Questioning Potential Future Uses of my Notes

The question of my notes continues. So far, I've divided some of the stacks of paper that I've taken upon myself to go through into pre-existing categories. There were letters from a few people who I was strongly influenced by, growing up. This includes the letters between myself and my jazz teacher in high-school via printed-out e-mails. This includes the later letters in my twenties between myself and my audio teacher in my twenties via e-mails. I have a file including letters to/from Danielle, my best friend growing up who is now in prison (hence the letters). I have a file including correspondence notes between myself and a particular writer who strongly influenced me to decide to pursue writing. Furthermore, I have letters that have recently begun between me and the Deputy Cultural Attache for the Consulate of France, Ivan Bertoux, via e-mail. Thus, one category, that I must consider for the stacks of paper that I keep in my files is LETTERS or CORRESPONDENCE. This could become a key component of my future assimilation or regenerative use that I prescribe for these notes.

I think the reason I'm going through these stacks of papers is that by categorizing, I'm cultivating a better understanding of the difficulty of text for both ARCHIVING purposes and knowing how to make sense of them, when my own past selves were the authors. This is another key component: PAST SELVES as AUTHORS.

I suppose more than anything, this is an attempt at literary criticism in a somewhat meta-fictional manner, or perhaps even meta-autobiographical. Because I don't understand or know enough about those terms, I'm going to attempt to learn more, before going too far in using them to describe this project. To do so, there is a Metafiction class that a class-mate of mine set up online to use. But I would like to explore this further in relation to how I'm perceiving my own texts. Thus, METAFICTION is of importance to me.

Another realization that I am having is that I have used the medium of writing to conjure up very hybrid formats of writing that are perhaps part of the reason that my writing has very little consistency. In looking at many of my past projects, it seems that I am somewhat of a diarist, somewhat of a critic, and somewhat of a collagist in both my fiction and non-fiction writings. The nature and use of COLLAGE is of particular interest, because it suggests a dissatisfaction with singular mediums as a means to express. The question of medium is interesting to me, as well. There are many mediums that appear to be cropping up in my creative projects including textual mystery that results in NONSENSE in Medication for Saltambiques; SHORT FICTIONS in Vignette Fictions which are conducive to including another medium to make them more robust (which I used a blog format to allow people to expand or change the existing fiction in a collaborative model); because we were doing so much editing of people's papers in my short fiction class, I also began to make a play of this idea and I used the idea of making notes and turned it into a conceptual joke by writing three comments on papers that I kept for my own mimicry. Thus, with all of the stacks of edited stories I have sitting on my floor, the EDIT is a textual form that I would like to explore further. I have the workings of a NOVEL which is part narrative, part extended metaphor, and part that I don't have a word for, which is taking a recurrent theme in artworks and mimicking the cultural changes by reflecting it in my characters, as a progression. Basically, I want to use a historical progression in the way that art-critics describe it, following a subject that a limited set of artists have created in the synthesis of their work and openly mimicking the change in the narrative of the story between my characters. Another place that I found this form was Sophie's world, in which the main character is woven through the history of philosophy. I'll call this textual form, a PROGRESSION MIRROR.

I like the idea of borrowing from the existing forms of work that lay in the stacks of paper on my floor and making them undergo further permutations that progress from the state they are currently in. For example, I would like to do something with the feedback I received for a number of my stories in school. I would like to view them with regards for how to make use or fun with the style the EDIT. This could do a number of things. It could either demonstrate the flawed translation between the Editor and the Editee. It could also demonstrate the optimistic improvement cycle. It could even demonstrate the contradictions between various edits, by following different pieces of advice in full, leading the story towards a nonsense-like result.

There are plenty of notes that don't have a simplistic framework of genre, like some of my pieces do. Some of the easiest to perceive are those which I would classify as STORY or STORY HYBRID. The difficulty is to decide whether to salvage or to scrap an INCOMPLETE STORY or INCOMPLETE THOUGHT. My methodology of taste, standards, or purpose comes up when the question of salvage or scrap comes up. Or for that matter, to even decide to what extent it is actually complete or incomplete. Similarly, if I were to continue them along a line of progress, it is difficult to say whether they should or should not still aim for the perfection of the story genre. Instead, they could become more of a conceptual hybrid, that would perhaps be more satisfactory for me because it does not involve the validation of publication, but rather the personal validation of my 'calling' or a more honest kind of experimentation or creative pursuit, because it does not involve the simplistic and degrading needs of aspiring to be 'like others' who 'get published' for 'writing stories'. I don't really see myself as one of 'them' in my authorship. Instead, I see myself as more of a conceptual artist in print. Or perhaps even a hybrid diarist or self-conscious critic.

Some of my notes are not even stories at all. Some of them are LISTS, REMINDERS, ART PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS, RULES, BEHAVIORAL SUGGESTIONS, QUESTIONS (to myself), CONVERSATIONS (with myself), descriptions of DREAMS, LAMENTATIONS, LEXICONS, ETC. Some of them are hand-written, some of them are type-written, and to bring them to a finished state, I think it matters what the material is. Some writings are like objects, books are lovely art-works even with their mass-produced appeal. The medium of text is going digital, so I wonder if I should put effort into creating documents that have a particular kind of physical appeal, or even if I should format them in a particular way, to convey a style or intent. Someone I know who even does this in his text-habits on the computer is Janey Smith. In fact, my use of CAPS is derivative of his, but I think we use them in a different way. He is a lot more interested in humor than I am.

The large number of dedications 'to-myself' indicate a question of the mirror, the reflection of the self, the self-conscious dilemma, the inward spiral to the deep abyss. This is something to question and explore further.

What has come of this brief rumination is a list of potential ways to conceive of my writing as a textual habit:
LETTERS or CORRESPONDENCE, PAST SELVES as AUTHORS, ARCHIVING, METAFICTION, COLLAGE, NONSENSE, SHORT FICTIONS, THE EDIT, PROGRESSION MIRROR, STORY, STORY HYBRID, INCOMPLETE STORY, INCOMPLETE THOUGHT, LISTS, REMINDERS, ART PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS, RULES, BEHAVIORAL SUGGESTIONS, QUESTIONS (to myself), CONVERSATIONS (with myself), descriptions of DREAMS, LAMENTATIONS, LEXICONS

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.