“Writing is one way of self-making (…) The writer’s notebook has been variously compared to a laboratory, a mirror, a brainstorming tool, an icebreaker, a wailing wall, a junk drawer, a confessional, a postcard to oneself, a singing in the shower, a jump-start cable, an aide-mémoire, an archive, an anthology, a warehouse, a tourist’s camera, a snooping device, a sharpener of observation, a survival kit, a way of documenting mental illness, a meditation practice, a masturbation, a therapist, a spiritual adviser, a compost bin, a punching bag, a sounding board, a friend.
(…)
Freedom is the giddy promise of writers’ journals: freedom to try out things, to write clumsy sentences when no one is looking, to be prejudiced, even stupid. No one can expect to write well who will not first take the risk of writing badly. The writer’s notebook is a safe place for such experiments.” — Phillip Lopate
I was just reading this in Lopate’s book on the craft of literary non-fiction, which reminded me of a piece I wrote in a flash of a persona inspired by a friend who is a writer and carries many notebooks at all times.
He has, in fact, been carrying notebooks since way before we met. He keeps his writing in the confines of those pages or transcribes them into music. It’s inspired me to carry notebooks around too, and engage in the singular pleasure of coming up with ‘clumsy sentences’ on-the-go, or to improvise collective poems with people who never write poems. It makes for great clumsy poems that often sound like slurred à-la-Beat prose at best.
There is a charm to scribbled nonsense. One can excavate deep meaning from random meanderings; proof that meaning can be found, or fabricated, out of a string of nothingness (how existentialist!)
Anyway, here it is.
He’s so free
He’s so free, he goes where the wind takes him and he doesn’t even know which way the wind blows, how it blows, why it blows. He only knows there is such a thing as wind, and he is the kind of person that would notice that it’s lovely how the wind is invisible, but it’s there, you know? Like language. He knows that because he’s so free
He’s so free, but I don’t even know if he knows it, if he feels it in his bones, if he thinks about it as deeply as he ponders other things in life, like: is suffering for art worth it?—or if he even likes it. ‘Suffering’ for ‘Art’. Does he? It’s something I’ve asked recently, but I wonder if he can answer, given that he’s so free.
He’s so free, and he inspires me to write so freely, like this. He probably doesn’t know it yet and will probably never even read this poem and even if he does I wonder if he’d recognize himself. It’s not like I’ve given much away but the volatility of his being, probably because he’s so free.
He’s so free, and I wonder whether more details resolve to be written because they’re here to paint a picture. To paint a picture of a person so free.
He’s so free. He carries notebooks, pages smudged with ash, and poetry, too. He usually doesn’t know what tomorrow brings but he likes it like that, he likes it but also he needs to have some sort of plan, some skeleton of what tomorrow may bring because without that skeleton, he’s afraid of disintegrating into the dust of his skeletons, and maybe that’s a reasonable thing to be afraid of.
He doesn’t even wear his heart on his sleeves because it’s plastered on his face; even if he says he doesn’t believe in love, doesn’t understand the word, has never said I love you to someone—even when he couldn’t say that it wasn’t love, either. But his heart is still on his face and he parades it around aware or unaware that it’s what people see first, but if he is aware he wouldn’t care because he’s usually content in his scribbling. He juggles words around and sometimes recites them to people or makes music out of them and around them, then he asks his audience to scribble some down too because he’s so free and we’re all free people.
Then he moves along, somewhere else, someplace better or someplace worse, because that’s not the reason he goes places. He’s not seeking a better or a worse place—although something can be said about our tendency to always be moving to where we believe is a better place—at least that’s the kind of thing we’d talk about. But he moves along because that’s all he can do, that’s where he can go at this particular moment in time, point in space, space of mind; and he brings his notebooks and scraps of other people along with him because he’s so free.