Shore and disorder
We watched Les Bouquinistes De Paris the other night, an hour-long doc about the famed book sellers of the Seine, and part of me yearned for their way of life: days and years in the company of stories and posters and knick-knacks and wind. A bohemian spirit of quiet rebellion. I could almost smell the paper and damp wood, hear the creaking hinges of centuries-old stalls.
I'm tired of straight lines and sterile sleekness that sees most of our memories hidden away. There's a place for minimalism, for rooms where the mind is free to roam or lay still without interference. But minimalism is a void. I'm not sure we're made to exist in a semi-constant state of sensory deprivation.
I’ve never wanted, needed in fact, to touch life as much as I do now. I'd build chairs and dressers if I had the tools or the talent. I thirst for ink and dirt, for splinters that throb, stained fingers I can't scrub clean.
...
A year ago I reintroduced my parent's first kitchen table to my workspace. A big, heavy wooden thing. I needed it to shoot a commercial gig but decided to keep it after I was done. It's created a space within a space, a desk where notebooks and pens take center stage instead of drives, cables, and screens. I often use it to write with the iPad too, but the device somehow feels more single-minded here, more typewriter than computer. As if the surface commands its own particular brand of focus. At first I kept the table almost bare but lately I've been piling up books and magazines, raiding our bookshelves to make a deliberate mess around me. Channeling the clutter spirit of tsundoku, an accumulation for my eyes to settle on during lost moments. That, and notebooks—filled or half-filled or barely touched yet—all at arm's length, ready for either browsing or new scratches.
As much as I like Bear, the knowledge it contains is a library through which I can't wander. Or, when I do, it doesn't seem to build the same connections. Notes are segregated, their ideas locked behind search strings or tags. I can't flip back and forth between pages, eras, and continents. I easily find but I rarely stumble upon. The homogenous nature of those notes—identical type, size, format—is an equalizer that ultimately stifles adventure. A perfect archive, but a facsimile of life far removed from the flâneurs of the Seine and their serendipitous encounters.
...
In a tower of books I spot Stephen Shore's Survey. I pick it up and soon grab my camera, a common side-effect of seeing what others saw.
Synergy from disorder.
The rush of an aimless voyage.
