The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.
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I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.
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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.
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My stake is always, of course, [to] remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.
It is a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing.
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(Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)]
And I’m discovering that the core of Didion’s chapter on keeping notebooks is suddenly and starkly clear. The notebooks aren’t a recording, really, of anything that’s happened. They are a shorthand, a code, alien as hieroglyphics that may or may not give any information on a particular thing or time. It’s not a reporter’s record of when it happened, why it happened, or even whether it happened at all as it’s written on the page.
It seems I’m not a diarist. Not at all.
The notebooks are simply a direct dump of who I was. I think it’s related to the phenomenon we've all had of a scent that unlocks memory.
For me the barest whisper of a scent may unlock a root cellar from 60 years ago, the thundering sunrise of a particular moment a half century back on that particular morning with a girl I loved, or a flash of that sweating deep night of cigarette smoke dying in the planter next to me as we earnestly discussed how important it was for both of us that he believed I’d kill him if he ever touched that girl I barely knew again, or a ten-minute riot of colors and the smell of mowed lawn in the park’s flower-gardens as my toddler sons, one long since dead and the other long since having fathered several of my grown grandchildren, ran and played in the purest joy, as free of life’s shadows and scars and guilt as puppies while the swans in the pond honked to us to bring bread.
It puts you right there, y’see, in the middle of it — more than memory. A literal revisit of, not the facts, not a bloodless diary or calendar entry or note, but complete immersion in WHO you actually were in that exact moment.
Like a triggering scent, these nonsensical notes and sentences and even paragraphs are often as opaque as asphalt to anyone else. What would anyone make of a fading line in an old flip-notebook: “8-19-79 Faloni Towing, PRT169 Detroit prototype Jeremiah Jackson 6-4-57, LA CA, Colt ft rt beltline, run gun, 27/28/29 for rpt”?
Nothing at all, or damned little. But for me?
He’s lying on the damp roadway with his fingers interlaced behind his head, a gaudy silver class ring on his wedding finger and he’s arguing with me and I know that in a few seconds he’s going to come up off the ground and fight or worse because he’s figured out my backup is minutes away, more than enough, but for now we’re here alone in the mist, the stolen car half into the traffic lane. I put my foot between his shoulder blades and lean down hard and wedge the blued barrel of the Model 19 .357 between the laced fingers till it touches his skull and ask…
“Do you know what that is?” He is now very still.
“Yes.”
“You should know that if you so much as twitch, I’m gonna blow your fucking brains out. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
A sudden thin stink of urine cuts into the damp, earthy-moss smell of the mud on the roadside, and I step around the puddle as I back away from him; the yellow sodium streetlight has cut all the tones to a badly colorized black and white film-noir, and the air is so muggy I could chew it like damp cotton.
My hand and arm feel cramped because I’ve been holding the gun too tightly and I switch hands and flex my fingers before relaxing a bit and switching back — and what seems a million miles away, my backup is wailing and strobing the horizon.I don't remember him at all except for that ring and brand-new boot-cut levis that looked ridiculous over his tennis shoes. But I remember ME, the me that existed in that moment. It’s all in that scrawled, near-illegible, adrenaline-dump shaking, two-line throwaway note.
The point is the socially-disapproved but true notion that to me, the only thing that really matters is me, at least in the moments recorded in those pages. Reading them, I can feel the focus on — well, myself.
No wonder notebook-makers are so skittish about their writing falling into the wrong (i.e., anyone else’s) hands. The entire exercise is akin to being caught naked and bemused in a room made of mirrors.
So, going through this pile is taking longer than I anticipated. And less is going into the Burn Pile. I dunno, maybe it’s just the heavy dose of Didion I’ve re-ingested recently. But I’ve suddenly come to the conclusion that it’s OK to focus on me instead of the story now and again, and that the versions of me that got me here are sometimes the only part I give a shit about.
In short, sometimes it’s OK to insist on being the most important part of your own story.
I'll bet you thought you already knew that. I'll bet you didn’t, though. Not down in that “you’re the least important person in the room” part of you that our society builds into most of us. I am kind of curious whether anyone admits it.
I did find a way to subscribe! I went to blogspot.com, where I put in the url of your blog and that did it. Although if it turns up in gmail, which I never read... Anyway. What you say, so beautifully, about lonely notebook fillers trying to reassure themselves they exist (or words to that effect) is so true. Of me, anyway. I sometimes look at these boxes of old papers and half-begun stories and think, what the hell will my daughter make of all this? Of course she will chuck it all out...all those yearnings and scribblings and attempts to make sense of things...and so she should. We are of course the most interesting person in our own world/diary - I have no quarrel with that. However as an author I find other people's inner lives more interesting, simply because I don't know them (I know me) and because I'm still cosmically puzzled by what goes on in there and how it differs from what goes on in HERE. PS, I gather you also lost a son, so that gives us something in common other than our evident love of putting pen to paper/finger to keyboard. I'm sorry, but glad to hear that you have grandchildren. There is something in this 'future' idea.
ReplyDeleteWelcome aboard! I'm glad you found it.
ReplyDeleteI find I'm of two minds about this "future" idea. One is in fact based in my children/grandchildren (and now GREAT-grandchildren). Infinity seems well in hand and a natural outgrowth from that perspective. But I'm also a bone-deep rationalist, and I know the physics and I know the numbers -- and as Oliver Burkeman says, from that perspective our entire lives and, for that matter, the entirety of life of any kind on this infinitesimal dust mote in the universe, are "instantly trampled underfoot by the advancing eons".
Being human, of course, I'm perfectly capable of being both comforted and terrified by either of these conflicting certainties, or both of them simultaneously. If there's one characteristic I'd classify as probably unique to humans, it's our ability to make a home and live effortlessly between the unstoppable forces and immovable objects of these sorts of impossibly irreconcilable beliefs.
My journal, typed into electromechanical storage media of varying design since the late 1980s, has millions of words by now that will never be read. I write as though to someone who knows me and finds me interesting. That tells me who the audience is and reminds me the journal is not an artifact but a process. No one else should in a rational world find my processes of any interest. Despite the fact there are some brilliantly crafted sentences in there.
ReplyDeleteI've never read Didion. This matters because I live in the city that claims her as their own. I've walked and driven through the neighborhood she grew up in -- it's really nice. I'm a California "writer" and should read all the good California writers, and she's right up there. But, you know, eh.
The future is our children (or others' children). The future is the long mindless unfolding of cosmic energies. The future is what you make of it.
Re: Didion. Should the mood move you to dip into her stuff, I'd recommend "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" which is a book of essays she wrote during some of OUR formative years. Or at least mine. In that book is the actual essay "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" which is an absolutely dead-on portrait of San Francisco in general and the Haight district in particular in 1967/68. As an essay, it stands on its own, and I'd recommend starting there, even though it's about 1/3 of the way into the book. I'd bet some safe money you could move huge chunks of that into the "Burner" culture with only the barest modifications.
DeleteBoffo. Big thumbs up. Highly recommended.