My Days As The World's Most Confused Scrabble Player

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden.

–T.S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton“

It is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice.

—Elias Canetti, Notes From Hampstead

Broken world:

How is it that I came to find myself in the courtyard of an unfamiliar apartment building, seated on a bench in front of a poor excuse for a fountain, stammering and watching people –all of whom seemed to be afflicted with some sort of mental or physical infirmity– shuffle away into the shadows?

Where is Beyond the Shadow of a Doubt?

Find it for me on a map.

Show it to me.

Take me there.

Don’t bore me.

Please don’t bore me.

Keep me moving.

Keep moving me.

Make me work.

I am wanting.

I want.

I want something.

I want, I believe, something more.

I frankly don’t understand anymore how people make things out of words. It sometimes takes me days to build a single word, any word at all, even when I have elaborate plans and dictionaries and Scrabble letters scattered all over the tabletop in front of me.

I’ll make what I think is good progress, I’ll have something that almost resembles a word in the dictionary, but the instant I carefully remove the tip of the pen from the paper a mysterious breeze will materialize and blow the whole thing down. Quite often it will simply –not so simply– carry the letters away. I’ve seen them float off through the windows and evaporate into thin air. Sometimes they drift up to the ceiling and just disappear.

Other times my clumsy attempts at words combust of their own accord, and dissipate in the air around me like smoke. I once labored for days, working around the clock, to construct what I thought was a serviceable sentence –“When the old man arrived in San Pedro he was thirsty and in need of a shave”– only to collapse from exhaustion. I was then startled from a deep stupor at some point in the middle of the night by the smell of smoke, and discovered a pile of smoldering ash where I had left my sentence lying on the table earlier in the evening.

It has taken me more than two weeks of the most difficult labor to reconstruct from memory an approximate version of that original sentence, and even now I have little faith that those words, that any of these words, will survive another night.