Monday June 20, 2023 12:33 am
I am thrilled by ephemera much more then perhaps I should be…really, it is often more interesting to me then the catalogued official expression – art work, book, poem, you know, the ‘finished’ product.
But this also a post [hopefully, it won’t turn into a rant] about process, for all the ‘things’ we do and consume and interact with, affect their small implications on that great bold finished idea or object.
It seems as though there is a great untold story, in the souvenir travel brochure, a hotel lobby match book, [which are now exceedingly rare] that scrap piece of paper with scribbled ‘to do’ lists on them – everything tangential, after the fact seems a lot more important. Of course more of it gets discarded then kept, and very often it is only happenstance that they even exists at all, like those foot steps of prehistoric humans, petrified by the perfect accidents of weather and geology. Which of course for me, that IS the thrill, this could have been destroyed, but it wasn’t - why?
Is it because of these happy accidents that make them all the more fascinating, perhaps, but it is more likely for me that its fascination and excitement lies in the story I can create. Those pieces of refuse and forgotten book-markers are the objects of perfect tall tales or real life accounting of time and place. How many cigars did that one book of matches’ light and in whose company were they smoked in? That smudge on the travel brochure, the reflex action swatting the stinging insect of a sweltering hot day, could we sample the blood from that mosquito now, for a whos, who, DNA? Or the idea so perfect in it’s phrasing needs to be written down – right NOW! otherwise lost forever. Those caffeine pills which were needed to pull that all-nighter then 36 hrs to get that manuscript in by the deadline. Each one of these incidents could line up, compile themselves, these tangential tools and consumables, that in some small way contributed into creating, finally, to that one perfect poem.
Or nothing at all.
Who knows now…
