Offering 2024–049
echos from my journal -
feeling very syrupy
still plugging away
brain keeps working
fingers leaving letters
striving enduring longing
emergency word parade
otherwise feeling great
— —
It’s time for another experiment.
I journal every day. Within ten minutes of waking up, I’m sitting in my chair and writing in a ‘string of consciousness’ manner for ten minutes — if it pops in my head, it goes on the page. After years of struggle with more structured journal writing, I found my current method to be far superior.
A couple of months ago, I found myself revisiting a dormant project where I intended to create art through data and technology. When I made a personal breakthrough on the technical aspect of the project, I did not have the data set I intended to use prepared. I trained the program I wrote on the word counts of my own journal. While the original project reentered dormancy. the ‘fork’ to my journal is still active and serves up an artistic rendering of my text when I go to save my journal file.
A few weeks ago, three word phrases in the rendering started catching my eye and tickling my brain. I started looking forward to moment the artwork appeared so I could see what interesting phrases popped out of my consciousness each morning. About two weeks ago, I had the thought I might want to write these phrases down and create a work from those.
Reading from top to bottom of the poem, the phrases in today’s offering come from February 18th, 13th, 7th, 11th, 14th, 17th, and 18th respectively. While they describe different moments of my life, they stitch together well to describe the moment I find myself in now.
Outside of outlining the creative process of how this work came to be, only one element needs explanation — ‘emergency word parade’. This phrase describes a state I enter when I get stuck in my journal. My goal is to use two-hundred unique words each session. When it feels like I’m going to fall short, I started writing random words I believe I’ve never used before to get my word count up. That’s kind of where I was this morning. With no idea on what to write about, I did an emergency word parade using phrases instead of words.
I’m happy with the result.
