''I Swear I Saw This'' records visionary
anthropologist Michael Taussig's reflections on the
fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of
travels in Colombia. Taking as a starting point a
drawing he made in Medellin in 2006 - as well as its
caption, ''I Swear I Saw This'' - Taussig considers the
fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and
the place where writers and other creators first work
out the imaginative logic of discovery. Notebooks mix
the raw material of observation with reverie,
juxtaposed, in Taussig's case, with drawings,
watercolors, and newspaper cuttings, which blend the
inner and outer worlds in a fashion reminiscent of Brion
Gysin and William Burroughs' surreal cut-up technique.
Focusing on the small details and observations that are
lost when writers convert their notes into finished
pieces, Taussig calls for new ways of seeing and using
the notebook as form. Memory emerges as a central motif
in ''I Swear I Saw This'' as he explores his penchant to
inscribe new recollections in the margins or directly
over the original entries days or weeks after an
event.This palimpsest of after thoughts leads to
ruminations on Freud's analysis of dreams, Proust's
thoughts on the involuntary workings of memory, and
Benjamin's theories of history-fieldwork, Taussig
writes, provokes childhood memories with startling ease.
''I Swear I Saw This'' exhibits Taussig's characteristic
verve and intellectual audacity, here combined with a
revelatory sense of intimacy. He writes, ''drawing is
thus a depicting, a hauling, an unravelling, and being
impelled toward something or somebody.'' Readers will
exult in joining Taussig once again as he follows the
threads of a tangled skein of inspired
associations. |
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