on journaling

originally prompted by julia cameron’s concept of ‘morning pages,’ i have returned to my habit of trying to knock out 500 words in my notebook every morning, however mundane the subject matter. invariably, my entries remain so mundane that i become rather embarrassed and begin to question the benefit of such an exercise. but i keep at it, because so much of writing is making time for it, developing the habit, showing up to the work. get out the nonsense while developing the routine of writing, eventually making room for your creative voice to make itself heard.

so the muse, in her infinite wisdom, must have seen fit to give me a token of reassurance that this undertaking is not in vain. i’m fortunate enough to often be able to listen to my ipod for a few hours at work. i’m obsessed with a handful of podcasts, not the least of which includes Selected Shorts, a collection of short stories performed live on stage. Today I listened to Parker Posy read Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook.”

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

“yes. go on…” said my brain.

How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook. I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there…

this is how i feel about keeping a notebook. it’s not the same as keeping a journal. i do not merely recount things that happen from day to day. i’m free to write whatever i like, even though it is often very dull and seems pointless to commit to paper. but i do enjoy going back and reading the stupid little things that i, at one point, did commit to paper because some part of my brain saw fit to remember it in the first place. even though the insecure “rearranger” in me cringes, there’s something less lonely in the remembering.

our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its marker.

she continues that even if the notebook keeper doesn’t herself know the meaning of what she writes, there is merit in the exercise. it benefits the writer to be fanciful and without censor, because it belongs to no one else.

thanks for the nudge, Joan. and happy belated 79th.

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