In Preparation for a Study of my Notes

The problem of my notebooks extends beyond archiving. The scraps of information, anecdotes and the upstarts of blind stretches into poetry or artistic representation compiled within these texts lend themselves to either an extensive unfolding and expansion, or a reductive extinguishing, via the trash-can. I'm caught between these two options and more options are presenting themselves to me as a solution, everyday. I could follow an archival method and simply file them away in a chronological order for future biographers to collect and unravel to piece together my persona using evidence, but I'm afraid that my life will not lend itself to further investigation and that with my death, these notes will be reduced to garbage, at last. Perhaps I should simply toss them, myself, to be free of them, free of self-obsession. And while this obsession over my own notes certainly depicts a need to resolve some kind of mystery, I also feel that the mystery extends beyond myself. My obsession with the notes involves a notion of time, and these notes are evidence of time passing and leading further from a starting point and if the meanings compiled in the notes suggest anything, they sort-of chart my own change, a process of change, a mathematical segment of a life and by proxy, the web-of life that each individual life reaches out to. This gives me the idea that perhaps I should try to chart and create parameters of the meanings of the small creations that bloom from the notes, to create a more organized and translatable study of my own reflective obsession. Perhaps the problem of these notes is not simply a problem of self obsession, but the problem of mirrors, mazes, and reduplications that transpires within the ongoing folding and unfolding that occurs within this obsession.

I wonder if obsession is even the correct word, with all of its negative connotations, of disorder, disease, addiction, and a lack of will-power. In actuality, it is possible that I should consider the study of my notes a project. Within this project, I would like to categorize and generalize the various strands of thought and modes of representation that come out of the notes, like a structuralist. But, of course, I would like to resist the impulse of the structuralist and make claims to a different sort of analytical stance, in part because of the emotional and intuitive direction I must inherently take towards the physical pages which are mere remnants of the self. Perhaps it extends into phenomenological or even psychoanalytical realms, but as an individual living in the post-modern world, I would even like to take it further and critique the outset, if I'm even able to pull the frame back far enough to understand what this problem solving encompasses in terms of not only my structural standing, but my metaphorical bearing and the meta layer of the notes. I would like to know how to be a post-structuralist for this project, not for the complexities that arise, but simply to belong to the time that I am in, and to fit without anachronism into my own history, but perhaps this is where philosophy or religion kicks in, because the element of chance comes into play, and when it comes down to it, I feel that I am a victim of history, caught in a trap of fate, that I cannot properly represent myself as a human being to others, because of the overwhelming forces that impose themselves upon my life, in relation to grand history. I'm caught in a dilemma of either breaking down my notion of grand history, by cultivating the traces of a history via circumstantial evidence, my notes, or tossing out the notion of history altogether and overcoming my neurosis once and for all.

There are many complexities that I haven't done well to address with adequate explanation, but to simplify the difficulty of approaching the notes, I guess I see them as sacred texts, generated by a me that is ephemeral and has already since passed with only linguistic traces to account for the passing. My present self will approach the past self, or the ghost of a self, through language. The inherent difficulty with language is the same as the difficulty of mirages, convincing images fade into thin air, the closer one approaches them, because they are brought into being through a process of illusory representation, the difficulty of placing any conviction into the outcome of my study into the meanings of my notes is that the meanings link up to nothingness, the past that is ephemeral, and only in the doing, the act of creating, is anything really accomplished. Thus, the ongoing reduplication and re-categorization of all of the meanings I have collected in notes is an act of fiction. The vestiges of philosophical and ethical epiphany are merely patterned flares that contradict the strain of life that actually produces them, because they are the shadows of a reality that is the self. They are the void of meaning, using the guise of communication. Only in the act of appropriating and continuing the investigation do we find life, because life is not life, life is living. It is an invisible activity that passes unseen with every turn. Language competes to reveal the living thing, but for its lack of unfolding, without the present speaker, it merely reveals the only truly active participant, the reader.