These images from a simple notebook I’ll probably bring in and keep on my desk for reference is, without having meant to be, the foundation of my thesis. I take illustration and combine it with personal narrative. I show the world around me and speak my own truth in one piece. I find that documentation can be all important and that, over time, it becomes a history of its own.
So I have some keys I found all on a ring one day while on my usual walk to work that I did rubbings of, cut out and then pasted across one spread, a peregrine falcon from the nature lab in the Peabody Essex museum, a diagram of injuries on my hands and arms, some more discarded objects with larger texts accompanying them, and finally a sketch of the the Salem Willows and the nearby water treatment tower observed from Dane Street Beach, that is from a separate, more recent sketchbook
This final image is the most promising as I want to do more of what John was advising me of on Thursday — Walking and writing, walking and memory. To record more than just “a snapshot” but rather, an experience. How can I share that, what I’ve seen and felt- make it vivid to someone experiencing my work? I have obtained a notebook for the purpose of experimenting and, circumstances permitting, I hope to have my first novel experiment to show on Tuesday — whatever that may be or whatever form it will take!
it is a bad time, but being so, a less bad time to be in school, where at least we — the people gathered together — can dwell on our time, survival, what needs to be done (and not only for ourselves).
ReplyDeleteas you record, document, your wanderings and walks, sightings and prompted recollections, the issue comes up of form: what form things take. there are the notebooks., etc... can these yield other forms, other arrangements, juxtapositions... different registers of information, some immediate impression, others processed in some way, presented in different ways (e.g., typographically)...
and how — in what form(s) — are they made available to others.
I have some other walking literature in mind... Robert Walser, also Hans Jürgen von der Wense... Lauren Elkin her Flaneuse (copy in seminar room)...
p.s., do you know J. A. Baker's book The Peregrine (1967), discussed at length in this essay in The New Yorker?
ReplyDeleteI recall it being a pretty single-minded, serious bird of prey!
how it relates to the word “peregrination” I don’t — but want to — know.
peregrine (n.)
ReplyDeletealso peregrin, type of large, spirited falcon, 1550s, short for peregrine falcon (late 14c.), from Old French faulcon pelerin (mid-13c.), from Medieval Latin falco peregrinus, from Latin peregrinus “coming from foreign parts,” from peregre (adv.) “abroad,” properly “from abroad, found outside Roman territory,” from per “away” (see per) + agri, locative of ager “field, territory, land, country” (from PIE root *agro- “field”). The original implications of the term in falconry are not clear; they may have been of a bird “caught in transit,” as opposed to one taken from the nest. Peregrine as an adjective in English meaning “not native, foreign” is attested from 1520s.
source