michael-dean-k/

To read someone’s logs/diaries is to let them enter your mind, whether you realize it or not. I don’t mean that figuratively, I mean it in the sense that by reading someone in such detail, you risk inheriting them at least, and at most becoming them. If they are articulate and prolific, it means that you contemplate a new form of existence. Even if you are ambivalent it, or even loathe it, it is such a volume of informaiton, that you risk forming patterns and assuming others of a similar type have a similar mind. I guess the question is, do you want others to be a mystery, to be imagined by yourself, or to be transferred from your understanding of self/other. My sense is that we generally transfer our own consciousness onto others, which is distorting, and so reading the logs of others is a kind of calibration.

It’s a challenge to articulate any given moment of consciousness. I found myself in a particular feeling, and tried to deconstruct it. First, my vision: I was looking at spatial objects in a room—a vase of flowers, the thing, and the shadow it casts. But that snapshot has a history: they’re from our wedding, and our five year anniversary is coming up. But part of any moment is the afterglow of the recent past too: I had gone to the coffee shop in almost freezing winter, I felt discouraged about my own writing practice, and then I completely forgot about all that while talking to a baby through a stomach and playing her Claire de Lune. So any particular moment is like a collision of objects that each have a temporal history; it’s dense, and words are lossy.