I’m looking out the window : black, skeletal trees. White doves, no, gray pigeons among the branches, flying, roosting, feeding, ho hum. A ray of sunshine . . . On the wall enclosing the vast garden, a grand estate, evergreen ivy. The faded red bricks of the house opposite . . . there are several, gray with green or yellow shutters, others whitish. So, back to the bricks . . .

A certain stiffness.

From my window, I have a delightfully lofty view. I live up in a garret, sixth floor, no elevator. I could invite him up. Despite his graying around the temples, he’s not too old to handle the six flights.

The pigeons, if you examine them closely with binoculars: there, that one’s stopped moving, perching motionless, a big one, or fat, or maybe just puffing up in the sun, contented, leaving me time to observe the blue grooves in the wings, the white collar with tiny orange grains, and the purplish skin of its feet. A gray pigeon is never really gray. There’s a fact to put in quotation marks, as if to suggest its future entry into common usage. What matters is how sharp your vision is, and of course, the instruments you use to enhance your visual faculties: I’ve also discovered a little green spot in the middle of the throat, and on the stomach, some yellow down, bright lemony. A little like parrot colors, actually . . .

White doves on black branches. That’s what I should have written, without fretting about oversimplification, which is inevitable in any case.

Alright, I’ll start over. So, here we go, a robust double stroke in the form of an X. Don’t you just love fine-looking rough draft?

I’m gazing out the window: the tree branches in flower. A fine day. The sky is blue, almost green. Why not turquoise? I feel like going out. Quicker to it than I am – it’s the fate of the writer, bogged down in his paperwork, to live in slow motion, pathetic voyeur – punctual, abiding by a kind of tradition, at five o’clock on the dot, Madame Maryse, who lives in the house across the way, is going out to walk her Pekinese.

I’d better first describe the glass canopy above the entrance to the villa situated just opposite my window, but below, of course, I’m on the fifth floor; the villa is lost in the greenery of the estate, with its silly four-stair stoop, its stone weathered away, the lady is clearly afraid as she steps down, especially today since it’s raining, she’s firmly gripping her umbrella, a leash in the other hand, the pooch appears to detest this compulsory outing.

Too bad the windows of the houses don’t have wipers! I pass blind over the steamy glass, moving through the fog. Or maybe I should wait until the weather clears. Alright. This page is in shreds: a mass of cross-outs, circled additions like cartoon bubbles swept along in the general flow with the help of insert wedges, arrows and other correction devices, all of which are threatened at any moment by yet another slash, this time definitive. Definitive?

The preceding sentence is crossed out with a bold, authoritative stroke; but then, no, after a while, it gets revived thanks to dotted lines: disjointedness triumphant, rising Christ-like from the dead!... yet overloading the page with ever more numerous signs, sometimes contradictory . . . I should crumple it up and toss it in the wastebasket. Or copy it over again, make corrections here and there, mending it in such a way that the contradictions get ironed out, more or less: to suggest that, sometimes, dissonance creates harmony, or rather, it allows for a structure, a bit more complicated, I’ll grant, but capable of procuring subtle forms of gratification. But I’m too sluggish . . . And I lack imagination. Not to mention that it might prove unwise to do so: promising the moon and the stars in this nouvelle cuisine lingo is not the best tack for attacking a text. What to do?

I’m adding little drawings, an imp riding a turtle dove, a sunflower, a parasol, a carrot that looks like a dog penis, a stingray.

Start over?

She’s a widow, Maryse.

Birdsong . . . I can hear the cry of night raptors. Rain. I’m alone, and am relishing the solitude. It’s my vice. I write in order to stay alone as long as possible. I keep everything, down to the last doodle. Later on, I’ll decide what to get rid of, for efficiency’s sake. What I mean is, in the dialogue, in the exchange with the public that writing entails . . . Anyway, at least I pay scrupulous respect to punctuation: I swore I would, promised myself. And yet it would be more in keeping with my style, and undoubtedly much simpler, even for the reader, to remove this arbitrary corset. Well, I won’t labor the point. I prefer to think that if someone dares to highlight the arbitrariness of his own text, he’s more likely to escape being accused of arbitrariness. Well, too bad! I’m holding onto everything, even if it’s confusing and I lose my pen (my Bic? – my beak!) in the layers of notes, bits of paper that I can hardly decipher, let alone understand. How to choose among them?

How to process all this raw material, how to rid the pure ore of its slag? Until I come up with some method for purging, or grinding, if not, fusing, I’m transcribing even this expression, this formulation that I’ve found in the margin of a very earliest draft (itself recovered and re-written almost in its entirety): didactic project.

What exactly was I thinking?

The first pages might consist of, might come across more generally as a kind of preface, a forward, let’s say, to the kind readers who scan the page wisely, suspiciously, no, attentively, insightfully, humph, radiantly, hmm, hypocritically, or rather, superficially, yes, dully and lifelessly . . . they thus scan the text while moving their lips imperceptibly, or rather, nodding their head along each line, finding words that instill in them this simple notion: our thoughts, dear friend, are doomed to deletion, our words are but fleeting and never quite right, quite accurate, writing is but the stammering of the soul, that word which, even more than all others, must be read under erasure, of course, and so anything that is in any way related . . .

They used to taunt me, shouting: Stingray-head! Stingray-head!