Notes on a Diary
Self-imposed regulations for organization of thought, the rules only you can know and uphold.
There are self-imposed laws, delegating what content suits one notebook and not the other. The expensive green Moleskine is to be filled with diary entries, emotional explorations that must permeate almost all pages, front to back. After one offers her final punctuation mark on the last page, she should be able to flip through the treasured thing with an overwhelming pride for her own capacity to max out space. No margin is to be left untouched.
For the yellow Staples-brand spiral notebook, one must concede that it will never be completed. Unless, of course, one lucks out and meets yet another professor whose casual, unplanned conversations are ripe with phrases that the notebook-haver would have been exquisitely proud of producing after days of hovering over her keyboard. But realistically, this notebook has expectations of polish, of cleanliness. Distinct thoughts are to be separated by bullet points, arrows, and very rarely does a thought ever surpass more than two of the provided blue lines. This notebook is primarily concerned with legibility, with recording the ideas that do not belong to the notetaker, but ones she should consider acquiring, rejecting, erecting cities on top of. This notebook could easily be leant to a friend who missed class. For they may struggle to decipher the notetaker’s shorthand, but could be expected to grasp the general ideas that the shapes and signs gesture toward.
While these rules of governance are strictly authoritarian, and therefore, easily fungible, why does it feel transgressive to start a diary entry in the spiral notebook? To explore spontaneous branches of thought and emotion alongside the professor’s analysis of the assigned reading? Why does guilt seep out of the fingers and blend into the ink when recording a class note in a diary? When transcribing the professor’s comments about Marx and Schiller in company with reflections on one’s route earlier that morning?
Even if one dictates a page in the notebook as a space for a diary entry, and vise-versa – even in marshaling the orders that note-taking must move into a rented unit of the diary, a separate isolated page, a space clearly marked as temporary for its emotional inhabitants – even that demands a sense of culpability.
But in certain classes, I found myself with both books open, juggling notes on Percy Shelley and Djuna Barnes with recordings of social meetings and creations of the self. I thought, for a moment at least, that in physically marking the distinction of form, the contents would not be blended. But the notion that the contents remained separated, while sitting right beside each other on my desk, even for a day, is a mere fantasy. My notebook began lacking the heart of the lectures, as the life-giving rhythm was recorded in my diary, while dates and pedantic quotes were left to the rigid blue lines of the spiral journal.
After breaking my own rules involuntarily, guilt was transformed into thrill; the practice of keeping a diary suddenly elevated. The place I reserved for reflection stormed into the present moment, demanding that I dictate not only recollections, but transcribe thought as it happens, without directed intentions.
As I began blending diary entries with class notes, still keeping both notebooks on my desk, I realized that what I was doing was unintentionally recording the process of synthesizing information, not only documenting my attempt to grasp it, but embarking on the strategy of inheriting it. It flooded not only my brain, but my body too, my hands validating this information as part of me; my perspective; contextualizing this information with all I’ve experienced. I think, because I’m not trying to do something, and because I am distracted by the class discussion, this interplay captures the intimacy of learning, the hunger to mold this information into knowledge, and in turn, to fix that knowledge to me, inextricably. The “capturing” of this is “accomplished” precisely because it leaps; it fails to disclose everything to me; and I fail to disclose everything to the page. There are ideas left unexplained, paths of thought unexplored. All that remains are mere connections, associations, vague and loose knots made of disparate scarves of knowledges and perspectives.
Sometimes, notes blend with my life experiences, sometimes related and expanded upon, sometimes the two are left unjointed. It's easy to see, even if the reading experience perturbs me, what is mine and what is not.
For Rilke’s hero, he does not want to be the hero – he wants to be the boy reading about the hero. Samson is a destructive hero, a tainted hero. How is it that my classes are always speaking as if directly to the words in my diary? A hero has a way to reach the angels, some divine goodness, but this hero is tainted. Is that me and Woolf? I want to be the girl reading about her hero. Elegies have real appreciation for the universal realm, for fleeting objects. He can transform these objects within his consciousness and hold them, maintain them in poetry. Connect to Mrs. D. After class I’m going to eat, but what?
Sometimes, however, the pages look like this, as if I had weaved in the reveries of my life with precision; with decision. Sometimes you can read it back without a trace that a thought had been abandoned, that distraction was given way to, that these ideas were not at all related to each other:
She thought it was in great shape to present. I just now have to set up
notions of utility – leaving us with deeply attenuated views of humanity. We have forgotten how to educate our souls. Division of labor has lots of utility for basic human needs, but it has limited us into fragments, made us attenuated human beings blocking us from full endowment of human beings.
Other times, I recognized what was happening as it was happening:
Soviet/socialist realism glorifies the work of modernizing Russia, educating peasants. I’m taking most of my notes in here? I feel like it goes into my blood, merging with my skin cells, like cotton candy in water. That’s how I absorb – here, in this book. Now, that is the ideal. Argues basically that if we are living in the moment of liberation of the proletariat, the art will reflect that. All that is required is that the poet must feel the world differently, and how can you not feel the world differently right now?
And the best of times, I leave delicious fragments behind on the page without any connection, hoping that they’ll provide some nutrition to me later.
“Form itself is a pressure exerted on content that the artist wishes to express.”
The notebook and diary are branches of my intellect designed to function in different ways, regulating my life through organization. And when I abandon this organization, when I ask myself to change the pressure that I exert on the content of these notebooks by no longer emphasizing that their container dictates their reach, the entire operation collapses. I begin again.
As summer approaches, I’ll have to depart this new method of exploration, waiting with anticipation for the season that allows for it. I hope I don’t forget how breaking my own rules has benefitted me.
The last lecture for one of my classes was on a book that I did not read. I sat right next to the professor, who is in her 70s, and her copies of Wallace Stevens’ poetry collections. I was more captivated by her copies of the books themselves than anything that was said that day. And perhaps if my focus wasn’t pulled so viscerally to the books, I’d have a different perspective. But sitting next to them, I rejected my spiral notebook entirely, placed it back in my bag, and expressed loyalty to my green moleskin for the final class.
The books are bound together with painters tape. Pages, having been unattached from the spine for what seems like years now, stick out unevenly at the tops and bottoms of the books’ frames. There are post-it notes and annotations littered throughout, and she grasps onto the near limp spine so tightly, as she talks about Stevens’ impulse to create having emanated from the fact that things disappear, that I worry she’ll suffer from muscle fatigue.
I would love to carry a life along with me inside the seams and margins of a cracking, enduring thing. If I protect mine; if I offer its endurance my architectural support with tape and intellectual conversation with responsive notations, making sure that the elderly and the dead aren’t ignored; if my words are among yours; if I attempt to ask and to answer to you, will I, too, endure like you do? Is this why I can’t read a book without a pen in my hand? It may as well not be read if I can’t underline what sticks so that it sticks to me, permanently. And there’s something sad, of course. If it is beautiful it is only so because grief seizes and bridles beauty’s reins.
When she’s gone, where will these books go? When she’s gone, who will cherish them the way she does now? Who will maintain her alliance with them? Who will honor her loyalty? Who will know the ripples and folds of the covers as she knows them like she knows her own birthmarks? Who will instinctively understand how to carry the book to ensure pages and notes are not lost to the wind? Who will know the rules of these books like she knows them?
I feel protective. There’s an anxiety that is taking over right now, and it is concerned with preservation. What will happen to these books? I have not even done the reading, yet there is nothing – nothing in this moment that is more important than these books.
“Death is the mother of beauty,” she quotes, after clearing her throat.
We all need ordering principles in our lives. Mine is not religious, or morally concerned, and it is not even a goal. It’s a guiding pursuit. How could I live without it? Without one? It’s not that it gives me or my life a direction, for the direction of this pursuit is unknown and unmarked. It is intangible and cannot be mapped. But it nonetheless orders my life. My life is ordered and organized around it. It is not merely a consideration in all my decisions, but it is the deciding factor in all that I consider.
Somewhat related —> I fear that my deep admiration, my passion, becomes apparent, and in its visibility, that it becomes drenched in desperation, soaked in a forever-pleading fluid that begs to be hardened into validation. I fear that — well — the few people that inspire this flood, have to jump over my puddles in order to just keep walking.
“Recognize that there is nothingness. Then go from there.”
And what happened just now? The professor passed her book to the student next to me, and pages 215-221 slipped out and splattered onto the floor. I picked them up and reordered them.