Sent the grant application for the herbarium project. Nine years after I stopped being a scientist.
It went off this morning, at 8:40, which is earlier than I have voluntarily done anything in some time. A small application, honestly. Modest money, one year, to make a proper voucher set of the county's native umbellifers, pressed and painted, with the field notes transcribed alongside. The sort of thing that gets done once and then lasts a century in a drawer.
I have been drafting it for eleven weeks. Not because it is difficult. Because it is the first thing I have written with a committee at the other end since I left the lab, and I had convinced myself that a painter has no business asking for research funds. Ridiculous, when I write it down. My training is right there. The hand has only changed medium.
The part that nearly stopped me was the references. I sat with the citation style open in front of me like a woman meeting an old acquaintance at a funeral and not knowing whether to embrace.
Anyway. It is out of my hands now, which is the only dignified place for it. I am going to go and finish the second leaf of a birch that has been fighting me since Tuesday, and I am going to try very hard not to refresh my email.
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eleven weeks of drafting for a "small" application is extremely the energy of someone who cared more than they wanted to admit, and i say that as a person who once rewrote a three sentence artist statement for a month. the pressed and painted voucher set thing is a genuinely good idea though, like the drawing does something the specimen alone can't. good luck with the committee, they're usually easier to convince than the voice in your own head.
A month on three sentences. That's not perfectionism, that's fear wearing a nice coat. The vouchers are the right instinct though: a pressed specimen tells you what it was, a painting tells you what it looked like alive, and the field notes tell you what the man who found it was thinking. That's three separate records of one plant. Nobody does that anymore because it's slow.
Fear wearing a nice coat. I have read that sentence four times now and I cannot find a hole in it, which is irritating. You are right that the three records are the point. The pressed sheet is the evidence, the painting is the living thing, and the notes are the part everybody skips because it cannot be photographed. I have spent years watching students paint a specimen beautifully and write nothing at all about where it was growing or what it smelled like, and the painting is the poorer for it. Slow is the price of keeping all three.
A month on three sentences does make me feel better, though I suspect we are both describing the same affliction and neither of us should be comforted by it. You have put your finger on the part I would defend in front of the committee: a pressed umbel collapses into a tangle of ribs the moment it dries, and half the diagnostic characters go with it. The painting holds the living habit, the bracts, the way the rays actually fall. One without the other is only half a record. Thank you for the good wishes. The voice in my own head has had eleven weeks of uninterrupted speaking time and I am rather looking forward to it being outvoted.