What Memories?
This is a post about journals; this is not a post about journals
Weird how fast September went. Or did it? Love what Dan thinks about time, how it only seems to have gone fast when looked at with hindsight because you’ve compressed the time span into the snatches of memory you can recall and assemble like a highlight reel. —Like Remains of the Day!!
A journal helps capture what happens each day. But a journal only captures snatches of memories from each day. It’s an exercise in Dan’s theorem in miniature. I wonder if the process of capturing memories is a fractal?
—from my journal
What have you done today? If you listed it, what would you write?
Unless you have a brain that should be studied, your day probably amounts to a few bullets on paper.
Got up at 5:36
Coffee
Breakfast & meds
WNBA & SNL on YouTube
Journaled
Started writing this article
It’s only 6:30, but that would be my day so far. But I’ve done more than six things. I fumbled around in the dark for my phone and realized I forgot to charge it last night. I descended the sixteen stairs of our house, but only after I gingerly stepped over our dog asleep in the bedroom doorway.
Did I step with my right leg first? Did I slide a hand along the wall as I descended? I spilled extra sugar into my coffee. I opened a drawer, got out a spoon, swirled it in my coffee. How many revolutions did the spoon make in the mug? How many pieces of cereal did I pour into my bowl?
A certain Green Day song will be stuck in my head all day. I always think of my best friend Dan at this time of year. I’m certain tomorrow his Facebook status—Facebook still has statuses, right?—will be “SOMEBODY WAKE UP BILLY JOE.” (Google it, kids.)
I started this month’s subscriber’s letter with another entry from my journal not just because it’s about the end of September, but also because I’ve been thinking a lot about the function of journals lately.
This is a Post About Journals
As you might know from July’s subscriber letter, I started a journaling habit after I got married. No, I don’t write something every day. But most days.
This isn’t going to be a post on how to keep a journal—except in brief: you carry it and a pen with you and your write in it—nor is this a post about why you should start journaling—because you have a journal and pen with you and it’s safer than trying to jam the pen in your eye.
It’s a post about the recency bias—the idea that we notice mundane things more if they recently became notable to us, such as people using the word pulchritudinous all of a sudden because it came up on Jeopardy! last night.
For my series defining American Gothic, earlier this month I read Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates. It’s a chilling story about a dispassionate psychopath, Quentin, and his quest to capture a vagrant and turn him into his personal zombie. It’s also written in the form of Quentin’s diary.
I’ve also been reading The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Stevens, a butler who once worked for the Darlington estate, is taking a few days to drive through the English countryside. Each night, he writes about his day—and many, many reminiscences—in his diary. “The remains of the day,” is Stevens’s turn of phrase for what I’ve called the compressed snatches of memory.
Camus’s The Plague has been my carry-around book this past week. In it, the narrator draws on the journals of several characters to describe the collapse of Oran from multiple viewpoints.
I didn’t choose any these books because they are about journaling. It just happened.
This Isn’t a Post About Journals
I think my point is this: writers journal. Writers assume everyone journals. The characters of writers journal (or else, for example, there would be no story about Quentin because there would be no one to write it).
But journaling is susceptible to the compression of time, just as memory is. It’s what we choose to write down. How many trillions of little thoughts have I had in the hour since I awoke? How many of those trillions broke through the filter of the subconscious, into the conscious? How many of those do I even remember?
We can only create snatches of our past. It’s like when Descartes said, “cogito ergo sum.” “I think therefore I am.” That is all I know, the now. How can I be certain I’m not a being placed here at this moment, being told I have the memories I remember?
And isn’t that what a character is? In its essence, a character is a being, placed here on the page, told it has memories. Take Carla, for instance. I just created her. She went to RIC to get her Associates. She met a man at the zoo and they are now married. She didn’t exist when you started this paragraph but now she’s a grown woman, married and happy. Their wedding was penguin-themed.
You’ve had a trillion thoughts since you started reading this article. But your brain can only remember a fraction of them, if any of them. How does your brain choose to remember any of them?
It’s the same with the characters in our stories, or it could be. It’s the same with the narration. What is the narrator telling you? What are they leaving off the page? Why? Because it’s dull or unimportant? Or because it’s the most important piece of the story, but only if you realize it for yourself?
Remains
This is a book review. It’s been a book review since before you started this paragraph; since before I realized it was a book review it’s been a book review. In The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro, the ideas I’m playing with here are stretched taught beneath the film of the story.
Stevens, a butler to a once-great estate, is driving cross-country. He doesn’t know it, but he has a secret doubt and a marked past. He tells the story through his journal. He exposes his secret by never saying a word about it. He marks his past without even realizing it. He paints a caricature of himself only with the most sincere of words.
Ishiguro won a Nobel Prize in literature.
If you buy The Remains of the Day through this link I’ll get a few cents. Better to buy it used through Thriftbooks, of find a copy at your library.