Today I begin the 8th day of working at the ICI by reading a very short story titled Almost No Memory by Lydia Davis. The story is about a woman who “had a very sharp consciousness but almost no memory.” So “she took good notes on what she read, since she did have some ideas of her own, and even on her ideas about her ideas.”
Year by year she kept these good notes. Sometimes she would read her past notes and make notes on her notes.
“Or she wanted to make a note because to make a note was her way of thinking this thought.”
“Although most of what she read was new to her, sometimes she immediately recognized what she read and had no doubt that she herself had written it, and thought it. It seemed perfectly familiar to her, as though in fact she had just thought it that very day, unless reading it again was the same as thinking it again, or the same as thinking it the first time, and though she might never have thought it again, if she had not happened to read it in her notebook. And so she knew by this that these notebooks truly had a great deal to do with her, how much they were of her and how much they were outside her, as they sat there on the shelf, being what she knew but did not know, being what she had read but did not remember reading, being what she had thought but did not now think, or remember thinking, or if she remembered, then did not know whether she was thinking it now or whether she had only once thought it, or understand why she had had a thought once and then years later the same thought, or a thought once and then never that same thought again.”
I spent these first seven days reading, thinking, taking notes.
Below are some visual records.
lab book
work table
Blackboard (east)
blackboard (west)
post its 3 x 3
