That's the title of one of the chapters of my book. I thought I finished it yesterday, but this morning as I swam, doing my wet meditation, I was thinking about the difference, if any, between real and imagined events as they lock into memory. Both are real, also evanescent, shimmering in the mind's eye.

When I was working on my play "The Horsburgh Scandal" with Theatre Passe Muraille, the collective company's method was to improv scenes from material gathered in their research excursions. For weeks I wasn't allowed to write anything while they worked from my research and theirs and came up with ideas as they played. And play it was, very amusing and stimulating, but we didn't have a play, a drama, something to present to an audience. Finally, in desperation, I wrote a synopsis and an outline of a play that didn't exist yet, though opening night was fast approaching. Many of the scenes in my putative play already existed in the actors' memories. They had already happened, not really happened, nothing you could report as fact, but they existed in these people's memories and that's what I counted on. The actors played from their memories.

Does that make sense? Whatever gets locked in one's memory becomes real, even if it is acknowledged as fantasy. It's there.

I think I have to add something to my chapter on remembering. My blog and my book seem to be blending. My mind to me a playhouse is.

Where did I leave off? What was I thinking?

Well, I spent the weekend, apart from eating and drinking too much, going through my notes and clippings, trying to arrange my thoughts for the final (penultimate?) assault on my book, and amassing another pile of papers with noodges and follow-ups.

A lot of follow-ups are to other people's blogs and essays. I feel very humble in the light of all these illuminations by other thinkers and writers. That's why I haven't made an effort to publicize my "deathless prose". I'm not quitting, though. I find that, whatever or whomever else I touch, my daily blog is useful to me, not only for the discipline of writing (one-a-day like vitamins) but also for the discoveries I make as I plod along.

Joan Didion once compared her collected errant thoughts to a ball of string, comprised of short strands, stray bits, random opinions without conclusions, useless perhaps but not thrown away, simply wound up into an imposing mass - like mine, committed to paper and gathered up, stored somewhere. One-of-these-days, lick-and-a-promise ideas can be frustrating or stimulating, depending on your approach and timing. I'll get to them, maybe. Soon, perhaps. At least they make me feel - oddly - productive. So rich. So promising.

Back to the drawing board.