A great essay in the Glasgow Review of Books about “A Dog at the Edge of Things,” the review makes connections that I had always really wanted someone to notice after all these years plying the 100-word trade (!) but also suggests other completely unanticipated associations that both surprise and delight. What Berridge says about ASMR, about atmospheres, about (multiple) bodies, and about sequencing (my private word for which is ‘modular’) really had me smiling.
The ‘field note’ concludes when its gathering exists as atmosphere, epistemological project, authorial statement and loss, all certain and changeable as air, body, sea, car, and microphone.
After reading Carlyle’s book I looked in Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary for a quote where Barthes writes (as I remember it) that the written diary is useful only as a mnemonic for the vastness of what is unwritten. Was that relevant here? I must have felt something was. But the quote must be somewhere else, if it exists. I find instead another of Barthes’ memos made in grief: ‘In taking these notes, I’m trusting myself to the banality that is in me.’
Which is a word to describe the openness it takes to write these field notes: of position, activity, practice, body, to realise, record, keep, process, now, not now, until, as, when, and, if.