FragNotes

Lauren Albert

Fragments speak to me of hope. They reach out to completion but never reach it.

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Fragments represent the state of in between-ness, the source of all creative thought.

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Two fragments lying next to each other shimmer with possibility. Rays of potential joinings can be felt miles away. “The chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” is not just beautiful but rich with possible meanings and mental intersections.

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Writing fragments is an experiment in trust. You trust that your readers can fill in what is missing, perhaps even better than you could. It is a joint improvisation. Like an improv group, you riff off of each other and create something new each time.

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What is the sound of one fragment clapping?

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Joseph Cornell is the artist of the visually fragmented. Every experience of his works is a moment of connecting moments—different each time.

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To walk through the city is to walk through the lines of a fragmentary text. Pieces of stories collide and separate and move on.

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Fragments are holograms of thought. Each piece contains the whole.

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Juxtaposition and the fragment are sisters.

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The world is various, abundant and incomplete. If it were ever to reach completion, that would be annihilation. The fragment represents life.