endless endless notebookery
From cursed year to cursed year a diary makes its way. In my own journals and most of the writers’ journals I can get my hands on, time passes dismally and strangely. In March of 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I complained in my journal of “endless endless notebookery.” On January 31, 2021, I wrote that “these notebooks are such a graveyard of days.” The entries from the height of lockdown are particularly rough. Mopey, inert, and grandiose, they are the scribblings of someone unable to move, unable to focus, unable to read. Doomed only to write, but not particularly well—a cursed feeling indeed. Again and again, one is forced to ask: Why keep a journal at all?
The easiest answer, of course, is that you shouldn’t. In his 2005 essay, “The Concept of Experience,” Mark Greif writes that
Truly dissatisfied persons, maybe more than anybody else, take a large proportion of their experience from books. Or they find they can double their own little experience, and make a second pass at the day-to-day by writing it down. Poor scribblers! […] Keeping a journal is a sure sign of the attempt to preserve experience by desperate measures. These poor dissatisfied people take photographs, make albums, keep souvenirs and scrapbooks. And still they always ask: “What have I done?”
Sylvia Plath, herself an admirer of Woolf’s “blessed diary,” gets at this doomed life-doubling in a diary entry of her own from June 15, 1951:
you think about how, with difficulty and concentration, you could bring back a day, a day of sun, blue skies and watercoloring by the sea. […] and you could delude yourself into thinking - almost - that you could return to the past, and relive the days and hours in a quick space of time. But no, the quest of time past is more difficult than you think, and time present is eaten up by such plaintive searchings. The film of your days and nights is wound up tight in you, never to be re-run[.]
Writing a journal can feel like living on a delay; by the time you have recorded one day, the next has already passed. The journal begins to feel ceaseless and Sisyphean, like the line from that The National song, playing on repeat: “Takes me a day to remember a day / I didn’t mean to let it get so far out of hand.”
Greif—himself a kind of scribbler—includes journal-keeping in what he sees as a problem with the modern concept of experience, that “The attempt to make our lives not a waste, by seeking a few most remarkable incidents, will make the rest of our lives a waste.” Woolf reveals a similar anxiety when she begins one diary entry with “A gap: not in life, but in comment,” as if the reader might have forgotten that she was still alive during all the days not put to paper; all that unrecorded, intervening time.
Greif’s larger critique is aimed at our consumeristic frenzy for meaningful experiences. In service of that critique, however, Greif elides the fact that to write is to experience, that writing is part of living itself and not some doubling back of it. I have memories of being up late and upset, scribbling away in my notebooks. But I also have memories of journaling on the beach, in a town square in Spain, on the roof of my apartment at sunset—those are all experiences in themselves, coincident with my recording of them. Plath may be right that those days are unrecoverable and locked away somewhere inside of me, but a journal could not begin to find them. Even when trying to remember and record, a journal is too entangled with the present to be mere salvage of the past.
Furthermore, the time it takes to keep a journal or a scrapbook is nothing compared to the time we spend sending deranged, half-automated emails; nothing compared to all the writing we do that means nothing, that has no sense of time at all save for the mercilessness of timestamps, read receipts, deadlines, and alerts. With the decline of letter-writing, the average person’s writing output is a bizarre mass of filetypes and platforms, a scattered and hybrid language that would be tedious or impossible to collect. A journal’s broken, desperate time is still more coherent than most of the writing we do.
Rather than an “attempt to preserve experience,” a journal could be better thought of as a way of organizing one’s personal language into an instrument for living. One way of reading Woolf’s “Yes, I will force myself to begin this cursed year” is essentially in agreement with Greif: that the years are all cursed in a way that writing will not make better. But “I will force myself to begin” can refer to both the new year and the new diary. Rather than proof of the diary’s inadequacy, it can be read as a way of insisting on living by insisting on writing. Not always pleasant and unevenly useful, the diary is an obstacle, an opportunity, a curious little metonym for life: I will force myself to begin.
Forcing oneself to continue, to continue to begin, is the task of the diary-keeper. It is also the task of the person who finds living difficult. In his diaries, the famously morose Franz Kafka is everywhere urging himself to keep writing:
16 December. I won’t give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can. […]
25 February. Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.
Even in journals written in a brighter register, the diary is still a form of self-exhortation; encouragement can come as much from defiance as desperation. In a journal entry from December 9, 1985, during her long battle with cancer, Audre Lorde writes that
I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes—everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!
Write regularly! Don’t surrender! and I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor! are two sides of the same coin. Though Kafka’s diaries reflect a wilting, frantic solipsism and Lorde’s a fiery will to make life worthwhile, in both instances, journal-writing is something more than just writing. It is writing to be worthy of salvation, writing that becomes an all-consuming fire. No mere “attempt to preserve,” a journal is an attempt to persevere, a way of convincing yourself to keep trying to live the kind of life you want to live.
This would be a resounding endorsement of journal-writing if such journals weren’t also repositories of misery, inertia, and insecurity. In her diaries, Woolf admits “that I never write here except when jangled with talk. I only record the dumps & the dismals, & them very barely.” Kafka’s diaries are almost laughably crammed with despair. So, unfortunately, are mine.
This is the problem with a journal: nowhere else are writing and living so precariously intertwined. Without the structure of a finished work of art, without the exigencies of audience, without deadlines or horizons, a set of journals is an enormous, endless, and shapeless body of work. And yet, it is still one of the truest records of one’s own attempts to live through language. Largely inconsequential as form—writers from Kafka to Larkin wanted them burned—they can be hugely consequential for oneself.
Such consequences are not always pleasant. Woolf’s first entry of 1938 goes on after she calls the year cursed: “How am I to describe ‘anxiety’? I’ve battened it down under this incessant writing, thinking, about [her book, 3 Guineas]—as I did the summer after Julian’s death.” Unable or unwilling to describe her anxiety, save by comparing it to grief, Woolf suggests that writing provides not clarity about her feelings but a distraction from them.
If one cannot find the language to describe despair and loses the ability to press on in spite of it, the diary reaches its limit. What was once an instrument for living looks instead like a premonition of death. On January 26, 1941, Woolf insisted in her diary that “This trough of despair shall not, I swear, engulf me.” Two months after that entry, her husband found her walking stick by the River Ouse. Woolf’s body washed ashore three weeks later.
A journal may not always prevail as a tool for survival, but it is always proof that someone survived. On December 23, 1911, Kafka wrote:
In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier stirring in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.
Rather than thinking of a journal as work to bury one’s feelings in or a gap-filled calendar of half-remembered moments, I try to think of my journal as something like this, some negotiation between past and future selves. Or I try—Don’t surrender!—to convince myself of it. What all the handwringing over past experience and present misfortune ignores is that a journal also exists to be read and reread. By others, perhaps, long after one is gone, but also by future versions of yourself. Rereading one’s own journal, as embarrassing and dizzying as it is, does what the writing cannot on its own. Rereading creates a sense of solidity, a further integration of writing and living in which the journal is not just an account of life or even a tool for living it, but a process of recursion that, real or imagined, casts one’s life in language in a way that might make them want to live.
At the end of last year, I wrote in my own journal:
but there are days when, walking up to the fourth floor of my apartment building or walking the sidewalk circuits of my previous New York years, I wonder what former versions of myself might think of this one. & those selves feel less like a lineup, smallest to largest or youngest to oldest, than a crowded chorus, all with fogged-mirror faces, apart and aside from present or past. [an] odd throng of me, my imaginaries, my previousness. the point is not to emerge from them but to join them, somehow. what emerges is the writing, the work. what joins is some private, unknowable, opaque proposition of self.
ben tapeworm