Panacea for Modern Life

I’m told the average brain has a memory capacity of 2.5 million gigabytes of digital memory - but I swear, I have the equivalent of a 31⁄2-inch floppy disk. The double sided version.

The floppy disk probably peaked in the 90s and it just so happens that the earliest memory I have of journaling, actual autobiographical memory, not a photograph-activated memory, is also from the 1990s. Coincidence?

Definitely.

So, this memory: It takes place in 1992, when I was 9 years old. I am sitting on a plane - somewhere in the undesirable middle section, on an aisle (because my bladder also has a capacity far below average). Next to me on the left, in the center seat, is my little sister. My mother occupies the window seat A, and my step-father is across the corridor in what should logically have been D, but by some aberrant grouping sequence was probably G or J.

I have in my hands a boldly printed hardcover notebook with a red spiral spine. The cream coloured pages are blank. On the first page I write “by, by GENEVA.” Below that I draw an airplane flying over some tall buildings, all of which have $ signs on them or the word “bank” scribbled across their rooftops. The drawing done, I flip the page and ponder what to write next. I look over at my little sister who has the same notebook. My stepfather bought them for us at a gift store somewhere along the River Wye in England. She’s drawing a Chinese emperor under the same misspelled heading: “by, by GENEVA.” I roll my eyes, but otherwise ignore this blatant creative infringement. Some more time goes by and then, with my left hand positioned as a shield against my page, I compose the following:

“leaving geneva was sad but going to america and different contries will be fun. china will be a new expirience.”

My thoughts recorded, I look over at my little copycat to see what she’s come up with. But she’s entirely engrossed in something else and there’s a smear of sauce on her discarded diary.

***

From that point forward I have always carried a journal. I am partial to the word “journal” because to drop the word “diary” in adult conversation is awkward and uncomfortable - for announcer and auditor alike. Besides, “diary” doesn’t fully capture the sweeping, meandering miscellany that is my journaling practice. “Diary” is too condensed. Journaling is amorphous. And yet, I demand that my journaling notebooks adhere to a strict physical shape and form: soft cover, plain pages, somewhere between 40-50 sq. inches in size. From where I sit now, in my home office in a small town at the foot of some large hills, I can count thirty-eight spine-creased notebooks of varied fatness and fettle.

Remarkably, thirty-eight also happens to be the number of years I’ve lived to date. Coincidence?

Absolutely.

For thirty years I have kept a journal. With the exception of that first one, when I was nine years old, I’ve never drawn in any of them - only written. By the time I was nine I had lived in five countries already. You might imagine I recorded the sights and sounds of exotic destinations or gripping tales of foreign encounters and adventurous travel. But, wistfully - nay. My journaling pages are almost always turned inward. My sister never did take to journaling after that airplane attempt. But then my sister has always been graced with equanimity. Unlike me, she’s never needed to view herself from a different perspective. For me, journaling is to change my vantage point, to move my mind to a more abstract level, to feel my own presence from the outside.

Viewed from the outside though, my journal entries are probably as monotonous as the local meteorological station’s datasets. I make a lot of surface observations, including about the weather. The weather, it turns out, has an astonishing ability to affect my attitude.

August 1, 2017 (NY)

Ran home from work mid-day after getting Anton [my moustache] waxed off my face - he didn’t go w/out a fight and the redness, swelling and hives (!) made me decide to come home for a bit. The weather these last 2 days is that same kind that makes my heart fill my whole body with both a nostalgia for pasts and an excitement for futures. It is the weather of dream-making ...

October 9, 2019 (NY)

This morning is perfect. It’s so cool and the sky is an uninterrupted blue. No humidity. Always I think of Montreal and the start of school. Ca doit être liée à l'idée de la liberté. The feeling it engenders is of so much possibility. When after the sorrow of distance from my family receded and I tasted that first real freedom of adulthood - all that rebellious independence …

Of course, my journal entries are much less rigorously scientific than a weather dataset. But that’s because I write just for me. I write in incomplete sentences. I write in colloquialisms, with words from different languages thrown in whenever those better communicate my intention. I write from impulse; I write like I talk to myself, in non-sequiturs, in interjections and exclamations - sometimes in assertion, sometimes in speculation.

Also, I write in ink, with a fountain pen - which makes it nigh impossible to decipher what I’ve actually written. But that doesn’t matter because it’s a record of feelings as much as events, and feelings are transient. Something about writing them gives them permission to pass, to be let go of. And it’s always centering to leave them there, on the page, their attendance acknowledged but their dominance dismissed.

March 21, 2014 (NYC)

I am grateful this morning for Aliya and the dreams of her I had early this morning that meant I awoke w/ thoughts of her and friendship and not of sadness or loneliness or panic …

I wish I could say that the act of writing thoughts and feelings commits them to memory - but it doesn’t. Today I have literally no recollection of what I wrote yesterday and little notion of what I felt. Perhaps the act of doing something daily erases it from the conscious mind, converts it to muscle memory. Perhaps any physical trace of discrete memory is entrusted to the tissue of my thigh, or stored in the fibers of my forearm.

Now lest you think there isn't any muscle involved in the physical act of writing, let me tell you: there is. Immodest though it may sound, it is a triumph of advanced calisthenics to successfully calligraphy straight lines on an unruled notebook. It is not always with ease that I manage to strike an ergonomic angle between 1) the page, 2) my wrist, 3) the subjacent writing surface, 4) my elbow, and 5) the nib of my fountain pen. My movements are swift, sometimes desperate. After all, the mind migrates faster than a right hand can be put into motion. But even if they don’t necessarily achieve grace of movement, my exercises are always performed rhythmically.

Journaling regularly lends rhythm and structure to my life. It punctuates this capricious culture we live in with a uniformity and a predictability that is as gladly received as snow on Christmas Eve. And just like on Christmas Eve, when I journal, I’m allowed to be tedious, tiresome, and trite.

December 24, 2006 (CH)

I am in such a foul mood. And I know I shouldn’t be - it’s Christmas, everyone is downstairs now, around the fire, and I’m upstairs - where I’ve been all day practically, acting ugly …

In a world that demands we act (but act with aplomb!) and insists we succeed (but succeed with grace!) and exacts that we do both these things whilst employing every conceivable measure to avoid offense, it is cathartic to stain a blank page by writing off that foul failure, or permitting that raw shame, or delighting in those meagre moments.

May 22, 2011 (Montreal)

For a while now I have been worried about having children. I cannot deny my jealous nature - nor can anyone else. Younger I used to proclaim I only wanted boys - twin boys - that would grow up handsome and strong and I would parade around proud. The fundamental fear is the same, but I’ve given it more rational thought: actually I’m worried I’d be jealous of a daughter’s place in her father’s heart …

Some thoughts are so deformed that the effort of thinking them up fixes them forever. Other times, they are so monotonous and repetitive it doesn’t seem worth penciling them on paper. But when you have a floppy disk memory like mine, it never hurts to have a written record. Even if it is indecipherable. It’s proof something happened. With #FOMO and #YOLO vandalizing my every waking moment, it feels good to know I did something, I felt something. Pages filled with words are never empty.

June 28, 2019 (NY)

Yesterday I made a carrot cake. Whilst making the carrot cake I found the garlic press. What a fucking mystery. I woke thinking of it this morning: it’s absurd but it’s disappearance and sudden reappearance recall the crazy I felt with D____. If someone is responsible for what happened to it, I resent them not telling me. I’m starting to think Javier or Sabby had something to do with it since Maman swears it wasn’t her. I looked hard, so hard, for weeks, for that garlic press - so did Jon - and then yesterday, there it was! - laying inanimately where it should have been all along but clearly wasn’t. Whoever it is would fess up if they realized it’s brought up those same destabilizing emotions. To allow me to keep questioning crazily my sense of sanity, to leave me in the dark for so long. But also - ha!. What a practical joke! The one thing that should bring up parallel and comparable feelings post D___is a fucking garlic smasher. Something as TRIVIAL as a garlic smasher. Trauma is stupid …

***

Reading through some passages now, I realize I rarely journaled when I was traveling or when things were new. As a third culture kid, I grew up jet-setting here, jet-setting there, always moving in space and in time - and that was normal, it was familiar. When the world was in motion around me, I felt safe. It was when I stopped for a while, a year or two into our new posting, somewhere in the middle of recent arrival and looming departure, that the loneliness of leaving and the trepidation of starting anew caught up to me. That was when I would write. Without the inertia of an ever-changing horizon, I felt the threat of toppling over, like a spinning top. I feared I’d start precessing, rapidly and endlessly about my own axis, without ever going anywhere. It's banal, but writing kept me centered, kept me balanced. It was a way for me to take stock of my equilibrium, to make sure that no part of me was tilted too far back or too far forward.

August 5, 2009 (Tunisia)

No emotions gripping right now. Maybe it’s the early hour of our departure; maybe it’s satisfaction with our stay; maybe just jaded/finally used to it? Last night I cried. This morning I had no tears. Even at the very end, at the gate with the security guard who doesn’t let us take pictures. Papa teared up at the cafe. I don’t know why but I haven’t felt anything really yet. I’d have to remember hard to bring up any feeling. I hope Papa doesn’t interpret my dry eyes as nonchalance or je m’enfoutisme (as he would say) …

For several years now I have lived in a small town at the foot of some large hills. Here the days unfold placidly and there is little spatiotemporal variability. Nowadays, if there’s ever any feeling of impermanence or instability, I am it’s only author. My journaling is still just as inward but somehow it’s less self-centered. I observe the natural world around me and I record it as proof of continuity.

July 20, 2020 (NY)

I am anxious. I am sleepless. There’s an electricity in my body I can’t control. It’s unbelievably hot. The robins are anxious too. They flit to and fro the burning bush where they have three bald babies. I’m afraid for them. The babies and the parents. I don’t want them to experience any sadness. There is so much vulnerability my heart hurts. Their hungry peeps reach my ears and my uneasy stomach rumbles in response …

The practice and progress of journaling has gradually begun to feel more biological, less cultural. When I journal there is an osmosis between me and the energy around me. Have you noticed that to be aware of something is automatically to perceive some connection to it? Some similarity? There is nothing showy about journaling; there is no fanfare, no fancy equipment. Besides the spent notebooks, which might get lost or destroyed, there is no gratifying end product. Journaling isn’t like knitting or embroidery in that sense, but it is a little like life: just doing it gives me a sense of constancy and presence. I don’t put my pen down to find that some outrageous transformation has taken place. No, of course not. But sometimes, I sense a subtle shift in my outlook. A shift as subtle as the difference between balance and symmetry. Symmetry, I find, is best defined by mathematics: an object is considered to have symmetry if, amongst other things, individual pieces of the object can be moved or transformed without changing its overall shape. When I make the time to journal, I realize that balance is merely a visual effect.

When I make the time to journal, the day passes in a more excellent manner than when I don’t.

Every single time.

Coincidence?

I think not.

July 24, 2021 (NY)

It’s a peaceful morning. There’s not much bird song - except in the distance. Here under the Rose of Sharon I mostly hear the constant, gentle hum drum of bumblebees. And occasionally a rustling in the undergrowth - which I often mistake for Indie - but he’s by the driveway out front where the sun is hot on the pavement. The hole in the parasol crank where a parasitic wasp deposited a paralyzed inch worm and then concreted up the entrance, is now cracked open. There’s a hole just wider than the tine of a fork in the … mud? mortar? The knob on the crank is designed such that the back isn’t a soldered piece of metal - it’s open on one side. I guess the wasp came back to check on it’s prey? Or perhaps it lays its eggs on the worm and having matured and eaten the worm, they’ve dug a hole out from the inside? Actually, it looks too small for the wasp to gain any access from the outside. When I look closely I see a still shape in the shadow. If there are larvae in there, they’re being extremely cautious. As they should …