I’ve been wondering: is there something supernatural about this project? If the book I wrote in 2000-01, and which I am expanding upon now, is natural, or at least naturalistic—if it conforms more or less to the laws of plausibility which we expect our everyday lives to follow, even if our everyday lives do in fact break those laws often, and our naturalistic fictions certainly break them also—anyway, what I meant to say is, if the book I wrote stands in some way for the natural or ordinary world, then maybe this Commentary, this corona, this penumbra, if you will, is its supernatural counterpart.
Consider: the book is solid, like a living thing, and has a beginning—you’ve read it already—and an end. Whereas this: a scattering of paragraphs which begins no place in particular and need not ever end, has the form not of a body but of a haunt. This is the afterlife of the book.
Now I am wondering if the analogy works the other way also. Are ghosts a commentary on the natural world?
