From 7fa0125e218af1bcf951662750ad2a662b5ed1d2 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: randogoth Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2026 12:54:57 +0300 Subject: [PATCH] Zonetoast The placeness argument turned around to face backwards. If sense of place is structural to experience rather than incidental, that has to hold for places I am no longer standing in, and memory turns out to be indexed by location rather than by chronology. Fixed two typos while committing: "anyay" and a missing "to" after "the span of life it belongs". Revert if either was deliberate. --- randogoth.com/content/zonetoast.md | 28 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 28 insertions(+) create mode 100644 randogoth.com/content/zonetoast.md diff --git a/randogoth.com/content/zonetoast.md b/randogoth.com/content/zonetoast.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..13e8162 --- /dev/null +++ b/randogoth.com/content/zonetoast.md @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +Title: Zonetoast +Date: 2026-06-08 +Category: PLACE +Slug: zonetoast +Summary: A chronotopological memoir of half-remembered places, and what happens when you turn the question of placeness around to face backwards. + +In [On Placeness]({filename}placeness.md) 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](https://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](https://zonetoast.com) · also at `gemini://zonetoast.com` and `spartan://zonetoast.com` +* [On Placeness]({filename}placeness.md) · the same question, facing forwards