On my kitchen counter there is a bright yellow stain I have yet to succeed in excising. It keeps a record of my failures: some patches are different shades; there are faint scratch marks on its surface; in one corner I made an inroad. Streaks stretch beyond a new border, reaching out to the old one, but falling short and fading into the all-subsuming mock granite texture of the surface beneath. It is true that the stain has a history in the discursive sense, but this is not why it fascinates me. In the material sense, it is a history: a residue of steams and vapours; of a hand sometimes too frail to bear the weight of a jar of turmeric; of a puddle of hot oil; of a certain surface tension; of the smells, sights and sounds of a little rent in the fabric of south Manchester that slipped away while I was not looking. Histories have a habit of calling us to action, too. Every so often, I scrub at the stain.
What if notation is something like a turmeric stain? A residue of thought, of processes, of people, of memories, and with it, a call to action the consequences of which it also accumulates. I don’t intend a metaphor, I mean for real. A real, material residue that stretches out towards us; that invites us to do things. Those things make time. Generate it. Leak it. Envelop us in it. 1/2 colegno tratto; three ps; faster bowing than usual. Fall. Fall again. Fall harder. Now fall longer. Begin movement 1 (not you, you), where the leakage clots and thickens, and eddy currents make little sparks along its surface. Broader histories, too. Barthes’ sanctioned babel, if you want it. Fade back to the mock-granite: make clefs, striate pitch, spatialize time. Ask for notes. Repeat, but get faster, then get slower. Pause. Rest. Say 3 ps (but faster than usual).