The underworld of unfinished novels.

The toil of writers like the coal stokers on great steamships, with smudged faces. This world is not normally visible, below the sphere of accomplished things--the manifested. And yet this striving is the  work of dreaming.

Wait. Does that metaphor work? Are these toilers and dreamers really making a huge machine go? Are they indeed working for some greater good? Does their mostly unrewarded labor help everyone else up there--those who don’t see them, who only feel the movement of the ship? Stoking coal. A task that probably no one would choose, all things being equal.

I’m trying to give some contour to a desperate exercise. Another metaphor: Grabbing a vine, and swinging out over the jungle. And laughing so hard while you do it that you almost let go. Because this daredevil act is exhilarating, and meaningless, and somehow--ineluctable.