a field notebook · vol. i · folio the first
a project about wondering aloud —
So you've found us, then. Take your coat off, mind the puddle by the doorway. Miris† is Latin — to wonder — and that is what we do here, mostly. We chart it the way a cartographer would chart a coastline: patiently, with a soft pencil, getting most of it slightly wrong.
(read on) We are not a company. We are not, strictly, a collective. We are a small standing invitation to pay closer attention to the world — particularly to the parts of it that are quiet, slightly damp, and easy to walk past. If you stay, we'll show you the kettle, and a few drawers we keep locked for the curious only.
here's the part nobody mentions —
Most of what we do is look at things slowly. A snail crossing a slate path takes about eleven minutes, in the rain, end to end. We have timed several. We do not always know why we do this. We have learned not to ask.
(the rest) Sometimes a member returns from a long walk with a single dragonfly wing pressed in a little tin, and we put it on the shelf with the others. Sometimes someone draws the same puddle every Tuesday for a year. Sometimes nothing happens for weeks except tea and the noise of the kettle. The work is unhurried; the kettle is generous.
"Wonder is not what is found at the end of looking — it is the looking itself, only continued past the polite stopping place."
— margin note, undated, hand unknown
plate iii · the cabinet
the drawers we keep
(if you're still here) We do not collect to own. We collect to describe. Each specimen is a small argument with forgetting. The dragonfly in particular — caught against a window in 1992, drawn in 2003, redrawn in 2017 — is the project's unofficial mascot. She is, by now, more drawing than insect, which is exactly the point.
Don't worry. We wandered in the same way‡ — through a side door, on a Wednesday, looking for something else entirely.
folio · the deep page
Hover the larger bubbles. Each one keeps an aphorism we couldn't quite bear to throw away. There are seven. Some take a moment to find.
and as for us, we are —
A small standing party of people who do not entirely agree on what we are doing, but who agree that we should keep doing it. A botanist who has not been to a botany meeting in twelve years. A bookbinder who only binds field notes. A woman called Iðunn who writes letters in mirror script, all of which are kept.
(read on) We meet, when we meet, in a low room above a shop that closed in 2011. There is a kettle, a wood stove, a cat that does not belong to any of us, three drawers of pressed specimens, a window that fogs early, and a stack of unposted letters that grows by the week. Decisions, when made, are made by drawing lots; lots are drawn from a velvet bag the colour of the inside of a mussel.
"We are unfashionable on purpose. The fashion will pass; the snail will not."
— minutes, March 2014, in pencil
on practice
slowness is the method.
There is no productivity here. There are no quarters. The fiscal year is October to October because that is when the fog sets in over the loch, and we like to begin in fog.
(the rest) We publish irregularly — sometimes a single folded sheet a year, sometimes nothing for two — and only by post. The post is slow. The slowness is part of the project. If a thing cannot survive being delayed by weather, we tend to think it was not worth sending in the first place.
- i. Notice. — before naming.
- ii. Describe. — before judging.
- iii. Forget, partially, on purpose. — so the noticing remains fresh.
- iv. Begin again, in fog if possible.
If this sounds like your kind of thing, write us at post@miris-project.net.
No subject line required. No reply guaranteed. We answer the post on Sundays, mostly, when the fire is going.