haiku and the ephemeral
Six years ago today, I started writing a haiku a day and sending it forth into the world. I wrote about this a few years ago, and if you’re interested, you can find that here. My original intention had been not to keep a record of them but rather to view them as a project of transience and ephemerality.
In the end, when the ownership of Twitter changed hands, I went in and pulled copies from the memory of that platform, and so I have an incomplete record going back to 31 March 2018. I have since broadened out the range of platforms on which I send them out, and once thing that I know I need to do is to bring the information about all of those platforms together in a single place.
One direction of travel from this moment of reminiscence is the observation that this was a strange thing to do, in that I hadn’t planned on keeping a record. But I go back to Yanagi and the Unknown Craftsman, as I mentioned in that earlier post. I still like the idea.
There are other crazy ideas I’ve had but never implemented. One is to draft a story, very slowly, and release it one paragraph at a time, as part of the out of office messages I’ve gotten into the habit of setting when I’m out of the office. Perhaps that’s the next windmill of ephemerality to tilt into.
I suppose that one attraction of this ephemerality is that so much of what I do is written for someone else, recorded by someone else, occasionally published by someone else.
The mind then turns to historians. Many of the words written these days appear in our many social media platforms, or email, and how many of these will just disappear. We won’t have the occasionally voluminous correspondence, but how much of our regular correspondence consists of things we might not have wanted to save.
And so, epheremality, a watchword for our current age. Bane perhaps of the future and the record of our present day, but I’ll continue on my merry haiku path, until at some point I decide to move on to something else.
multijimbo 