Betraying Gestures #10

the always of a gesture

I try to always be reading a bildungsroman about a young female character becoming a writer—the confusions of adulthood, love, and art that stage questions about how to live life and how to write a novel. In passages like, “In any real-life situation, I would pretend I was in a novel, and then do whatever I would want the person in the novel to do. Afterward, I would write it all down, and I would have written a novel, without having had to invent a bunch of fake characters and pretend to care about them.”, I cherish the naive cynicism of a system of writing, and its narration. I say I’m always writing a novel, and then I ask what writing is; whatever it may be, it is regarded as uninterrupted and continuous by the “always”. Betraying Gestures’ first existence was through letter stickers I had just bought—I always buy letter stickers when I come across them—on a rectangular sheet of glass in my studio. I wrote Betraying Gestures in sans-serif letter stickers on one of the sheets of glass I had; whenever I find a sheet of glass next to the trash or in the studio corridor, where people leave things they don’t want anymore, I take it. A few months ago, when I needed a glass to frame a print, I used one of these glasses. Talking about arbitrariness, the size of the print I was framing was decided by the size of the sheet of glass I had. When Betraying Gestures only existed as letter stickers, I wrote a few notes about the writing of novels. Twenty-four notes. Note #19 reads, “The first line of a novel is always the title. If I’m not writing a novel, it’s because I finished one and am desperate to start the next one. I rummage around the world looking for a title, searching for places and conditions where I may find the title I am looking for. I find the title—up until now, I’ve always found it—but the writing began in the search. The search for the title is the writing, silly. I shake and squeeze the word or words that form the title to see what comes out. I write with what comes out. Don’t we all? Construct with what we have?”. The way Betraying Gestures, the title, came, it felt like two words I would carry as signifiers until I finished the novel I was working on at the time (the same I’m working on now), and then I would start writing it—even though I was already writing it, according to my notes the title is the first line of a novel. But I thought Betraying Gestures maybe wasn’t the title of a novel rather than of a publisher, and I could write this publisher the way I write a novel, the way the I of the bildungsroman I quoted at the beginning writes. Note #3 of my twenty-four notes goes, “I write novels in a document on my computer; I don’t have a little notepad or anything like that. I only write in the one document I sometimes describe as a field—where things are worked, fertilised, and grown. And harvested, to stick to field-related images. Fragments are taken from the whole and become works; ideas for works come from the document; the document is a space for critical experiments. The document (another name for the novel or the place where the novel exists) is a model of the world, where I can test things out, see the reactions, have conversations, and construct dialogues.” I returned to my twenty-four notes because I had decided I would spend last week working on my novel—meaning sitting down with a cup of coffee, opening my

computer and typing, deleting, moving paragraphs around, and reading aloud. I hadn’t been working on it like this for months. The reason I returned to the notes was that I had to remember what writing a novel was and what I was missing about it. I was missing it, which is why I decided to pause other projects to work on the novel. Note #2 says, “I’ve written that what I am actually drawn to in writing a novel is the gesture and the attempt to write it, rather than the end product. Spreading the rumour that I am writing a novel, therefore, is a way of publishing it.”. I now spread the rumour that I have a publisher and a newsletter—or maybe those are not rumours, since their existence is public and verifiable. Note #7 reminds me of what I had in mind when the letter stickers on the glass sheet were fresh in my studio and I was thinking of betrayal: “The fascinating thing about a novel is that it says more than I wanted it to say. I can become friends with a novel; a lover, or an enemy. I can betray a novel, and a novel can betray me.” I wasn’t successful in my attempt to go back to my novel. There is a distance between my writing practice today and when I wrote the twenty-four notes. I’m drawn to the end product now; I dream of finishing my novel, Betraying Gestures editing it as a book, and publishing it—getting a grant to do so (?)—but the only few lines I could write made the following lines, and therefore reaching an end, impossible: “Now the gestures I write are revealed as betraying. Instead of being, one appears to be. And the betrayer breaks their own heart.” It sounds like the ending of an interrupted novel, and it sounds resentful like interrupted novels tend to sound. I try to hear the resentment as a sound Betraying Gestures produces, and I continue writing, trusting the “always” in my personal aphorism, “I’m always writing a novel”.