rule two
by uzwi
Moments chosen at random from other people’s family snaps. Or from invented family snaps. Current affairs as old family snaps: they may be digital but they’ve already curled up at the edges. Describe a faded polaroid, found in a shoebox, as if someone else took it. File an observation until its original context is lost then treat it as a found object, something to be misappropriated from yourself, something levered out of its “true” moment. There are only false moments, & moments are all we have. Rule One: take a note in one mood, but only ever use it in another. Rule Two: if nothing else works, describe the shoebox.
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Oh, good – rules I don’t have to not follow on principle just because they’re rules. They feel like meta-rules of some kind: in that Rule One is an inevitability & Rule Two is a last resort. More like Laws really…
Just the Shoebox:
http://vimeo.com/28236273
-Karim
Many thanks for that, Karim. It’s beautiful. I love the tones & lighting.
Hi Rob. “Rule One is an inevitability”. Sometimes it isn’t, & people strive to preserve the original matrix, the “truth” of the experience, & that locks the material away. But you’re right generally–you can’t use any of my rules unless you already know they’re not rules.
Thank you for the kind words. I was struck by what you wrote in this entry. Apologies for posting links etc.
That’s the inevitability of it, though: isn’t it ? That if you try to use the note – the moment, recorded – in the same mood as the one you took it in, if you “strive to preserve the original matrix”, you can’t, or you can’t successfully: the attempt is always counterproductive to some degree precisely because of what it is you’re attempting. Same river twice and all that. The note’s already edited truth anyway. So “only ever use it in another” becomes the only way you ever will use it, with any degree of success. For a given definition of success, I mean… At least, that’s what I’m finding with my own writing, now that I’m actually writing some of it. It helps, I think, that most of my notes are quite old now: whatever mood they were taken in has rubbed off most of them…
I’ve adopted “There are only false moments, & moments are all we have” as my new mantra, by the way, if that’s ok. I don’t remember what my old mantra was: I don’t think I had one, actually.
Big yes to this post, old notes as found objects- essentially, raw material to be mined for whatever’s shiny. Original intent’s irrelevance is freeing, huge fun: mmn this is cool, now what’s it spark, what else fits with this? etc.
Always liked this little piece of Neil Gaiman’s:
http://www.hereinmyhead.com/neil/sw.html