Place as a Kind of Imperfection

I.

Distracted, reading Casey Cep's profile of Marilynne Robinson ("Book of Revelation," New Yorker, October 5, 2020): "She considered the day a success because she had perfected a single sentence."

II.

Some months back, a colleague and collaborator wrote about the idea of fallow time (that they'd learned about from bonnie tsui):

fallow time. in agriculture, fallow ground is land that is plowed but left unseeded during the growing season. this happens when a field has been removed from crop rotation. “fallow time,” tsui argues, “is necessary to grow everything from actual crops to figurative ones, like books and children. to do the work, we need to rest, to read, to reconnect. it is the invisible labor that makes creative life possible.

III.

And then, some months ago that felt like a different continent, Jenny Odell speaking to Ezra Klein. She talked about the value of negative space in making art, but she also talked about the invisible labor - the iterative failures that went into producing art. I forget the specific project she was referring to, but that project's success was preceded by a year (years?) of what felt like frustration and failure. And yet when the project 'succeeded,' Odell returned to her notebooks and realized that what felt like failure then was actually an iterative process of working things through.

IV.

This morning I'm writing about these things instead of returning to the revise & resubmit I've been mumbling through for the past month. There are moments - like yesterday! - when I return to those revisions and think, This is better than it was. And then there are moments where I don't really want to return to the work of revision. It's boring, slow, glacial. And sometimes that worry: But what's even the point?

V.

This morning from the window: A light rain darkens the road and sidewalk. The leaves of the magnolia tree are beginning to yellow and curl, the lawn slowly filling with wind-shuddered leaves (now there's a phrase I'm not allowed to use in an academic journal article!). The tall oak across the street is still late-summer dark. In the distance, the red of early maples, eager for fall. Somewhere in the distance I hear the grind of construction work, a dull whistle and then the rap of piles being driven into the earth. Out of the corner of my eye, the smudged colors of a jay in flight.

VI.

I was speaking with students yesterday about Doreen Massey - who makes the argument that too often we assume that what defines the distinctiveness of places is somehow 'internal' to those places. For example, what makes Paris unique is a sort of essential French-ness or Parisian-ness. This is limiting for all sorts of reasons, but she argues that we need to reframe how we define the distinctiveness of place. Places, instead of being internally coherent, are always networks, sites of connection and articulation, linked to other places and other times in a variety of different ways.

So I wonder what would happen if we thought of perfection as a kind of place - but the experience of which was defined not in terms of its tightly guarded borders but instead by its linkages to a world of imperfection. Fallow times, fallow places.

The thickening whisper of rain on the roof. To work.

Green Lakes State Park, October 2020