I remember reading The Bluest Eye when I was a young parent, and something opened in me. That's the highest aspiration.

I keep thinking of Robert Stone making the distinction between the word sublime and the word beautiful. He described being in a battle as sublime. Because even though people were dying, it was such a huge sensory experience that it became sublime.

If you could press a button and your ego investment was less, the toothache would be less. Or less tragic at least.

Later, I went one step further, by putting in some invented "historical" bits [into the Lincoln in the Bardo]. And reading those alongside the actual historical bits was like looking into a sort of a painful mirror, because "my" parts were so show-offy at first. They stood out because they were so flamboyant.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that whatever weirdness was going to be in there, I felt, had to be earned. And it had to be required by the emotional needs of the book.

All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.

So, good news/bad news: good news that I'm progressing; bad news that life is short and art is long.