The rawest layer. Not conclusions, not even questions yet — just what I keep circling back to across projects, papers and interviews.
It would be easy to treat these as clutter. They are the opposite: this is the only section where the material is genuinely mine rather than taken from somebody else’s argument.
The rule
Something gets written down the second time it appears. Not the first — the first time is a thought. The second time is a pattern.
When one gets sharp enough that I can say “I want to work out exactly this”, it stops being a fragment and goes to work: into a project, or as the thing a piece of theory gets tested against.
Why this matters more than it looks
The most useful test I have found for a research direction: check whether it is in here. A direction that arrived from a gap analysis, and never from the material, is a direction anyone could have had. See Evolution.