I’ve finally gotten around to tagging all of my old journal entries, but it’s a little more trying than I anticipated. Firstly, because I have not been very efficient. I say “efficient” less in terms of productivity and more in terms of wheel-spinning. It’s basically a “theme” of my work to take the long way round, to over-stress and over-work myself over nothing. To spend hours upon hours hunched over a tiny detail until it becomes unrecognizable but the piece as a whole has remained a stranger in the next room the whole time. It’s totally my (cough, ahem) practice and not a lack of perspective, a fear of completion, a fear of revision. Fear of the questions: what’s next? what is completion if it is not death?
Besides, sometimes organizing old entries is easy and funny, and sometimes it’s easy to avoid rereading them. But other times, you accidentally get sucked into your recounted memories and the curves of your scrawly handwriting start to burn inside. Retracing your embarrassing feelings and the jagged pathways between them. Allowing some of the shallowest musings on could have been– what maybe should have been?–while remembering that they are like the scuffed edges of a dirt trail in the woods, with maybe some poison oak hiding in their underbrush: No need to drift too far, now, darling. Don’t waste any more of the present than you already do.
The other day, I watched an artist talk about the internet and time (and many other things) by everest pipkin. I laughed to myself while listening because it felt coincidental that I just had been reading some of the topics they discussed, had been circling a few of the same reading paths.
It wasn’t really a coincidence, as obviously I follow everest and their work, and began following them after reading “I Know a Place” while doing research for imaginary places. It’s clear that lots of people think about these kinds of things, about putting a place online and about the online being a place, and so anyone thinking about that is bound to have overlap.
I suppose it is natural to move from reading about memory to reading about deep time, about the languid yawn-and-stretch that is a human life mapped onto the body of the earth. I know it’s more like a blink of an eye, or that’s what they say, but I’m currently imagining it more like lengthening your legs in bed in the morning; the blood rushes in your brain a little and you forget where you are or how long it’s been but it’s also only been a moment. Or like a short, sharp gasp of cold air where the outside temperature fills from your mouth down to your fingertips.
Anyway, I imagine my research like taking a path in a grassy field, following a soft bed amongst so many blades to the same touch points that everyone else follows. Is it because I am so predictable and gauche, or simply because my brain is working the way a human brain works?
Perhaps I am burrowed so deeply in my memories because I could anticipate the upcoming cauterization of access. We went to a Jewish cemetery yesterday, nestled on the steep hills on the outside of a bend in the road. C told us that broken branches are often a part of headstone imagery, as though a part of the family had been irreparably broken by their absence. For some family patriarchs, their headstone was carved into a detailed tree trunk, sheared at the top and bottom like a log with ornate inscriptions on the front and a bark-like texture on its rounded back. You could say that about my grandfather, maybe, that he was the backbone of the family, the only reason why any human would subject oneself to my grandmother, and the only family member for whom we would do it. I guess in that case it does feel a little bit more like a separation. I am a poisoned fruit on this tree, tired and honestly so grateful that another connection to this sick and dying woodland is gone.