INQ

Back in southwest France. The heat is still there, but the day is being negotiated by a breeze from somewhere higher up. A violent catabatic gust has just catapulted a beautifully crafted set of twelve-spot dominoes across my parlour floor, a timely reminder that landscapes are conversations, not pictures.

Earlier I found myself thinking about punctuation. About cadence. About music. About the strange tendency to mistake notation for performance. A score is not music. A sentence is not a thought. A landscape is not a view. The marks on the page matter. The notes matter. The contours of the mountain matter. But none of them contain the thing itself.

The thing itself happens in motion.

Perhaps this is why cadence interests me. Punctuation, at a minimum, is guidance on cadence. At its best, it traces a path through which a reader may recreate the movement of a thought.

The dominoes are back in their broken box now. The breeze has carried on northward. Yet something remains: the sense that the world is less a collection of objects than a series of performances, each leaving behind only enough evidence to be imagined again.

David Marshall
Montory

For years I’ve written within boundaries.

Some of those boundaries were set by the organizations that employed me. As a freelance they were set by editors. Sometimes they are set by the subjects themselves; policy belongs in Marshall on Policy, essays belong in Essays. And reviews and commentary belong in The Marshall Review. Writing on music has its own homes and so on.

The arrangement works well. Readers know what to expect and I know where things belong. But if I’m honest, I’m usually the one who decides. Mostly.

But over the years I’ve accumulated another kind of writing. Observations that don’t quite fit anywhere. Thoughts that begin with a question rather than an argument. Small irritations. Small discoveries. Things noticed in passing and then revisited later because they refused to go away.

A queue in a public office. A speed bump. A campervan parked outside my house. A conversation overheard in a café. An assumption everybody seems to accept. A truth arriving more slowly than expected. These things are often too slight for policy, too personal for review and too unfinished for an essay. Yet they are frequently where thought begins.

So this is INQ.ie

Not a journal. Not a review. Not a policy site. Not an essay site. Simply a place where I can write in my own voice without first deciding where a piece belongs. Some posts may become essays. Some may become policy articles. Some may remain exactly what they are: an observation, a question, a complaint, a curiosity, a thought.

That’s fine.

I’ve always been someone who pays attention. Frequently to things other people choose to ignore. INQ is the place for those things, that would annoy my family and friends. The things that refuse to let me go. There is no programme. No manifesto. No grand design. Just a determination to speak more plainly. And perhaps to cut loose a little.

Oh, and one more thing.
It’s pronounced ink.

David Marshall
The site should have some kind of logic to it before the end of August – maybe.