Something I believe very strongly, mostly from observing changes in myself, is that, once you’ve shoved your own hands deep in the entrails of a building, you’ve permanently altered your entire relationship with the world.
Ah yes, this is really nice. it helps me understand something I’ve been doing for several years now: learning to maintain and repair cars. I’ve always loved cars, but from the outside, as objects of beauty and as thrill rides (I like to drive on race tracks when I can). But when I retired, I knew I wanted to go deeper, to learn how cars were put together and to physically engage with them, get inside the engineering. The car I work on most now—a 10-year old Porsche—is teaching me a lot about the quality of engineering. I’m trying to build up ink in my stomach, I believe.
Your point about shedding initial projections reminds me of Proust’s reflection on this:
“But let a sensation from a bygone year … enable our memory to hear that name with the particular timbre with which it then sounded in our ears, then, while the name itself has apparently not changed, we feel the distance that separates the dreams that its same syllable have meant to us at different times.”
“Ink in the stomach” is such an apt, visceral description for accumulated contact.
Anything can be interesting to look at for a moment, but not for long if looking is all that happens.
I can relate to your decade of photography. My computer and TV screen savers cycle through my favorite photos from abroad — about 1,400 of them. When it was just 100, it was cute. But now I see the same place across separate trips, what changed each time, what I remember feeling, even what technique I was trying.
The repetition multiplies the depth of the memory.
When you make repeated contact, when you get into the guts of something, that something gets into the guts of you.
The proverbial one-night stand is almost a mental abstraction compared to a sustained relationship whose memory lives in the body.
The "long distance pleasure" — understanding something only well after it happened — is the line I keep turning over. I've spent the last year building a different kind of ink in the stomach: a written record of my own thinking, day after day, most of it feeling like nothing in the moment. The depth only shows up reading it back. And the surprise is that the accumulation isn't passive — going back through it is its own act of contemplation, a way to develop that sense rather than just store it. The doorway stops being a doorway. So does your own past.
Ah yes, this is really nice. it helps me understand something I’ve been doing for several years now: learning to maintain and repair cars. I’ve always loved cars, but from the outside, as objects of beauty and as thrill rides (I like to drive on race tracks when I can). But when I retired, I knew I wanted to go deeper, to learn how cars were put together and to physically engage with them, get inside the engineering. The car I work on most now—a 10-year old Porsche—is teaching me a lot about the quality of engineering. I’m trying to build up ink in my stomach, I believe.
Lovely meditation.
Love it. Excellent as always.
Your point about shedding initial projections reminds me of Proust’s reflection on this:
“But let a sensation from a bygone year … enable our memory to hear that name with the particular timbre with which it then sounded in our ears, then, while the name itself has apparently not changed, we feel the distance that separates the dreams that its same syllable have meant to us at different times.”
“Ink in the stomach” is such an apt, visceral description for accumulated contact.
Anything can be interesting to look at for a moment, but not for long if looking is all that happens.
I can relate to your decade of photography. My computer and TV screen savers cycle through my favorite photos from abroad — about 1,400 of them. When it was just 100, it was cute. But now I see the same place across separate trips, what changed each time, what I remember feeling, even what technique I was trying.
The repetition multiplies the depth of the memory.
When you make repeated contact, when you get into the guts of something, that something gets into the guts of you.
The proverbial one-night stand is almost a mental abstraction compared to a sustained relationship whose memory lives in the body.
The "long distance pleasure" — understanding something only well after it happened — is the line I keep turning over. I've spent the last year building a different kind of ink in the stomach: a written record of my own thinking, day after day, most of it feeling like nothing in the moment. The depth only shows up reading it back. And the surprise is that the accumulation isn't passive — going back through it is its own act of contemplation, a way to develop that sense rather than just store it. The doorway stops being a doorway. So does your own past.
Woah. Fantastic as always. Simple and profound.
I write so much and my poems are normally my memory. I love how they are an ambiguous reflection on that time, ripe for making sense of in the future.
But you have inspired me to take more photos. Even to get out the old DSLR.