ABSTRACT
No one ever told us we had to study our lives, make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history or music, that we should begin with the simple exercises first and slowly go on trying the hard ones, practicing till strength and accuracy become one with the daring to leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggio or faulting the full sentence of the fugue… (Adrienne Rich, 1978, ‘Transcendental Etude’ in The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–77, p. 73)
It’s important to remember and record to set the record straight, to get the story out. But we cannot afford to make memorializing a fetish: the sign of desire once wounded and forever enshrined. Visiting hours are over. Wave good-bye. (Miller, 1997, p. 1013)
