Totnes Market (11/11/22)
/ Creative Reflections
Book of Moments is a collection of overheard conversations from the Friday market in Totnes, recorded between 11th November and 16th December 2022. The idea for the project came from a classroom discussion on ‘Hermes divination’. It is said that if you whisper into the right ear of Hermes in a market square, the next voice you hear is the answer.
By dipping my pen into ‘the boundless chaos of living speech’ (Johnson, 1755) I hoped to walk the thin line between orality and the written word. Whilst I was not looking for an answer, I was curious as to what might emerge from the polyphony of voices. Each sentence written down adding to an indexical language of colour, objects, weather, temperature, time, places and people…
To organise the fragmentary conversations, I decided to create a digital copy of my handwritten notes and place them beneath four collapsable headers. Each header represents a time that I went to the market. In this way, all four markets can be read as one continuous ribbon of text. Sentences that would not normally be placed side by side may begin to speak to one another. Whilst the variations in each day are subtly acknowledged.
On several occasions, I went with a friend and asked them to write down what they heard. What we both recorded were two completely different sets of notes. On 25th November, I brought a microphone with me and wrote everything down when I got back. Whilst I was able to hear more (replaying conversations that I had missed) the digital landscape of sound didn’t feel as alive to the act of divination as it did to writing things down then and there.
The more times I went, the more I became fascinated with the subjective act of listening. Was I choosing the sentences I recorded or were they choosing me? How was it possible that stood in the same market, at the same time, my friend and I had not written down a single sentence that was the same? And whilst I’ve kept some of the conversations that I recorded with a microphone in the final draft, even these were influenced by the range of the mic, the tone of a person’s voice and the volume of ambient noise.
I often wonder what it would be like to read these fragmentary conversations without context. Would people know that this was a market? What images does the text create? If I were to continue this project (both with a recorder and other people) would it be possible to create a census through language? Words revealing the face of an impermanent community? The more I write, the more the transient landscape of the market begins to take shape and find a form. Published on the internet, the Book of Moments is a record of a moment in time available to anyone who chooses to read it…
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