no story because it was submersed. I had no education other than to carry and to cross. I couldn’t seize the words right away. Most of memory was forbidden, so I had to invent. There was desire but I couldn’t say whether the desire was aesthetic or conceptual. It had no name that I could locate so I went toward namelessness. I was unreliable. I went to fuck. It was sort of a practise. It wasn’t much after all, not much. After fucking dwindled I needed a new method. I taught myself to flee. It seemed accessible. I had an aunt who had rejected fate. I fled after her. I came to think in a river city. 

Belated, insomniac and underemployed, a reader and a weeper, a scoffer and a scrawler, a cleaner, a fibber and a sipper, a doubter, a haunter of shame, I am a hag, yes; I am a riverologist. How did I become this moist thing? Through a fortuitous ratio of patience and luck, I arrived, but quite late, at my calling. My will was then prodigious but my wisdom brief. Say I wandered. I fled and I crossed. 

For some decades, before rivers, there were diversions and episodes. I will come to those.

Origins—let’s get them over with.

My early river experience was limited. In regards to water I am genetically timorous. I was raised inland on lakes. One is warned about lakes. They are dark and deceptively placid. Although fixed they hold unknowable terrors in their depths. Rivers have gods; lakes have monsters. This would explain my physiological sadness, which I have from my splenetic great aunt. A child raised by the sea would be a bracing adventurer; a child raised by rivers, pre-Socratic. My great aunt preferred to widely skirt the topic of wells. All water is dangerous and we are made of it, in solution with random stuff, although some wrongly think we make ourselves. How does the diverting and influential water come? It’s a primordial and astral element. It cosmically oozes from the swirling fountains of galactic dust. On earth it seeps up through the humours in fated proportions. Indifferent cosmic elements recombine without stopping to become us. 

Leibniz calls earth an opaque star. This star is attractive and wet. 

Thus doubly influenced, a girl both phlegmatic and moody, I brooded and doubted and scribbled. I scowled over the mysterious, purloined pages. I took myself away to my little hiding place with some heavy, abstruse volume, to pore and worry privately. In time, lust arrived as lust does, precocious lust and wordy ambition. They were closely related. In truth in my earliest memories I was a thief. This led quite directly to poetry, because poetry was easy and cheap. I simply absconded with the words I wanted. Words were my water. Words were my secret element, my gregarious ornament, my toxins, my darlings, my keys, and then my calling. I drank them. They were free. I never questioned that I deserved them. I had no other education to speak of.

My family were petty crooks and bad businessmen in the co-called new world where we had fled after spoiling our names and their reputations in the old. We’d been horse thieves, I heard, small-time scammers in petty schemes involving cheap tailoring in bad cloth for poor people in mourning, or department store book-keeper-embezzlers who disappeared onto boats, Northern Irish Catholics who remade themselves as Protestants during the voyage then conveniently landed staunch Orangemen in the bigoted colony, dutifully repeating the slur Mick. Once roughly re-established, their basic dispositions unaltered, they performed subsequent conversions, adapting themselves willy-nilly to the slapped-up colonial economies they encountered, which were parodies of the old. They moonlit as industrial spies, rum-runners or sundry henchmen. Some were small town shop keepers grown fat who borrowed to enrich themselves as grain traders, then dallied with the stock market to next gamble away their ostentatious houses. Others squandered everything they had meanly scraped together on their dissolute sons. Some sons performed the painful charade of obedience. Other sons flat out lied. What did they lie about? Whatever came to hand. Who the fathers were, and from where. Money, whatever. They dodged taxes and hid debts. There were bitter accusations in kitchens and fistfights out on the lawns. Whatever injustices the sons had traditionally suffered, they subsequently whetted on others. And the daughters, the daughters hid until we didn’t. We were experts in forgetting but we did not forgive. Forgetting without forgiving was our matrilineal church. We abandoned our names. In this way we resembled the general idea of a family, settlers shipwrecked on a turbulence of silence.

The story of women and hags faces in two directions at one. In one version of my origins, I simply took up my lot in obedience to the family tradition, embarking on my independently crooked existence by means of the premeditated theft of my great aunt’s worn-out copy of The Book of Poe. In another version, I wrote— I needed to collect the flotsam and account for everything that had not been said. In any case I eventually stopped striving. 

Chateaubriand says we are nothing but time. 

This is about the exhausted body, time in the body, what writing once was to me and what it became, lateness, failure, dust, the disappeared river, and this is about centuries of textile labour, the stink of the water, the raucous calls and songs of the laundresses as they stooped and pounded all day at the river, the stink of work, the ruinousness, it’s about the laundry drying meadows grown over with weeds where people went to fuck or to tether their goat. And my fatigue, the leaden silences and what they concealed, everything I’ve ever stolen, shitty temporary work, the ends of poetry and ambition. This makes use of Youtube philosophy, insomnia, the history of the dyestuff red, the tightfistedness and meanness, my great aunt, her disappearance in 1968, how that figured, what gets called madness in hags and women, the weaving of silk and its eventual shattering. Chateaubriand means that all of time is an enormous body.

Nothing is private. There is no private water. All the water is public water. All the mirroring water is ancestral. The hags who carry water, who historically or traditionally carried or carry water, who work in the element of water, are the carriers of the commune of water. Only women carried water. Our backs are aching. We are wanting to rinse out the grief in that water. Nothing fully dissolves. We keep rinsing. Some carry water and others cross or crossed water. The crossing and the carrying, the rinsing, the worthlessness, that is the story. Who crosses and who carries who rinses and who aches. Where value went and what it changed into. The words it next attracts. And some hags rest in water aching in order to think. Crossing, carrying, rinsing and resting. Some died in water. The women of whatever wild genders who rest in water instead of carrying water inventing the receptivity of what it is to think, thinking in water and aching with water. Also sleeping near water, which is a rinsing. Some hags are refusing to carry the communal water and the sour hatred that goes with it. The hatred for the water carriers. The ache. The forgetting of the crossers of the communal water.

I’m tracing that water.

I stole all the pens, every pen I’ve ever used. I steal the paper leaf by leaf and I steal each word and also the spaces between the words, I take them. I’ll steal each slow minute I need to write this account. The words will arrive rawly patched and scamming, by way of greed and thirst and shameless theft. Is theft anger? Everything is anger. I’m stiff with it. Everything that happened is still happening, in the moist body or elsewhere, repeating and repeating with only the slightest variation, brutal. 

Call everything Intimate Papers, from this day forward. Use archaic, irritating turns of phrase such as “from this day forward”. Call the notebook Riverology. Call the notebook On Disappearing. Call the notebook Notebooks of a She-Dandy. Call the notebook A Ribbon. Call the notebook Riverdrafts. Call the notebook Hannah Arendt’s Face. Call the notebook Insomnia. Call the notebook Intimate Papers, from this day forward. In it, put familiar things, everything that insomnia contains. Call everything Intimate Papers.