“…this is the most immediate effect of the Dionysian tragedy, that the state and society and, quite generally, the gulfs between man and man give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature. The metaphysical comfort—with which, I am suggesting even now, every true tragedy leaves us—that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable—this comfort appears in incarnate clarity in the chorus of satyrs, a chorus of natural beings who live ineradicably, as it were, behind all civilization and remain eternally the same, despite the changes of generations and of the history of nations.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

tr. Walter Kaufmann

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

Ecclesiastes 1:9

Notes on Tracing

One of my longest-standing and most wide-ranging habits of thought leads me back to the same response, which answers many different situations: “this is not a new thing.” Perhaps there is such a thing as the genuinely new in the world, but if new things exist, they must make up a vanishingly small portion of the world. “Tracing” is my way of imagining our relationship with the not-new things that we encounter (often for the first time, or having blessedly forgotten them - not-new things can easily be new to us) as we move through the world. Something already existed, and it left a mark. We encounter the mark, and in our encounter with it, we trace it over, making it more visible to ourselves and to the future.

Since this happens over and over again throughout history—as we learn and use words, read and discuss books, listen to and tell stories, see the natural world in ways that we are taught to or in ways that we teach ourselves—we inevitably find ourselves tracing not the first instance of the thing we have encountered, but layers of earlier tracings. Just as we firm up and re-form our own memories by calling them to mind, tracing over the lines of our loved one’s faces, of gestures made and sounds heard years ago, we are adding our marks to the layered tracings of collective memory.

I will insist on “notes”—a word behind which I always hear the Russian “записки” thanks to Dostoevsky (translation is also an act of tracing)—because of the provisional status I assign to this work. I am tracing something now, and I or someone else may trace the same thing later. As or after I trace something, I may peek beneath my tracing and discover some dimension, angle, value that I neglected on my first attempt. I may re-trace. I may rewrite even this sentence. Everything is iterative, everything is tracing. These are my notes on the process.