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.

Running in the Family

The following mix of thoughts and visions and images was inspired by Michael Ondaatje's book "Running in the Family". I've started using things I'm reading to inspire writing excercises. The following written material is basically an excercise to re-invoke the past. To see the more essay-like impression I had of Michael Ondaatje's work, go here.

There is a file in my drawer that I haven't looked at since last year. I've been holding off. I don't know how to approach family history. I come from Sweden, Ireland, Scotland, Bavaria, and Croatia. How can I try to understand those pages that describe my lineage, linking me, this piecemeal American to those distant parts. I can still recall the brittle dried out thistles, feel them scraping on dry skin in the summer and smell the grit of dust that would rise up from our driveway when my dad raced his pick-up home after a long day of work. Inside, he'd unhinge his feet from his work-boots and strip off his faded blue jeans to go wash off engine grease from his hands in the downstairs sink before stepping into the shower. I could hear him blow his nose, even through the sound of running water, from the kitchen. The summer in Spokane has always been both maddening in its boredom and glorious for its piercing hot days and warm nights that enable you to scavenge through the woods for ghosts in the shadows. In the summer, one always knows that hidden stickers might cling to your toes in the grass if you step too absent-mindedly with bare-feet, stabbing pain into the nerves like a hidden insult. I remember waking up so early one morning at 4:30am. I couldn't sleep and I couldn't yet play the piano because I would wake up my parents. I decided to go watch the sunrise through the pine trees in the front of my house, sitting on the cool cement walkway. The colors of the sky in Spokane are crystal tones that cut like razors over your eyes. The light there flares so crisp it haunts.

But I only remember in faded colors. Distant as fog makes things seem. I only remember through gauze. With each new memory, a thin sheath of gauze rolls across the others, placing them back, back into a hall of mummified imagery, sounds, smells, and the numb feelings that belong to them. The things my mom used to say that would make me angry have shriveled into dead corpses wrapped under layers and layers. To say she was and/or is that way limits her, makes her real, makes her true, and bred of nightmares. Give us the stock footage of natural disasters, and we'll make mummies out of them. But with the colors, the vivid colors, I long to lift the veils. All of them. Spin the reel.

I tried to paint my Dad's Cessna 210 in Arizona. The crinkle of the red-rock in the background looks like toothpaste plastered onto papier mache. I'm no Michaelangelo. And regardless of how juvenile my painting appears, I know what it is and for whatever reason, it lifts something up from the recess. Dad, the pilot, the man who rarely failed to remember about testing for water in the gas and yelling "CLEAR PROP," or filling up the cabin with the smell of lysol, from cleaning both the inside and outside of the wind-shield. Up we went. Lifted out of Newman Lake, Washington, out of the Spokane Valley following South along the Snake River towards Boise, eventually Reno, then Las Vegas, Death Valley, and at last, Arizona. The houses were mere pebbles from so high up. Scabs on a cross-section of divvied up land. I would count the pools and dream of which house I would live in some day, or pick which house in each of the neighborhoods was my favorite. I'd point out the biggest, most ornate buildings to anyone of my family members who would listen, usually this was Grandma, although she was hard of hearing. And the noise of the prop often blotted out any communication anyway. We learned to thrust our voices over and beyond the decibel threshold of the engine and make our thoughts heard, our needs met. Powerbars. Mom brought bulk Costco-boxes of Powerbars and when the hunger crept up, itching out of the noise, it was met with the grainy, chewy, pasty texture of a Powerbar. This kept me awake enough to read and at that time, I was reading about Oz. Without knowing that all of my memories of those airplane rides would one day be jumbled together, thrown into a pile and shaken, scattered, rearranged, and blurred. My future is often turbulent, and I have no safety switch for my memories, to smooth the transitions, hold them in clear precision.

Thanks to my sister, my precision is not necessary. She re-writes history to her own liking. Because she articulates set of facts, figures, dates and names with more conviction than me.