The biography of a book chapter: a short photo essay

 

 

 

It starts with the sources and stories; that’s where it always starts. Not stories that exist full-formed and discerned. No. These are stories that exist always-already in-the-process-of-becoming; stories that consist in half-thought ideas, half-glimpsed connections, half-baked moments. Intuition? Perhaps. Often I do not know where they come from. Always I suspect they are wrong but worth trying still.

 

 

 

It continues with the sources. Hard won over many years and forgotten long ago. To re-enter box files is to meet old friends or to be struck with the shock of the new. I told you I had forgotten these sources long ago. It continues as an archaeology of our accreted days and months in some dusty archive or other.

 

 

 

It stops. It stops just at the moment when you open a document to begin. The blank page takes on the haunting qualities of nightmare. The blank page seems a proxy for a blank mind now full of nothing.

 

 

 

It continues as copying. Transcribing noting scribbling – sometimes ideas and arguments still half-baked; more often content and quotes that build up as words and paragraphs and bullet points and pages. Say goodbye to that blank page. Say hello to more words and fewer ideas than you know what to do with.

 

 

 

It continues as the sources. Are they necessary? Not to fill the page with words, no. Are they necessary? Yes, to absolve a guilty conscience or diffuse that creeping paranoia. There is something that you have missed. There is something that you have missed.

 

 

 

Fuel for the mind: no one writes a book chapter on pan y agua.

 

 

 

It slows down then it moves. That chapter that began in the head and took life on the screen can only move on with the distance that pen and paper bring. Those connections and layers cannot take form without colours and lines and shapes and drawings. That’s what I tell myself, in any case. Illegible handwriting and a tangle of lines bring temporary order in the chaos. And in the background always more sources murmur and taunt. And in the foreground the nagging suspicion that all of this is wrong and cannot be anything but wrong.

 

 

 

Chaos is in order; more coffee is in order. Does anyone really have a tidy desk? Getting the detritus out there clears out from in here, right?

 

 

 

Moving from the page to the screen and colour and circles and underlines become headings and subheadings and fast-typed arguments. It builds and grows and shrinks and changes from here. Cut and paste; revise and rework; write then elaborate then rewrite and elaborate and delete and cut and move around the pieces. Half-thoughts double; glimpses become clearer. Baked?

 

 

Window gazing.

 

 

 

Escape. Not to forget but to displace. Not to forget but to leave that chapter to one side. It grows faster that way. Not to forget but to reflect when the mind is – or should be – at least part elsewhere. A purposeful daydream; sitting quietly before the sources; history looks different over the bars of a bicycle.

 

 

 

Moving from the page to the screen and colour and circles and underlines become headings and subheadings and fast-typed arguments. It builds and grows and shrinks and changes from here. Cut and paste; revise and rework; write then elaborate then rewrite and elaborate and delete and cut and move around the pieces. Half-thoughts double; glimpses become clearer. Baked?

 

 

 

Escape. Perhaps to forget this time – or, at the very least, to take the edge off things and to mute thoughts and ideas and arguments that become louder. It does not work nor last.

 

 

 

Then in a rush it is done. However long it has taken to come into being the end is always a surprise. There is a pause; maybe an attempt at introspection and reflection (is that what this is?). There is definitely a lingering cruising gaze over endnotes of perfect form: that is the moment that makes it all worth it. Breathe deep; convert to PDF; email to friends and colleagues and sit and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait. Then that chapter to which you thought you had said goodbye returns. Not as you sent it out, but with new scribbles and circles; new annotations; new connections and ideas and arguments – all more compelling than yours and (now, at least) obvious. All writing is rewriting; all writing is co-writing. These are things we know and take for granted. That we know and take them for granted does not make them easier though. And so there is a return to that chapter.

Never good, but perhaps good enough, for now.