anti:freeze

Forensics is all about individualization. Saliva smears on a half-empty glass, loose hairs trapped in the vacuum cleaner, paint chips, shoeprints, tire tracks in dried mud, cigarettes smashed out on the garage floor - all of these are unique. Clamp your molars into bubble gum, and you have just handed over your toothprint. Light the cigarette, let your spit soak the tip of the filter. You are leaving your DNA all over the place. Very few things aren't part of your story.

This is why I still write in notebooks. I love the pressure of my pen as it drags across the thin sheet, the way my handwriting starts out neat and controlled, then expands until it fills several lines at a time. Notebooks are evidence in their own right - a whole stack of DNA samples, right here in my closet. They turn documents into relics. You are not just reading words. You are examining the shape of the letters, the color of ink, the coffee stain inside the front cover, the elastic band that holds the cover shut, the inside pocket, the cross-outs and smears and illegible handwriting, the heavy pressure of the pen one day, the fainter lines a few days later. You are making an identification.

Notebooks remind me that writing is, above all, an epistemological act. The notebooks are not clean. The writing is not controlled. They represent creation in its rawest form. The form before the form. The form that identifies me most.

Did you know there's a whole field of forensics devoted to pollen? That pollen gets trapped inside the dark liquid you trace across the page? That your signature contains an entire landscape? A season?

Later, I will post about the different kinds of notebooks I use, and why each one is devoted to a distinct process or question - another form of individualization.