Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it’s committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
Will Self
Searching for something else, I find some old notebooks from around 2008/9/10? and so much of what’s in them is new to me, still interesting (field names, lecture notes, observations when out and about, stray quotes, to-do lists, travel information etc). I’d forgotten everything I’d bothered to make a note of and I’m glad to have these not-quite reminders, more perhaps archaeological finds dredged up from my past history.
The notebooks in question are small, randomly chosen, sometimes gifts. There are lots more scattered in various rooms around the house. I use them for small on-the-hoof jottings, alongside the bigger A5 or A4 notebooks that I keep by me and write in more expansively, a place for more leisurely exploration, as well as recording interesting extracts from my current reading. This system gives the illusion of order but in fact I am bad at remembering to date my entries (or the books as a whole) and storing them in some kind of sequence so I am left with only fragments here and there, vivid traces, the unravelling tapestry of a life I once lived. Perhaps this is enough, all that might be preserved with any enduring truth.
One of the notebooks opens with quite a long run of renga verses from 28th September to 3rd November, which I pick up again from 1st January, only making as far as 3rd. Having just finished keeping a year renga throughout the whole of 2023, I know quite well how much dedication and effort sustaining that practice takes.
Here are a few of my verses plucked from the notebook:
*
how much light
the silver birch keeps
from my window
This is interesting to me because this particular silver birch, which was such a landmark (in my neighbour’s garden) was chopped down around ten years ago. And I am spending a lot of time with birch trees at the moment.
*
the cold creeping
up her sleeves
into her bones
Nothing new there.
*
his kisses
mouth full of russets
I call him Adam
*
moths at the window
origami hearts
*
smaller in real life
he still sheds
a certain glow (I don’t know who this is – probably a poet)
*
parcel in the post
three years old
her book of days
This last was my first year renga, written in 2006 and published by Smokestack in 2009 as book of days. Since then I’ve kept several year rengas, only publishing extracts here and there. When I don’t keep a year renga, I always feel as if something is missing.
*
I imagine my death
an endless afternoon
*
the nugget of fluorspar
found at Cross Fell
glued on a silver shank
*
an otter’s head
in the dark water
In a slim red moleskine I have recorded the fact that the brain has 100 billion cells, specially designed to read itself. Apparently, the brain is a vain organ and considers the letters in its bearer’s own name more attractive than others – ‘…without a little deluded optimism, your immune system begins to wonder whether it’s worth the effort of keeping you alive’. There’s no reference for this delicious snippet – another example of my erratic record-keeping.
Alongside notes for an interview for a job I never got, there’s a rubbing of some embossed work, whether wood or metal I don’t know – the only clue to its provenance, the date – 1889.
Another example of a failure to take my forgetful future self into account is the cutting that falls out from the back, recognisable from the Guardian, but written by whom? When? Intriguing enough for me to tear it out and save just the corner of it, from some nameless writer:
Sometimes it feels as if all I was born with, I have now said. But other times, it feels as if I haven’t even yet got close.
Among the pages of these notebooks there is quite a collection of phone numbers or addresses of people whose names I don’t recognise, who I have forgotten I ever met. Sometimes just initials. Why did I think I’d remember what they stood for? Perhaps fifteen years ago I was less acquainted with the frailty of memory.
The 2008 notebook is full of notes about sessions with clients from when I worked as a Bereavement Counsellor with Cruse – names and details that bring back waves of shared sadness, and cryptic suggestions from meetings with my supervisor.
There’s also mention of being caught up and stranded in floods driving back from Oxfordshire at the beginning of September – tales from one of the rescue guys of a brand new BMW up to its roof in water, a Bentley floating in a swimming pool in Darras Hall. Courtesy of a recovery vehicle, I came to an empty house at 3 am and couldn’t sleep till I’d written it all down.
It’s particularly exciting to come across snatches of other people’s handwriting – names, addresses, sweet messages. It brings an image of that person to my mind more powerfully than a photograph – the whole of our connection compressed in the shapes of their letters on the page.
A quote from A.C. Grayling:
A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it.
This can’t help but remind me of Oliver Burkeman’s provocative, insightful and practical Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, which I enjoyed when it came out in 2021. A lot of my entries chime with persisting preoccupations – making the most of love, life, death, beauty, creativity. Recently I came across this from Ursula K. Le Guin, which hasn’t made it to my current notebook yet but intrigued me as soon as I read it:
The poet Carolyn Kizer said to me once, ‘Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.’ Maybe storytellers are interested mostly in life and commas.
What I’m working on just now is more story than poetry and I like the idea that I might be paying more attention to life than death. It’s easy to lose myself in the past, sifting through these notebooks, but what makes most sense to me are the parts that connect with my life in the present, ideas that still carry an imaginative heft, capable of helping me see where I am now more clearly.
For the sublime and the beautiful and the interesting, you do not have to look far away but you have to know how to see.
Hedda Sterne
Ahh, notebooks. I have too many of them and constantly ponder what on earth to do with them. Renga poetry/ verse is completely foreign to mee. Asian?