ON THINKING AND CHLOEGRAPHY

"When we 'see' a landscape, we situate ourselves in it."

- John Berger, Ways of Seeing

I'm no longer reading around the world in eighty novels, but writing myself. I've changed my cyber-address and, though I've dragged my old luggage with me, I want to situate myself in this new address more pervasively than before. 

The first undergraduate essay I was set, in Michaelmas 2015, was to discuss the nature of Geography as a subject being unified or divided. Having no extensive accompanying reading list or lecture scribbles for guidance in formulating an argument, as quickly became the norm for supervision essays, it was entirely in the abstract that my essay planning began. What is Geography, really? The OED says that Geography comes from the Greek geōgraphia, constituted by gē (earth) and graphia (writing). Essentially, Geography is therefore literally writing the earth, or, earth-writing. The suffix 'graphia' (or more colloquially, 'graphy') is hence used to denote some particular form of writing or field of study.  

19 art 

6 writing

1 science

6 types of works

and 19 fields of study are listed on Wikipedia under the brief explanation of 'graphia' as a suffix.

Chloegraphy is not one of them. It's made up. But it's apt. 

As the feminist movement after the academic and more general cultural turn of the 1970s propounded, everything is situated and subjectively informed. All of my writing therefore is informed by who I am. My writing construes who I am as much as it is construed by who I am. One of my supervisors always pleaded for us to put ourselves into our essays. Chloegraphy is a pledge to do just this. This does not mean that this blog shall become a virtual diary. It remains a space for questioning, challenging, perusing and tangentially thinking - just from the identified positionality of Chloe, not the attempted neutrality of an objective C. 

I still want to review and challenge, but I also want to write and explore. I want to think. And there's still no quote I adore more than Stephen Hawking's intimation that 'intelligence is the ability to adapt to change' (okay, confession: I adore many quotes and that probably isn't my most adored but that statement makes the sentence read more intently). Thought is, in this sense, fluid. It moves, changes, and is variably shaped. And I want to make you, whoever you are, think too. 

"From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books."

- George Orwell, Why I Write