an utterly personal practice
my notes app
Unity is the shallowest, the cheapest deception of all composition. In nothing is the banality of the intelligence so clearly manifested. There is no less significant matter for the attention.
—William Carlos Williams
Generally, I’m not a good archivist of my own thoughts. I have a physical diary that I write in sporadically and inconsistently. Days and weeks go by without an entry, this despite the fact that I bring it with me wherever I go. Lately I’ve also started bringing along a standalone camera, too — as if to spurn my phone, which can both take pictures and write things down. But I take my phone with me, too, and when I have a stray thought that I feel I want to keep a hold of, I am more likely to write it down in my notes app than take my notebook and pen out on the subway.
Each of those entries gets deposited in a chronological collection, unsorted except by rough categories (“writing” “editing” “personal” “photography” “miscellaneous”). The whole thing probably runs to hundreds of thousands of words. I despair at ever getting it organized, condensed into something with the sharpness of my physical notebooks, which are places where I do some of my best writing and which I frequently consult when I’m working on a new project. I rarely go through my notes app — the compulsiveness with which I write in it has something to do with throwing a thought away, getting it safely outside of my mind, so I can continue to think about more pressing things. It’s useful to me in a sort of hypothetical way that these thoughts are still there if I want to find them, but in practice they’re quickly forgotten and rereading them is often more alienating than edifying.
The truth is that my diary is both less of a secret and more of a self-conscious writing project than my notes app is. I’ve read enough 20th-century diaries by writers — Susan Sontag, Sylvia Plath, Alfred Kazin, Hervé Guibert, etc — which were edited by their allies and present formidable if perhaps illusory literary edifices. Someone has pared away the shopping lists and the half-baked thoughts from the idle hours of decades to present an image of a mind constantly tensed like a spring, ever ready with the kind of poignant insights that only they could make. I know it’s egotistical, but I do imagine someone, if only my loved ones, reading my diaries after I am dead, and indeed lovers and friends have surreptitiously peeked at my notebooks while I am still alive. This is in keeping with my intentions.
I’ve known this whole time that holding myself to a high standard in my diary makes it less useful, in a way, to my practice as a writer. Failing to mention things that don’t feel in keeping with the high-mindedness of a “writer’s notebook” is a form of lying by omission, and it creates blind spots in my own self-concept. Sontag’s often-quoted aphorism that in her notebook she “creates” herself should imply a more permissive attitude toward the notebook; at my worst I am simply flattering myself there. Ideally, I would use the notebook to test myself in an arena of total honesty. But I have, somehow, gotten the stage fright of the blank page even here.
For most people, I think, a diary has a kind of preciousness baked into it. Some of my friends who use notebooks talk about “journaling,” in which the physical act of writing, in its isolation from the rest of the world, has a similar effect to therapy. A diary is a return to basics, a way to close the door on life for a moment, to get to a place where you can really figure things out. The uncritical veneration of anything “analog,” in which certain tools gain something in their aura by virtue of being an older, more inconvenient way of doing things, tends to kneecap the potential of a notebook as a tool. Discovering certainty is not really what a notebook is ideally for, and this is not, in fact, what the 20th-century diarists I read were using them for. Most of the notebooks I listed above are jumbles of stuff — think of Sontag obsessively listing off the movies she saw in Paris, Plath writing down what she ate for breakfast, Kazin venting his spleen, Guibert writing down his dreams and fantasies. The thrilling part of these diaries is how unprecious they are, how omnivorous. How can this all be the same person, one thinks.
