But what if someone has already made it? Doubt creeps up. What if you are not good enough for it? You think about the process, that you need certain materials, some items which you don’t have. You need someone else’s help, who can you ask? It is an ambitious project, and you might need a whole group of people. If it is too small, crammed into a box that you could reasonably carry alone, it might not be good. Even though you are used to working alone on a small scale, this idea, it demands more.

The idea lurks in the shadow of your mind, while you look for ways to subvert it into something manageable. It anxiously desires to remain unchanged, beautiful. What will happen to it if you downsize it? The idea desires the cinematic. Why not go bigger? Why not make a full-scale production? Yes, you must. That’s it, you have to do it right. Disquiet glues you to the library seat—you have to wait through it, like wading through the ocean in your concrete shoes.

You’ve stashed the idea in a quiet place (shielded from the deluge of your thoughts), but you are unable to return to the book. It might wreak havoc on the idea. You might find that someone else has indeed done the same thing, and you didn’t know because it wasn’t really all that great. Worse, you might discard the idea in favour of something alien; your idea might be twisted around on itself, wounded beyond repair. You protect it by shying away from anything new, should the realization creep up that everywhere, everyday, something beautiful happens with and without your participation, and the world can barely perceive another drop.

Trapped by the uncooperative weather in your vast library of illegible information, you fantasize about your exquisite idea. Imagine it just so; marooned on the island of your interior, it is perfect.

A Research Outline suggests a predetermined approach. Anchored to bullet points and numbers, it implies a secure future, a plotted timeline of events. Cause and effect, history by the books. It says, we’re going Somewhere.

That’s all well and good, but, based on a few years at this art school, even though I will end up somewhere, I can’t be sure that I’m really going there. Not specifically. Certainly not impressively. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a year fraught with reversals and mishaps. All things considered, it would be misleading to present a bulleted Research Outline.

So begins the anxious reflection (what will I make, how will I make it, and what will I pretend to know about) that prefixes the Research Outline. The first thing that comes to mind is the travelling metaphor (now we’re getting somewhere). Towards the unknown, it’s important that life is portable. Those big heavy things are so settled. Et cetera. And even here, space is short and time is enclosed by semesters, bracketed by Sundays, cornered into the three a.m. moment when an idea can finally strike with all its misinterpreted intensity. Who is awake at three a.m?

Which highlights the time of things happening. Now is a very personal moment, belonging to the living individual, close to home. It is bound by temporariness, which itself has no opposite state of being, since how permanent is permanence?

Temporariness implies fragility, haphazardness. As it translates, just for now, it requires the present tense. The temporary also suggests an unknown future, uncertainty, this is just for now, until. It seems to say, not so sure when.

A safe way of approaching these concepts could be through performance, because it must involve the moment, and is easily portable. But I’m probably not going to do that. Another good idea would be through film, or moving image, automatically invoking our little travelling metaphor. Maybe I could do something like that. But even more appealing is the idea of a sound work which fills a space, which happens temporarily, and which doesn’t fix our attention to a visual thing.

I might do that too. Safe to say for now that it’s going to be a very wordy project. And I’m always tempted to make books.
 

Artist’s are full of the desire to create things that will influence people and speak to their generation, things which will all the same be autonomous and also within the world, things which are known. Sometimes I think that this is an impossible thing. And unnecessary, when the world already has all these things.

In Borges’s Library of Babylon, there is most probably, almost certainly, even definitely, one book that contains all of what has happened and all of what will. One book which is the truth about the world. But they cannot find it and even if they found it they probably almost certainly would not recognize it.

Maybe it is a problem of organization.

What next