The first instance of Peeping Mot was a prototyping space for asystematic statements – typically short and discrete. It was never exhaustive of daily thinking, and wasn’t intended to be, but collected examples of a kind: propositions, questions, aphorisms, notes and fragments. A small subset of notebooks akin to those of Joubert and Lichtenberg that I keep elsewhere. A couple published collections branched off of or tumbled out of this first go, despite it stubbornly not being positioned toward ‘the book’.
Even then, a sort of method and its limitations set in. A tendency to willfully write toward a project, or worse, toward ‘art’ or a claim to it. This sort of writing is still happening in other spaces for me, and maybe there’s nothing wrong with this. But I’d like to open the register again, and create a semi-public, barely-findable place for any thought. I think register is not a bad word for the scope of it, and diary hints at the appetite and ambition for a certain dailiness for this writing. Perhaps the only way to do this is to abandon compartmentalization and let anything stand.
Blogging feels anachronistic, and did so when I began blogs in earlier years. But this feeling still seems habitable – with my longstanding reluctance to live in-the-moment, perhaps the odd format suits. I’m unfamiliar with WordPress, so the shape of this is likely to evolve in lumps and be something less than handsome for while, but I’m primarily looking for a place to gather and keep things, in a place I can index and occasionally point to, to create conversations with small handfuls of friends or could-be-friends, in that gardening spirit of Epicurean friendship and consideration.
More than anything else – and why I’m starting fresh, at this convenient arbitrary beginning of a new decade – I’d like to leave less out. I’ve been equal parts proficient and clumsy at building a life of many spare parts, with so many preoccupations: film, poetry, music, baseball, politics, art, technology, taxonomy, utopias, Americanisms, translation, scattered stakes. These have been distributed fitfully across different channels via avatars and pseudonyms and false fronts and quasi-public selves. I think all this fracture and occultation has been a way to hide in plain sight, resist the premise of a synthesized or whole identity, and internally thumb my nose at social media, which is easy to dislike (and I think correct to dislike!).
But let me make an attempt to put it all together (altogether?) here. It will be a mess, and nothing that anyone will want to absorb in its entirely, but put that aside for a moment, and we’ll let it stand. I’m excited to see that WordPress provides categories and tags to channel the unwieldy inventory of ‘all this’ into allotments, tropes, and familial tranches. I can’t resist – and won’t.
Peeping Mot 