Notatio, Sentiment, & Impression: The Journal as Response

Moyra Davey:“I’m drawn to fragmentary forms, to lists, diaries, notebooks, and letters. Even just reading the word ‘diary’ elicits a frisson, a touch of promise.”

Eliot

I’ve been revisiting T.S. Eliot before bed this week. I am incapable of reading him normally; silently. He must be read aloud. From time to time, when Prufrock’s worries scurry into my brain, distracting me from whatever task I’m pummeling through, my acknowledgement of the visiting phrase isn’t enough. Prufrock demands a verbal greeting. 

Theeyesthatfixyouinaformulatedphrase, 

AndwhenIamformulated,sprawlingonapin, 

WhenIampinnedandwrigglingonthewall, 

Then how should I begin?

Finally, Prufrock exits. 

Often, it’s not just Prufrock who bugs me to address him, but Eliot himself. The sound of his voice, carefully precise, slow but absent of lethargy, becomes as present as my own. It’s this recurring scene that makes me wonder if it’s Eliot’s – maybe Prufrock’s – voice that reigns as the pestering voice of my subconscious, the voice that intimidates with its withheld knowledge. Years ago, I listened to a recording of his reading of “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Though it was a past self that heard Eliot’s own inflections, my voice still insists on shifting down a register to meet him. Certain phrases get stretched. eeeeeeevening. Others have consonants that outshine the usual star, the vowels. table. tedious. intent. I hit the consonants like punching bags, as if I’m proving my loyalty and dedication to an elementary school acting teacher who demands annunciation. And I hear my familiarity with the vowels’ usual sounds receding back into the night, and tomayto becomes tomahhto. haahhhlf-deeeserted streets. aaahhhhhgyumentt. It happens before I can determine which word is the culprit. And the poem demands a second reading.  I read it again to hear it again, and before I c – let us gooo then, you and I, when the –

* * *

Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield’s Journals: “I should like to have a book published and numbers of short stories ready. Ah, even as I write, the smoke of a cigarette seems to mount in a reflective way, and I feel nearer [to] that kind of silent, crystallised being that used to be almost me.”

* * *

Woolf

I think the spot I sit at right now – I think this is the spot that Woolf chose. The last stretch of earth she walked before she gave into the rhythm of the Ouse. I was never really intellectually concerned or emotionally connected to her suicide. And I am here, overwhelmed by unexpected sadness. No. Sadness is a comfortable disguise, the protection that my unconscious mind offers to hide me from something else. No, you will not receive the ahhnsahh you desiraahh.  Stop ahsking questions. It woould be most productive for you to accept the eeevent as sad and your related feeeelings as sympahhthetiic.

I ignore him. The wind winds along the river’s bends, slapping me in the face like a punishment for probing further. Sadness is the comfortable disguise, I firmly decide, for a more complicated situation with no promise of resolution. So, I challenge him, declaring that I’m in fact not more comfortable with the sadness, and that I’d rather have this hundred-year-old irresolvable dilemma of life's purpose on my shoulders. Beyond the inauthentic and flattening platitude of sadness, what is it that emotionally coats this moment? 

I depend on Woolf’s work to fulfill the job that almost nothing else has proven to be fit for. It shakes me like a child shakes a doll, an attempt to endow life. It shakes me into remembering beauty.

And it’s her work that not only keeps me from falling into those fiery distractions that ignore beauty’s force and value, but her work, while a reminder to value beauty, simultaneously embodies the beauty that it is a reminder of. 

And Woolf, herself, is an additional site of beauty. For decisively witnessing the ordinary and defining its exquisite mundanity as beautiful – in ways that make me feel alive and infuse a desire in me to stay alive– is also the beauty itself. 

Her compulsion to catch these moments like a child after a butterfly, to pin them to the wall and suspend them for others to see, biting her teeth with the conceit that her representation isn’t strong enough to hold the weight of what she’s aiming to carry, keep, and share – is also the beauty itself.

Her perpetual disapproval, her conviction that she got it wrong, when I see it as perfect – the standard – is also the bittersweet beauty itself. 

And it’s Woolf that convinced me that beauty is the only thing that matters. 

And as I sit here, seeing the beauty she loved, her diary entries about walking in Rodmell flood my mind. I walk; I read; I write, without terrors and constrictions…

This is written at Rodmell; oh yes, & it is the freest, most comfortablest summer we have ever had…

Reading and walking and swimming into lucid depths – powerfully – that’s how I put it. And people impend, but can be shelved for the moment. 

And before I started on my walk to the river, I read the final diary entry she recorded before she left the building for good. She said something about her sister, Nessa, and how she wished she could fuse their souls together. It was a rather scattered, unfocused entry compared to others. And something about her most treasured intimacy with her sister, how she wished to fuse souls with her sister in her final days.

* * *

Mansfield

Diaries: “And yet one has these ‘glimpses’, before which all that one ever has written (what has one written?) – all (yes, all) that one ever has read, pales… The waves, as I drove home this afternoon, and the high foam, how it was suspended in the air before it fell… What is it that happens in the moment of suspension? It is timeless. In that moment (what do I mean?) the whole life of the soul is contained. One is flung up – out of life – one is ‘held’, and then, – down, bright, broken, glittering on the rocks, tossed back, part of the ebb and flow.”

* * *

Davey

“Wonder if I am beginning to overidentify with Jane. Instead copy passages where I’ve made a mark, often late at night:”

* * *

Smith

On the cover of Spring, which I’m reading as I write this, a quote from The Observer claims Ali Smith to be “the Virginia Woolf of our time.” 

I’m beginning to agree, though statements like that are quite reductive even when the comparison is Woolf. Smith isn’t a writer trapped in the gooey seduction of nostalgia. Chucking that to the side, she instead requires history. She isn’t only vaguely attentive to the existence of “the past,” a thing of which we are just a mere layer. So many contemporary writers decide to present a past rather than a history. These writers afflict themselves with an aversion to the contemporary. They attempt to collapse the present right into the past. But it’s too heavy. They don’t even realize that the consequence of avoiding confrontation with a history is a rejection of the amorphous element that might endow their work with the chance at immortality, the fiercest and most shy of their desires.

How can you be a writer that shatters grounds and fractures these deceptively frail layers of time if you act as though time doesn’t matter? As if time isn’t the most important part of a novel? As if everything we ever do or say or think about is not also about time?

* * *

Eliot

The simple act of listening to the poem. To remove the compulsion for an intellectual encounter with Prufrock is to replace it with a sensual one; how perhaps a child would greet the aging Prufrock. Perhaps that’s why I find comfort in seeking it out even when I’m not aware that I am. 

* * *

Davey

“I’m piecing together fragments because I don’t yet have a subject.” 

As I underline, I find myself saying underline, underline, underline and realize I am quoting Fun Home.

* * *

Smith

And then there’s Ali Smith. She refuses to worry herself with “the moment” because she wholly embraces it. This is why it is difficult to say why her work works. She is unafraid of sentimentality, of the cliche of today. She knows (and what other writers don’t realize) that an author’s work becomes cliche, rather than embracing those cliches in work, when the author scrubs the specificity out. When an author mistakenly does the work that the historians will do years from now, thinking they’ve the intention of greeting readers who will hopefully pick up their novel decades from now – when an author does the work of the historians preemptively, there won’t be readers picking up their novels decades from now. What Smith realizes is that people, today and always, are the cliches. Again, she is not afraid of – in fact, she knows — that it is a necessity to chronologize the thought process that lands a person onto, into, and at the average cliche of today, because that is the now. And the now, captured with Smith’s deftness and care, is timeless. 

* * *

Mansfield

Diary from 1920: There are moments when Dickens is possessed by this power of writing: he is carried away. That is bliss. It certainly is not shared by writers of to-day.

Katherine!!! 

How to let go of this contempt, this perpetual expectation of lukewarm waters when diving into the contemporary? Has it always been and will it always be this way? Is this the curse of time? 

* * *

Woolf

It’s still difficult to mentally remove myself from Woolf’s suicide while I’m here. I blame this on deciding to read Between the Acts right before arriving, and flipping through her diaries from her final years on my first night. As I think about my recent readings, the hopelessness that all of her work viciously pushes up against suddenly comes crashing down, smothering any possibility of maintaining the posture of a chin turned toward the future, caking life and history in the ruins of repetitive hopelessness. This is not familiar to me. And obviously, the moments of exquisite joy – the sun infusing desire into the veins of leaves, making them quiver and glow – that disintegrates, disappears, loses shape; the atmosphere of its possibility altogether vanishes in the face of war and fascism. How is a gleaming, persistent, and determined river to combat the despair you have? Despair that isn’t even yours to have? You just happen to be there. 

I get it. But at the same time, you confuse me. If it – if those moments – if people – and trees and walks and books and sighs and the waving away of cigarette smoke and the blowing away of a lady’s hat on a summer morning and the river’s rhythm, its water– made up your armor over the years, how did it fail? In the end of things, okay, I think I’m understanding now. In the end, you were Septimus Smith. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate. 

* * *

Mansfield

Diaries: “I don’t want to be sentimental. But while one hangs, suspended in the air, held – while I watched the spray, I was conscious for life of the white sky with a web of thorn grey over it; of the slipping, sliding, slithering sea; of the dark woods blotted against the cape; of the flowers on the tree I was passing and more – of a huge cavern where my selves (who were like ancient sea-weed gatherers) mumbled, indifferent and intimate… and this other self apart in the carriage, grasping the cold knob of her umbrella, thinking of a ship, of ropes stiffened with  white paint and the wet, flapping oilskins of sailors… Shall one ever be at peace with oneself? Ever quiet and uninterrupted – without pain? With the one whom loves under the same roof? Is it too much to ask?” 

* * *

Davey

Davey on why Jane Bowles didn’t date her letters: “Superstition. She will be safe if she cannot be placed in time.”

* * *

Smith

How does she just do that? I wish I had her handle, her oversight, her control of story. Unlike Woolf, the text itself never meanders. It is direct, blunt, with time-sensitive delivery. She won’t offer you more than one reference to understand something. No. Her similes aren’t equipped with options. Oftentimes, her concern is not to persuade you to see, as an inclusion of multiple similes sets out to do, but instead she drops the story off at the airport gate. You’ll be with it on its journey. If you, and how you, engage with it, is no longer her business. She places a curt, perceptive clock on an airplane, leaving no instructions, no implications, no hints for your engagement. So you watch it. You sit beside this clock and accompany it on its journey. It puzzles you, its confidence strong and knowledge unfurling. 

* * *

Davey

M. Davey’s penultimate essay in the collection waltzes through the same themes that I’m exploring in my thesis, even dancing with some of the same partners, quoting the exact essays of my focus. What I liked so much about this collection was how it felt like a transparent bag, like the kind that the British Library requires you to place all your belongings in before entering the Reading Room. Everything on view, displayed. She’s transparent about the sources that she brings along with her, they are admitted. No, they’re more than admitted, more than revealed. This book, though a brand new copy from The Photographer’s Gallery in London, somehow came tabbed and annotated from Davey herself, with loose scraps of paper teeming at the brim. It felt like reading my own diaries. Fragments that are alive, squirming like bugs along the paper, never ceasing to converse with one another. Without supporting this ecosystem, her work wouldn’t just fail, it would not exist.

* * *

Mansfield

Diaries: “Ach, Tchehov! why are you dead? Why can’t I talk to you, in a big darkish room, at late evening – where the light is green from the waving trees outside. I’d like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one.” 

* * *

Davey

Davey quotes a Vivian Gornick piece about Natalia Ginzburg, Elizabeth Bowen, and Anna Akhmatova. Places Gornick’s impressions of Ginzburg and Bowen and Akhmatova here for emphasis, for evidence of the history, of the inherent and mostly unconscious layering work that informs her impressions. Davey’s work uncovers these layers, exposes them, and rejects the elitism that so many of us accidentally embrace when presenting our impressions and thoughts as singularly our own. And to uncover the process of thought – before thought even occurs – to capture that quick, explosion of movement from sense to impression – I think, is what I’m after. Davey quotes Gornick on these three authors: “What unites all these works is a severe absence of sentiment – and even of inner emotion. A remarkable stillness suffuses the prose in each; a stillness beyond pain, fear or agitation. It is as though, in each case, the writer feels herself standing at the edge of history – eyes dry, sentences cold and pure – staring hard, without longing or fantasy or regret, into the is-ness of what is.”

But a page later, after Davey agrees and explores her understanding and reactions to this quote, she encounters an epiphany, and returns to Gornick’s own journey with the previously stated impressions. Gornick writes: “It wasn’t sentiment that was missing from them, it was nostalgia.” 

Davey’s insistence on accompanying her authors on their journeys, then making their journeys into her own journey… She doesn’t argue, she depicts. Depiction as argument. It’s that invisible and shapeless space between thought feeling sense impression opinion analysis feeling sense sense sense sentiment sentiment feeling thought. The thing that craves formation but resists it.

* * *

Mansfield

Diaries: “I write that. I look up. The leaves move in the garden, the sky is pale, and I catch myself weeping. It is hard – it is hard to make a good death… To live – to live – that is all. And to leave life on this earth as Tchehov left it and Tolstoi.” 

* * *

Davey

“Does everything need to be instrumentalized: read or looked at, consumed with a view as to how it might be made into something else? Even as I scribble this note at 6:15AM. I feel the satisfaction/relief of productivity.” 

* * *

Sontag

Sontag’s diaries again before bed. Her commitment to her analytical nature is admirable and vindicating of my own. It’s not like she can help it. But I get on myself for too much analyzing analyzing analyzing. Thinking thinking thinking. It’s endless and sometimes, I just want to experience without interpreting, without applying meaning, to not feel rushed towards conclusion, to polish the experience like a gem for a keepsake. It is exhilarating. Sometimes it is exhausting. 

* * *

Smith

Smith seems to be my “comfort author.” I hate that I just wrote that. Her work’s kindness, its appreciation of chance, while filled with ugliness and inconclusive evils, brings me to tears, again and again. I read her to relax, to feel. Right now, she’s having her protagonist read through Katherine Mansfield’s letters. Part of what relaxes me, despite the complexity of her work, is her honesty about one thing that many contemporary writers shy away from in certain contexts; admiration. Smith obsesses. She exposes her addiction to art explicitly, which layers the work in more truth than it would have had she implicitly sprinkled hints here and there from her inspirations. She avoids the misguided politeness that other authors take on when courting historical works within their own. She dispenses the concern for hospitality, barging right into the conversations that Mansfield and Woolf and Rilke were having with themselves, rummaging through their valuables and fixing them up to her own liking, being sure to honor the objects and their past owner – their rightful owner – as they would have liked. The act: impolite, but reverential. 

* * *

Davey

“Sometimes it feels like a literal ingestion, a bulimic gobbling up of words as though they were fast food. At other times I read and take notes in a desultory, halting, profoundly unsatisfying way. And my eyes hurt.” 

But then a page after writing this, she plops down a quote for us, obviously a result of noteaking, a cycle which I contribute to in copying it down here in my journal, and probably again later in a newsletter. She quotes Barthes. Barthes: “When a certain amount of time’s gone by without any note-taking, without my having taken out my notebook, I notice a certain feeling of frustration and aridity. And so each time I get back to note-taking (notatio) it’s like a drug, a refuge, a security. I’d say that the activity of notatio is like a mothering. I return to notatio as a mother who protects me. Note-taking gives me a form of security.” 

* * *

Sontag

Go to library and request Setting the Tone: Essays and a Diary by Ned Rorem. They have the copy from Sontag’s personal library, which includes her notes and annotations.

* * *

Woolf

That quote from To the Lighthouse that I’ve damn near memorized – the one that begins like, “Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge?” etc… I bring it up because I remember reading a copy that had transcriptions of your revisions, notes, and annotations on an earlier draft. You originally wrote, “Was it knowledge? Was it tiredness?” 

Why did you replace “tiredness” with wisdom? Why did you originally write “tiredness?”

* * *

Davey

There’s a quote from Davey that I didn’t transcribe. And of course, it’s the quote that I’m grasping for right now, and I know I’ll be grasping for it with even more fervor when I’ll be putting together an essay for my silly little newsletter, kicking myself for not writing it down. It was about how Davey does not care where she ends a piece of writing. Not how, but where. I felt vindicated when reading that. I know I starred it and underlined it and bracketed the whole paragraph, but I was too shocked by the statement that I couldn’t break the trance she had me under to open up my notebook. She doesn’t care where she ends a piece of writing. I don’t either. I pressured myself into thinking it was a weakness, something I need to strengthen. Perhaps it is. But my impressions of Moyra’s work were so tied to the endlessness of thought, the boundless possibilities for connections. Her work maps out thought. Erases the sketch, but doesn’t toss the first draft out. Just draws over it, next to it, leaving it there in some ways. Thought never ends, always changes. Senses and impressions begging to be noted, explored – what is the point of cementing them?