THE ARTIST'S WAY

The other night I fell asleep reading the new thriller, Sliding Scale. The thing hums. There are countless bodies and episodes of brilliant cogitation. I had been meaning to read it all summer but I was moving slowly through Rebecca Smithson, a vast historical novel based on the life of the woman who revolutionized bookbinding. My wife had read Rebecca Smithson first. "It doesn't really hold together," she said. I asked her if I could use that joke in a book. I am a writer. She agreed, stipulating only that I take pains to identify her as a real human being rather than a character that I dreamed up. “Whatever,” I said. My sleep was fitful and contained two dreams. The first was about meeting my wife for the first time. She was in a bar, wearing an olive-green t-shirt that said “Wake Up” on it in thick black letters. It was the same shirt she had been wearing the first time we met in real life. In life, she hadn’t liked me much at first. In the dream, we went away together immediately, to a house on an island one of us owned, and she took down a book from a shelf. It was Diminishing Returns, a novel I had apparently written. “Hmm,” she said, turning it in her hands. I fell then into a second dream. I was walking outside and found, in a bird’s nest, a book that recounted my life from birth. The details were all correct—where I was born, where I grew up, childhood friends, schooling, and so forth—but the book had been published long before I was born. It was a prophecy rather than a history. I started flipping ahead to see how things turned out. The book carried me precisely through the moment of finding the book, but the pages after that were ripped out. I woke with a start. My wife was still sleeping. She had not been disturbed by my start, which sent Sliding Scale crashing to the floor. It is good that it was not Rebecca Smithson, which would certainly have woken her. I reached for my laptop and began work on a new book, Diminishing Returns, in which everything that's important happens in the first twenty pages and what follows is 280 pages of trivia, ephemera, garbled repeats of early sections, and eventually just blank paper. My wife slept soundly, dreaming this paragraph. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas