Monthly Archives: December 2020

Lost and Gained

The tendency to think of what we have lost in 9+ months of COVID is pretty pronounced. I awoke in the wee hours with the Question: what have we gained in those months of altered realities? And then: what might we do with those gains when the external world opens again, and we have once again choices about what to do and how to operate in the wider world?

There’s an obvious answer to [what have we gained?] and that’s time and space for contemplation, for looking at each and every thing to ask what really matters and how we can productively engage, how best to use the time we have?

Speaking for myself, these months have prompted me to make sense of my own collections, and that’s morphed into the notion of building Finding Aids—primarily to guide myself in the vastnesses of things accumulated, but also to improve accessibility to whatever posterity there might be for those collections. The Blurb books (which I began 5 years ago with Bluenose Physignomy) were a start in that effort, though I didn’t apply the archivist’s notion of Finding Aids exactly, and preferred the image of Narration—which in general seems a superior mode of presentation when the binding thread can be found and spun out coherently. And, looking back at least 20 years, the whole enterprise of hypertext and oook.info gatheration has been the armature for building and distribution.

I fancy that I’m looking at things with closer attention, and certainly that’s true with the current engagement with the photography library, which I’ve barely begun and don’t really have a coherent plan for, beyond adding material from more books. There is a dawning sense that I might make a separate page for each of the photographers I revere, in which to gather thoughts and pointers outward to explicate that reverence.

Idle thought: Am I revisiting and reconceptualizing the Boy Scout notion of Reverent? What a surprise… what then for Obedient and Brave and Clean? Can these be redrawn into worthy ambitions?

The gallery of photographic inspiration (scans of especially redolent photographs, not for interwebs distribution for reasons of copyright) is turning out to be a productive contemplative device for exploring my own æsthetic, and for focusing my examination of the work of photographers by whom I think I’ve been influenced. I’m pleasantly surprised by their variety, even within the constraints of monochrome, and indeed it’s been worthwhile to discover how deeply steeped I am in the B&W world.

Digression: That thought provoked imagining a monochrome digital camera, with controls for refining the electronic viewfinder image…

So I have a rich sense of ongoing discovery in materials I’ve been accumulating for years, indeed for my whole life. The exploration has always been there, but it seems now that I’m more aware of it as personal raison d’etre, even without the captive audiences of students, or the library ‘patrons’ (whom I preferred to see as clients) who brought me questions. I feel myself to be a student, working toward general understanding of unlimited somethings in the world around me. Some of the tools are technologies of information—the camera, the computer, the sound makers, the books. Some tools are essentially mental—the processors of sensory inputs, the builders of texts, and link-makers in assemblages. Just what it is I’m building I can’t see clearly, and perhaps the absence of a specific goal is an advantage, even an operational necessity. It, whatever it is, won’t ever be completed, and completion of any part isn’t the point of the doing.