“Art is never finished, only abandoned,” Leonardo Da Vinci said and there is no greater proof of this than the creation of the book itself. By virtue of being print and bound, of being run off thousands of copies at a clip, the book appears to be an object that reaches completion by virtue of having a beginning, middle and end sewn together between two covers. But this is an illusion of the physical world, one forged like iron into steel, into an unbreakable convention of industry rather than the limitless boundaries of the medium. Who would accept the primacy of the book if it were acknowledged that at any given point, the author could revise its contents in part or whole?
Yes, it is true: corrections, addendums, and new introductions can be made in reprints; textbooks can be editioned to remain “up-to-date” while keeping the bulk of its content in place. But for the literary form, for the fiction and non-fiction novel, the idea of a writer making significant revisions to the original text would be, for many, blasphemous. Perhaps this is because the printed word appears as a kind of Truth, a kind of quantifiable fact; it was written, therefore it is complete. For the author, to be published means they must abandon the work in order to send it to market as a “finished” product.
I began thinking of Da Vinci’s quote last year as I made countless revisions to my first novel, The Kingdom of Eternal Night. After completing the manuscript, I considered leaving it unpublished. I needed to write it in order to release it, but I didn’t have the energy necessary to bring this project to market as a commercial object.
Months earlier, I had created a WordPress blog for The Kingdom of Eternal Night. I began using photographs to complement the words I had chosen until neither could be separated from each other; it was the interplay of photograph and lyric that made it work. Yet, the more I published online the less I wrote, and slowly but surely the novel burned a hole in the carpet on my closet floor. I needed to complete the revolution and set it free, to invite readers into my world of dark shadows and shooting stars. No act of art is ever complete without someone to witness it, to collaborate in the experience by creating meaning for themselves.
That’s when it hit me. The simplest solution was starting me in the face. I would publish The Kingdom of Eternal Night on my blog of the same name. As blogs load the most recent stories first, in order to publish it in full, I would have to publish it in reverse. Telling the story backwards reminded me of films like Memento and The Rules of Attraction.
The image became essential, not just to breaking the monotony of the text on the screen, but to the energy of the story itself. Photographs do things that words never could. They speak in every language at the same time, as we read them through the right brain rather than the left. They make the ephemeral eternal allowing us to consider that now is past and future transposed into the present tense. In the photograph, all our ideas about time collapse, and what remains is the silent echo forevermore.
Many of the gems selected for The Kingdom of Eternal Night came from the treasure troves of artists including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Erwin Blumenfeld, Rene Burri, Jean-Claude Claeys, Bruce Davidson, Sergio Larrain, Daido Moriyama, William Mortensen, Nadar, and Francis Wolff. I then began to invite colleagues and collaborators to contribute their work to the novel, including photographers Jianai Jenny Chen, Eric Johnson, Colleen Plumb, Ruby Ray, and Lilla Szasz.
When I began The Kingdom of Eternal Night, I dreamed of it as a finished book, an object that could be held by the hand, page turned in rhythm with the scene as it unfolds. But necessity dictated otherwise. Intervention became innovation in the creation of the Internet Novel. It is not an e-book. It is not for sale. It is free to be read by anyone fluent in English. What’s more, the form allows for changes to be made, should I be so inclined. “Art is never finished,” as Da Vinci said.
Links
http://thekingdomofeternalnight.wordpress.com/
http://missrosen.wordpress.com
Miss Rosen
