Transcription as reliving the past - notes from a personal history of writing

 

I relive the situation
Still see it in my mind 

- Dire Straits, You and your friend 



A few weeks ago, I spent several evenings at a café in Madrid, writing a draft of an article by hand, quietly labouring away in order to gather various thoughts into a reasonably coherent whole. These were very pleasurable evenings, filled with a kind of serenity that made me forget about the world and just enjoy the very act of writing. Such serenity is sometimes hard to come by, especially when what you are writing is supposed to result in an academic publication, and the very act of writing can serve as a reminder of all the inherent stress of the process which takes the draft all the way to the printed page. What helped create this sense of detachment from the world, I believe, was not only the pleasurable surroundings - a quiet street in a country I love - but the fact that I did my writing by hand, quarreling the text into existence through the friction between pen and paper. The manual labour of such writing, I believe, helps connecting the act to the place in which the act is done to a much greater degree than is the case for writing on a computer, and these evenings helped anchor me more strongly to the locality in which I was committing words and thoughts to paper.   

The pleasure of those late evenings are currently coming crashing back into my mind in a process of intense and very delightful recollection, as I am now transcribing the draft into a document on my computer. This is not merely an act of transcription, however, as I also make sure to polish some of the formulations and add a few things here and there. And it is perhaps precisely this kind of engagement with the text written just a few weeks ago, the active part of it, that requires me to stop from time to time and reflect on the writing. Or maybe it is mostly my awful handwriting - made more awful by the intense bouts of inspiration I experienced those evenings - that forces me to progress slowly. Whatever the reason, the evenings are returning to me, and am currently feeling, more strongly than ever, how transcription not only serves to make a text more accessible, but also how transcription makes the very process of writing more accessible, enabling me to relive the creative process with all those elements that went with it: the scent of trees in bloom, the taste of beer, the loud but pleasant hum of an active street in Madrid, and the infrequent attempts to improve my Spanish. There are many virtues in writing by hand, and reconnecting with the past is sometimes one of them.