In On Placeness I argued that our sense of place is not a contingent feature of human psychology but something closer to the structure that makes experience possible at all. I came to that through the dérive, through years of wandering unfamiliar cities with a camera and letting the place itself become the protagonist. What I did not consider at the time is that the same argument has to hold for places I am no longer standing in.

Memory does not store a sequence of events. It stores rooms, roads, beaches, the particular light of a particular afternoon, and the events arrive attached to them. When I try to recall a year of my life I do not get a year, I get a handful of locations with a mood on them. The chronology is reconstructed afterwards, and badly.

Literary theory has a word for this, which I only found later. Bakhtin called it the chronotope: the intrinsic connectedness of time and space inside a narrative, the way a story's temporal and spatial relations are not two separate axes but one fused thing. He was describing novels. I think he was also describing remembering.

So I have started writing them down, at zonetoast.com. Fragments, mostly. A Walkman on a dune in Fuerteventura, a bus to Frankfurt airport at sixteen, a sailing regatta that went wrong. Each one carries two pieces of metadata that matter more than its date: an era, which is the span of life it belongs to, and a location, as coordinates. The publication date is an artefact of when I got round to writing it after it bubbled up in my mind for whatever reason. The era is the real timestamp.

My first attempt at this was on the train to university in the early new millennium. I was twenty-one, felt ridiculous for writing a memoir with my whole life still ahead of me, and stopped. Now I regret not writing down more. That is the only argument I have for doing it now rather than later, but it seems to be enough.

Calling it a "cartography" instead of diary is not a play of words here. A diary is indexed by time and reads as a timeline. What I have on this page and in my mind is indexed by place and reads as a territory, with large empty regions ("here be dragons!"), a few areas mapped in detail far out of proportion to their importance, and contested borders that move depending on when I look. That is what chronotopology means in this context, and if the word is slightly too grand for a personal memoir blog then so is the whole undertaking. As usual I'm doing it anyway.

The title is a coinage I needed and could not find. Zone: a bounded field of perception where place and mood and subjective time gather into a distinct vibe. Toast, the state of having lingered in one too long, from pleasantly warmed to completely finished. A zonetoast is the condition of being somewhere that no longer exists, gently scorched by having stayed.

It is also, now, on the small net. The same Markdown source resolves over Gemini and Spartan as well as the web, which suits the material: no images, no tracking, a reader and a text, that's it. There is something fitting about a site concerned with stripped-back remembered places being served over a protocol that strips everything back as a matter of principle.

I have no plan for how long this goes on or where it ends up. The fragments are not arriving in any order and I am not forcing one on them.

Links

• zonetoast.com · also at gemini://zonetoast.com and spartan://zonetoast.com
• On Placeness · the same question, facing forwards