“eavesdropping on my own thoughts” | Passage from + One-Sentence Riff on Evan Dara’s Novel The Lost Scrapbook

. . . In fact, this happens often—when I feel as if words, others’ words, have crowded mine out, and have left me no place; I do not know why, through what mechanism, this occurs, but when it does, and it is often, I find that I developed a need, an earnest yearning, for words that have not become sour and strange—that is, for words that are my own, words that are uniquely mine amid this foreign wash; and yet I find, when I look for such words—my words—none seem to be there: all of my words, upon the slightest inspection, seem so foreign to me, so much the work of others; and so I wonder how I can claim that anything that occurs in my consciousness is mine, and not the product of some othernesses; often I feel that I am not thinking so much as eavesdropping on my own thoughts, listening in on the narrative being told between othernesses—that it is the otherness thinking me; because none of it, in truth, seems to issue from me; even my unplanned cries, my most heartfelt exclamations, have been determined by others: I have noticed that it is precisely at times of highest emotion—when I am going to the deepest regions of my responses, to the deepest particularity of me—that my words, which would then seem to be at their most personal and spontaneous, are in fact at their most derivative, just pure banal cliché: oh my God!, Will you look at that!, I don’t believe it!; but where are my words, I wonder, my own thoughts?; it seems, sometimes, that I am a conduit and not a content—a transfer point, a capacitor, a pattern in waves; or, at most, I am a bricklayer, combining chunks of accepted solidity to wall out fresh perception; is this adolescent thinking?—

From Evan Dara’s novel The Lost Scrapbook.

I am really loving this book so far, this novel that moves through consciousnesses in a (yes, I’ll use that cliché that book reviewers so often grab for) dazzling performance, shifting through minds, monologues, dialogues, always a few steps (or more) ahead of its reader, beckoning though, inviting, calling its reader to participate in discussions (or performances) of art, science, politics, psychology, education, loneliness, ecology, family, fireflies, radio plays, alienation, voting trends, Chomskyian linguistics, Eisensteinian montage, theft, Walkman Personal Stereos, semiotics, one-man shows, drum sets, being ventriloquized—a novel that takes ventriloquism as not just a theme (as we can see in the citation above) but also as a rhetorical device, a novel that ventriloquizes its reader, throws its reader into a metaphorical deep end and then dramatically shifts the currents as soon as the reader has learned to swim, a novel of othernesses, a novel that offers content through conduits, patterns that coalesce through waves, a novel composed in transfer points, each transfer point announcing the limitations of first-person perspective, the perspective that the reader is logically and spiritually and psychologically beholden to—and then, perhaps, transcending (or at least producing the affective illusion of transcendence of) first-person perspective, and this (illusion of) transcendence, oh my, what a gift, what a gift . . .