Parse Journal (May 2023)
Cast in Stone
Abstract
This essay harnesses the contaminating potentials of textual materials and hybrid literary forms. Drawing on notebooks kept during a stay in Germany more than twenty years ago, the piece presents a range of observations on monuments and museums, notably the memorial sculptures of Micha Ullman, alongside commentary on other artworks (Piranesi’s Views of Rome, Kafka’s The Castle) and accounts of chance encounters and daily life. A postscript reveals that parts of the text were published previously as a “case study” of a failed writing project. In the current text, the abandoned essay has been absorbed into a new sequence, following the initial conception, and the extended version is put forward as a “finished product”. Contamination across time draws attention to the elusive nature of the definitive version.
