Triad 17 of 32 · 2026-10-10 · Difficulty 4 · Shared form or method, Genealogy/influence, Oblique/structural
The thread
Three boxes of cards. Krajewski (Paper Machines) explains why the slip box, unlike the book, is a machine and a ‘second memory’ that surprises its own author (‘index cards know more than their author’). Nabokov’s 118 Oxford dream cards (Oct 14 1964 – Jan 3 1965, Dunne experiment) and Barthes’s quartered-paper Mourning Diary (from Oct 26 1977) are two such boxes, used as instruments for catching time when it misbehaves: one an experiment hunting time’s backflow, the other a vigil subjected to it. Nabokov’s 1968 note on a 1964 card (‘Had quite forgotten this when inventing Ardis’) and Barthes’s ‘mourning in layers… Units’ / ‘discontinuous character’ are that surprise in practice. Both stacks silt up (machine counts: Nabokov’s numbered records flatten after mid-Nov; Barthes’s dated headings fall from 72 in the first five weeks to near zero after the anniversary). Both were ordered posthumously by editors (Léger corrected the order). Krajewski names Nabokov once, as the ‘apotheosis’ of the novelist’s card box; he never reaches the dream cards, and Barthes isn’t in his book.
The three books
- Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929, Markus Krajewski, Peter Krapp (translator); 2002. Theory and genealogy: the card box as machine and ‘second memory’; supplies the vocabulary that lets the other two be read as instruments.
- Insomniac Dreams: Experiments With Time by Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov, Gennady Barabtarlo (editor); 1964-65 (cards); 2017 (book). The experiment: dated cards as lab equipment to test Dunne’s ‘reverse memory’; the second memory surprising its author (1968 note on a 1964 card).
- Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes, Nathalie Léger (editor), Richard Howard (translator); 1977-79 (written); 2009 (Journal de deuil). The vigil: dated slips with no hypothesis; the same instrument as Nabokov’s turned to grief, with time’s discontinuity suffered rather than sought.
Notebook
- Krajewski’s ‘ah, so that’s how I took this at that time’ (ch. 4) beside Nabokov’s 1968 bracket on card 2 (‘Had quite forgotten this when inventing Ardis’): is a precognitive dream structurally a well-kept card box? Is Dunne’s ‘reverse memory’ a description of rereading? Argue it on slips, then shuffle.
- Barthes’s ‘mourning in layers… each layer: a totality. Units’ (Nov 1, 1977) with Nabokov’s ‘Very exact clock time awareness but hazy passing-of-time feeling’: time stored as a stack of dated units with no felt duration. Write a period of your life you know only as a stack.
- Moser’s warning that an unfinished box can’t be finished by an outsider vs. Léger’s ‘the hypothesis of a book desired by him’: draft the instructions you’d leave for whoever opens your notebooks. What can’t be reconstructed from the slips alone?
Rabbit holes
Links as checked on the day of the reading.
- Luhmann, ‘Communications with Zettelkastens’ (1981, trans.): https://zettelkasten.de/communications-with-zettelkastens/
- Niklas Luhmann-Archiv, Bielefeld: https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/soziologie/forschung/luhmann-archiv/
- Ann Blair, ‘Conrad Gessner’s Paratexts’ (2016), Harvard DASH: https://dash.harvard.edu/entities/publication/73120379-2b76-6bd4-e053-0100007fdf3b
- J. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time (archive.org full text): https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.524576
- An Experiment with Time (Wikipedia; Borges’s ‘El tiempo y J. W. Dunne’, Joyce, Nabokov): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Experiment_with_Time
- Jennifer Rushworth, ‘Mourning and Intermittence between Proust and Barthes’ (UCL Discovery): https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10047894/1/Rushworth_Mourning_Intermittence_Proust_AAM.pdf
To carry
“In taking these notes, I’m trusting myself to the banality that is in me.” (Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, October 29, 1977)
Themes
Ada · anniversary · Ardis · Camera Lucida · chronology · commonplace practice · cross-reference · discontinuity · dream log · Dunne · Gessner · index card · Jean Paul · Jungius · Luhmann · Moser · mourning · notatio · paper machine · posthumous editing · precognitive dreams · reverse memory · second memory · serial time · silting up · slip box · units · Zettelkasten
Previous: The Probe and the Kestrel
Next: Only That Which Is Said