Carnet de recherches
or notes from the in-between
Lately I’ve been thinking about
fennel
cheese
Frank O’Hara
the person in the next garden having a better spring
a tomcat’s bloody paw prints pressed across my chest
The Sims 2
a mosquito at 3 a.m.
an outdoor shower
how little I want to be a person with a project right now
how much I want to be horizontal in warm light with nowhere to be and no one watching
and then go slightly mad in the French countryside
lose my phone in a river
and just let myself molt, marinate and dissolve.
(Post-Imagined Flower Challenge fog.
Thank you so much to everyone who participated, it was everything I hoped it would be and then some. How are you all doing?)
Kate Zambreno was under contract for a book she couldn’t write, so she did everything else instead. She walked her dog around the neighborhood, tracked stray cats, rode the train, visited museums, emailed friends, thought about Rainer Maria Rilke. Drifts is what came out of all that circling and deferring, a record of not writing the book she was supposed to write.
The French call it a carnet de recherches, a research notebook, though research can mean almost anything. No grant required, no methodology, no hypothesis to prove, only fennel, mosquito, tomcat, swatches, arrows pointing at things that are no longer there, doodles, scribbles, the ongoing record of attention when attention refuses to become a project.
Miranda July, in It Chooses You, interviewed strangers selling things in the Pennysaver because she couldn’t write. She was stuck on a screenplay and thought: well. If I can’t make the thing, I can at least go toward something. She interviewed a man selling rabbits. A woman with a portrait of Michael Jackson. She made a book about the going-toward, and maybe that was the thing she needed to make all along.
Instead of what I’m supposed to be doing,
I’ve been looking up whether fennel are actually trees (they are not, they are herbs)
eating cheese standing over the sink
reading poems
doodling
googling painters
Fun fact of the day: bears do not actually hibernate. They enter a state called torpor, which is lighter than hibernation, and they can wake up if disturbed. I find this very relatable. I am not asleep. I am in torpor. I am in a state of reduced metabolic activity that looks, from the outside, like refusing to answer emails, but is actually a sophisticated biological survival strategy. Please don’t disturb me. I am a bear. I am doing something important with my heart rate.
One variety of carnet de recherches I’ve been practicing this month: the daily doodle. I came across Mogu Takahashi’s sketchbook practice and couldn’t contain myself:
