Things That Keep Stories

Four Parts to Measure

I mentioned a couple months ago that I developed a book cover (and plot synopsis) for a fictitious book titled Measure. This story emerged from my academic research, where it really didn’t have a suitable place to grow.

Could this be a book? Might this also be an exhibition?

YES. To both.

Well, I’ve going to write the book. Maybe even develop an exhibition. This rainy morning found me with a cuppa and a brownie in my coffee shop home (away from home), taking a few moments to sort through the bones of this project.

There are four parts to Measure:

• A beginning: who, what, when, where… essentially an origin story
• A middle: news, reviews, articles, iterative advances
• An ending: uprising, destruction, change
• An aftermath: rebuilding, reconstruction, reimagining

The structure reminds me that measurement itself connects with storytelling; there’s always a starting point, a middle, an ending point, and the aftermath is what’s done with it later. We can also create the metrics by which we’re measured, and yet so often forget we have that power.

Some Ghosts

In the past, I've found it helpful to write a blog for major projects… note that I wrote ‘helpful’ there, rather than ‘successful.’ Sometimes these things stick and sometimes they don’t. The caveat with my blogs is that they are always set to private. The URLs have never circulated. Sure, I’ve got a little voice in the back of my head telling me to download all of it and get it offline... but that voice is not a loud one.

And so, I revisited my WordPress account today and found many blogs stashed away there. The most robust one began in 2011. Dear reader, that thing is nearing the ripe old age of fourteen. It’s got everything in it from grad school to the challenges of being new junior faculty. For quite some time, I wrote here almost daily, using it as a sort of digital commonplace book. However, times change and practices change. My last entry was in 2020, and before that, 2018.

The 2018 entry was really detailed. I was struggling at the time and in the post, I described a dream that shook me out of a pretty dim place. Rereading it, I can remember bits of that dream. Between 2020 and now, I got into the habit of writing in paper journals and my digital versions faded. I made another entry this morning.

Archives of Me

I’m writing about these blog-journals as a way to consider preoccupations with data and recording. There are pages and pages of private posts that I wrote and I may never read again. I might start one specifically for Measure. It’s a bit paradoxical. As much as there is probably value in going back and reading these things (the dream, for example), there is so much that I’ll never return to.

To that end, I’ve also experimented with documenting my writing sessions and keeping trails of notes for other activities. But for what purpose? These notes often end up in the recycling bin (digital and physical). But sometimes, on rare occasion, there’s a note that captured my thoughts from a sliver of time, and it changes the direction of a project for the better.

What traces of ourselves do we leave behind, intentionally or not? As I explore what Measure might be, I think about the value of these personal archives — the stories we create and neglect, revisit or discard. Perhaps the act of recording itself is more important than what becomes of the record. Perhaps it’s the process of measuring, rather than the measurements themselves, that matters most.