💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 10-27.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 11:09:46. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
For a long time I've wanted to keep a diary. I tried throughout adolescence but always gave it up. I dreamed of being very frank, like Joe Orton, whose diaries I admired; I found them in the library when I was about fourteen. I read them half as literary interest, and half as pornography, thrilled to follow Joe around the many corners of the city in which I had only walked but he had managed to have illicit sex. I thought: _if you're going to write a diary, it should be like this, it should be utterly free, honest._
Last month, when I went west, I brought a few books with me. Sometimes I read a lot, sometimes not; it's always best to prepare for the former, even if I slide into the latter. I brought a couple books of poetry, and bought a couple more collections while I was there. But I also brought with me a larger book, Zadie Smith's book of essays, "Feel Free", which felt to me like good airplane reading (it was heavy, it was long, she is known to be Good).
I was right. The essays are wide-ranging, covering Brexit, art, literary reviews, hip-hop, all kinds of things. If I'm not careful I can get sick on airplanes, and an hour before I fly, I take antiemetics I pick up when I visit the States. Usually that plus the takeoff knocks me out, coming to just before the descent. But on my trip, I stayed awake, sipping at my little cup of Coke, nibbling at airline pretzels (and the sandwich I packed before I left), working my way through Smith's wonderful writing.
I'll admit here that I haven't yet read any of Smith's lauded novels, though my partner recently finished "On Beauty", and my mother, a professor of English, used to regularly teach "White Teeth". I'd like to claim this book was a happy surprise, but I knew her reputation, and the hardcover was $10 in the clearance section at my local bookshop. An easy purchase. Regardless, it's good: Smith's reputation as one of the finest writers of her generation is certainly earned.
The first essay in the "Feel Free" section of the book, "Life-Writing" is a short (barely three-page) essay on how she wanted at one point to be a diarist, coming across a formative diary early, but couldn't from it create one of her own. That's now how her mind works, she says; there's a mental block she can't get past, writing that, ultimately,
I realize I don't want any record of my days. I have the kind of brain that erases everything that passes, almost immediately, like that dustpan-and-brush dog in Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" sweeping up the path as he progresses along it. I never know what I was doing on what date, or how old I was when this or that happened - and I like it that way.
I have a similar sort of brain, though whether it's undiagnosed ADHD (I have certain suspicions), or a result of everyting that went on when I was 14-15, I'm not sure. But I know the feeling: the sense that if I'm living in the moment, it's not out of choice, possessing a broad view, and an intensity, but also a kind of scatterbrainedness, and this configuration has persisted throughout much of my life.
For Smith, it all started with Joe Orton; for me, the compulsion, "oh, I should do this", came via the Swedish hacker and anarchist mc, whose late 90s net.diary was a touchstone of my adolescent life. To be blunt, I could never life his kind of life: Bohemian and hacker and polyamorous, an Aikido-and-C existence that a 17 year old in the late 90s couldn't help but find romantic. But I am circumscribed instead of free-loving; introverted; something close to meek, and because of my past, I could never be an outwardly sexual person. I live a quiet sort of life, very much by choice; having had the details of my sex life at a young age be made painfully public, this quiet exists because I've carefully sought it out. But the fire and frankness in mc's writing was still something that the much-younger-me found intensely attractive, and I knew after reading it I wanted to write about myself, however boring I'd appear to other people.
Perhaps the first kind of non-memory system - the one that can't retain dates or significant events - allows the other kind of memory system to operate, the absence of the first making space for the second, clearing a path for that whatever-it-is which seems to dart through my mind like a shy noctural animal...
I started writing at some point in grade 11 or 12; 1997 or 98 or 99, I'm not quite sure. I have a firm minimum, the summer of '99, attested to in the dates on webpages I've managed to fish out of the Wayback. But these firmly-dated entries reference an earlier journal, one that was moved, and at this point, the clues begin to fade. I've memorized a lot of my old URLs, but forgotten several; and thought I've tried in vain to guess, I can't seem to ever find them. Did I guess wrong? Did the Wayback never archive them? They would have had few incoming links, maybe none, possibly remembered by no one but myself. As to the question of dates, and starts, one of my oldest friends, who I met through this scene and never irl, says 1997. But neither of us remember where, and so that detail is shrouded in the earliest days of the web, nearly thirty years in the past. As Ocean Vuong would say, time is a mother.
One of my friends, husband of one of my partner's university friends, is the opposite of me. Date-focused. A deep, probing memory. If you want to know who played the halftime show at the 2003 Grey Cup, he's your guy. But that's not me; might have been at one point, but hasn't been since I was very young. Like Smith, I remember in snatches and fragments. But unlike Smith, who gives herself up to this, I treat it as a challenge, something to be overcome. Do I remember exactly what I was doing in the summer of 2002? Of course not. But I have journals (again: fished out of the Wayback), and I can return to those to find out, or at least find something.
For me, journalling isn't an attempt to catch a silver fish in a black river, but instead a way to cut blazes into trees I can grope for in the dark. In 2000, one of the players in my hometown symphony passed my name on to the Okanagan symphony. Late '99 I met a girl who one of my friends had fallen in love with two summers earlier, and as she talked to me, I started to understand why. These are two smaller details of my life, but things I can revisit, and replace, years later, thanks to the fact that I wrote them down. I don't mean this as a slight of Smith: how we catalogue our lives is a deeply personal choice. But whereas Smith lives happily in the present, catching flashes of the past as they come, I've found my own journals lead to their own shaky understading of myself. If I'm hung up in my past, it's because I can remember it; if I can remember it, it's only because of these old HTML texts, written in vi then the same way I'm writing in vi now. I have a style just as much as I have a type.
Life-writing, for me, is somewhere between a need and a compulsion. I was hurt, badly, when I was young, and because of that, there are years of my life that hang like dark, impenetrable ovals over the rest of my life. The details are gone, but they aren't; occluded from view, but still there, just not accessible to me right now. And if they do reappear, it's often because something in the frustratingly-limited but somehow-expansive journals I wrote in my late tees and early 20s illuminated them. A word, a phrase, and burning in the dark.
Going back to the original quote: free - honest - I'm not sure I've ever been either in my life-writing, not completely, either being aware, or made aware, of who can stumble across my insigificant corner of the net. I took few precautions last time. I've taken more this time, but let's be honest: if you know me (the real, the not-winter) you can probably cross reference two or things and make a pretty good guess. So, free is a stretch; honest, less so, with the honesty being constrained about the things I feel comfortable talking about if they were blown up and announced to the wider world. If, as we used to say on Twitter, my posts escaped containment.
I'm boring, but who cares; my journals are for me, but still semi-public. Even the original ones are still available in the Wayback; attached to my real name, to the city I grew up in; honest, and cringe, in equal measure; and understand, just as important as they are to my understanding of myself, I'll never reveal them publicly, not decades later, and not even here. I was a boring teenager, for sure. Sexless until university; cute, naive; paralyzed with unrequited want; so that even though my own journals from that time would hold no interest to others, they're of the utmost importance to me. Ask most people how they remember, and they'll probably reply through memory. And that's good enough for most. But not for me. Just as there are many ways to live, there are many ways to remember how you did. Writing, imperfect as it is, has its own heft. It triggers my mind, making space for what Smith describes as nocturnal animals, and I think that's apt. The things I remember in sleep - the voices that persist long after the people are gone -
I wish I'd written more. More of the pain, more dull banalities, more paragraphs to more fully piece together who I was when I was young. But in the absence of perfect, what I have is still good. What I remember is a beautiful, smart, and deeply hurting boy, one who'd find his way eventually. And if I remember that myself, so many of the details are recalled only because he thought to write them down. So, thanks, my younger self; and to my older self, who digs this out of storage decades from now, well, this is for you.