Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Mirror of Venus
(1875)

"…I lay down for a well-earned nap I might never quite wake up from."

Who does he think he’s writing to? For? Who did he intend to enlist to perform in the role of his reader? The book seems to have more premise than plot. He titled it Cluelessness, then cast himself as the protagonist, as almost the only focus. Should he be classified as a Narcissist? A Maschochist? If I weren’t the author, I wouldn’t be able to answer. Even as the author, I question whether I could be capable of coherently responding. As the author, my answers might be even more troubling than those posed by any reader. I cannot be certain. I suddenly can’t be certain about anything. I might be experiencing SelfReference poisoning. Have I disclosed too much? Have I revealed fundamental shortcomings? Have I gone and spoken what no one should ever say out loud? Does this publication mark the start or end of whatever might have been left of my reputation?

In the first sentence, I explain that the book is a work of philosophy, autobiography, history, and fiction, simultaneously, all at the same time. I suppose that pronouncement might work as an introduction for anybody, for what are we but works of philosophy, autobiography, history, and fiction? We must be something other than the sum of our experiences, for even an AI engine can muster responses beyond those explainable by simple exposure. Even though it seems to understand more than it knows, more than the sum of whatever it learned. Perhaps that’s evidence of intelligence.

I immersed myself in my own work. The book had arrived in a plain brown box, left on the porch and not discovered until later. The Muse put the box on the kitchen table unopened. I recognized it for what it had to be and opened it. It smelled like new books in there. The cover felt slightly sticky, as if it had been finished in a light coating of wax. That cover image was me peering into a mirror, me looking at myself, and myself quizzically staring back at me.

cluelessnesscover

I immediately set down to start reading as a reflexive action. To do anything else seemed beyond unthinkable. I was enthralled. I made it through the several introductory chapters. I hadn’t realized that I’d included so many statements of introduction and intent, and I was about fifteen pages into the content before the evening had the best of me. I set aside the read until the following morning. I restarted my reading in predawn twilight the following morning. I was looking for errors at first, for reasons to reject this book, but I couldn’t find any errors. I must have imagined them there the evening before.

I immersed myself, doling out the experience a scant chapter or two at a time before closing the cover and closing my eyes to what? Recover? Recover from what? Maybe I was only savoring. The immersion felt both calming and unsettling, familiar and gawdawful odd. Who was this character passing himself off as me? Was this the me from the summer of 2018, when we still lived in Colorado, before I knew we would successfully end our twelve-year exile, but lose my darling daughter? This presence was clearly associated with my past, but it sure felt all of a sudden disarmingly in-my-face present. I was experiencing SelfReference again.

Time and space got displaced. I crawled through that first read, not wanting it to ever end, unsure if I could stand to finish it. The book lengthened as I read. As I crossed the halfway mark, the stories seemed to become denser, the pages thicker. I read slower and needed to go back and completely reread a few of the pieces. My mind wandered, perhaps on purpose. Maybe that had been the author’s intent? I felt moved to tears a few times, private tears not included in the text, not even hinted at there. Who in Hell was this character whispering into my inner ear? Where did his stories come from? Where was this book going? It had no dénouement. It deliberately failed to conclude anything. It was not instructing. Nor was he insisting that his reader agree to anything. He didn’t seem to be selling, either!

What moved him to even write this book, let alone to force it through the brutal machinery deemed necessary to publish and distribute the work? His original intention seemed innocent enough. He’d finished four series, the first he’d chosen to attempt a year earlier when he’d sworn to be the writer he’d been declaring himself to be forever. He needed a theme. Those first four: Another Summer, Another Fall, Another Winter, and Another Spring, could have been followed by Yet Another Spring, ad infinitum, but he decided to attempt to finish a concept he’d been working on with his publisher back when he had still considered himself to be a writer. He’d intended to write an anti-self-help book, one touting the opposite of whatever the typical self-help title might tout. He referred to those works as Self-Helpless, if only because they presented as paradoxes. If they dealt in self-help, why would the reader require their external reference? Following another’s even well-intended directions could only undermine any self-help intentions. He’d call the work Cluelessness.

But Cluelessness would require a different focus, probably not the sort of focus any publisher could be interested in promoting, given that it wouldn’t provide instruction and might not appeal to their usual demographic. Just who would Cluelessness be written for, anyway? These were hard questions he’d never managed to answer. He wrote on instinct until the project, like many before, slipped to the back burner, only to be revived early on that late June morning. He’d produce a piece each day until the end of that summer and see what he’d produced at the end.

That’s what I encountered this week, when I opened that box and found ‘my’ book inside, Cluelessness, A Book of Mirrors, and immersed myself in SelfReference. I feel remarkably different for having read the thing. It felt materially different than reading proofs online on 8.5 X 11 printout paper. I held something remarkable in my hand, something my son and I had created. (He designed the cover.) This was a testament to something, something other than simply SelfReference. I cannot quite grasp the experience as easily as I held that copy of my book in my hand. Something vast stands between those covers. I heard myself whisper, “Beautiful,” before I lay it down for a well-earned nap I might never quite wake up from. I’d never read anything even remotely like it before.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz