the act of chronicling is not a futile endeavour, a way of marking time while the world slips past unrecorded and unremarked. To transcribe this strange, flickering sonata is not to control it; the act of writing does not still the chaos, nor does it grant any special dominion over what passes before my eyes. If anything, the attempt to seize these elusive fragments only make them more spectral, as if the very effort of articulation sends them scattering into impossible new configurations: a phrase misremembered, a gesture lost in the blur of motion, a memory gone to rot the moment it is set to ink.  I am at times haunted by the knowledge that for every luminous instant I manage to render, a thousand others slip through the cracks, unmarked, unresolved, unredeemed.

Yet I can not stop. The compulsion to bear witness, to catch even the faintest reverberation of a vanished moment, is too strong; a collector of echoes, a hoarder of absences, a curator of the nearly nothing, to record not the world’s declarations, but its silences; not its triumphs, but its tremors, to transcribe the secret music that everyone hears and no one can quite articulate; content to be the scribe of what vanishes in the telling, the witness to what refuses to be contained…

© KD.W.Heim