My notes:

the subtitles & extras of the form speak immensities:

• “Essays near knowing”
• a study in nuance, exemplification of holding contrary ideas together they are essays but almost sketches, they are so brief and feel improvisational (in a perfect sort of way) “near" knowing - asymptotic “may” “seems” “I think” / “I don’t think” etc “as best as I could tell and as well as I recall” (about Allen Grossman, the poet, saying the poet is made poet by the poem, each poem) he says about his poetry, which can be said about his essays: “It tries on aphorism but will not arrive at epiphany, preferring a moment-to-moment revelatoriness, which celebrate the spark and fire (merely) of poetry itself.” “Since I began this project, I have tried a number of times to write about my mother and me, and have abandoned a few attempts already. If these essays are, in part, inroads to disinhibited autobiography, as I have come to claim they are, and demand they be, I feel the imperative to address the subject above all others.” (On Peripersonal Space) “knowing” - as opposed to knowledge knowledge is facts. they build. they are discrete, in units. knowing is embodied, integrated. they have finality. assumes knowing. assumes an abstract ideal of a state of knowing. and assumes its impossibility - is this absolute impossibility or relative (for the author) an unlikelihood? “For a long time nothing went here, in this essay, which is trying to locate its subject.” (On Confoundedness) the essay is tryingIn “A Note”... (like a forward, but even here he refuses the assigned formal names - a note is scribbled, not labored over) says “It may still be running.”
• “a reckoning”
• reckoning with what? knowing. not knowing. with the form itself? with the self — hence the shame, error, guilt. a self-revelation that one imagines is exhilarating and terrifying.
• { Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source }
• resigning to unknowability of what is resigning to imperfection of the self single source? the challenge, one imagines: let’s talk about stuff and admit how much we don’t know about it. let’s talk about stuff and be liberated from the usual refuge of research, of fact. the shame of the stories/content. jizzy jeans. bad house-sitting. fatherly / motherly estrangement.
• Correction section
• some contradictions (find examples?) permitting error, permitting …if not shame, then exposure (of what? the humanity of knowing some but not all) this section highlights the error as error. true permission of error. why include it at all? for us? so we can know. for him? so he can come clean, be seen fully. abandon pretense.
• Essay title format: “On ___”
• what this permits is latitude to speak of but not conclude upon something things feel unfinished. this is a statement that knowing - especially self-knowing? - cannot, by definition, achieve terminus. it is the inconclusive project of life.
• “Proxies” title
• proxy is a stand-in for something else. these are stand-ins for what, truth? fully-formed essays? original meaning of the term “essay” — he even cites Montaigne in the first section

there is room for everything:

• error, guessing, imperfect/incomplete facts
• multiple topics, wandering mind - almost popping the hood to see the mechanisms at work. no polish.
• (and yet an exquisite polish! each word chosen with a poet’s precision)
• types of discourse: personal narrative like memoir, philosophical reflection, observations