A note-maker's anxiety

Friday Fragment #34

A few months ago, I was listening to an interview with a musician. It was a radio broadcast. I was in the car with my wife. We were on our way to collect our daughter from the airport. These details are somewhat immaterial for you (the reader), but helpful for me (the writer), in that they aid the recall of a memory, tether it to time, place and person, and thus help to fix its significance and sensation. In short, these details are aspects of the craft of note-making and this small essay is about just that. In the interview, the musician was discussing how he writes lyrics, a methodology that begins often with the most random-looking notes, jotted fast and crude, ink onto paper: words from which shape, meaning, rhythm – ‘his art’ – have still to be formed. He added that his wife has made him a solemn promise to destroy these notebooks should he die before her. His horror was that someone might see the beginnings of a thought, prior to any development or revision, naked, without any finishing lacquer: that they might see the spit and sawdust of his craft, not merely the polished end result. Or, indeed: they might see the more glossy origins of something that would eventually reach its completion more roughly hewn, which needed to be pitted and jagged and coarse to the touch. For earlier drafts can too quickly be too finely polished and need texture and bluntness added because sometimes the chisel can improve greatly on the work of the pumice. The scrambled words of the note-maker can be rough, ragged and non-linear and yet still make sense (and only make sense) to the author that returns to them. They need not be beautiful – they are sometimes so much more powerful when they are not yet so – so long as they take the writer back to a point of original inspiration, to a fledgling idea or a bridging device that requires further formulation. Speed is the note-maker’s friend – a gift to the writer whose premises he shares who needs to capture flowing thoughts, but works most days underneath that creative faucet holding a bucket with a hole in its base. Pretension and dissonance linger large in the quickly scribbled note; words that jut out and jar like ugly indentations in a sheet of metal. They require two or three soft taps of the writer’s hammer – and sometimes a hundred or so more – to eventually render them smooth. And again, sometimes, the fierce blow and smash of that same hammer can liberate the writer from what has become the most turgidly boring mechanical prose. I once heard it said of Orwell’s writing that you can hear him thinking as you read. I think that’s true of one our great contemporary essayists, too: Rebecca Solnit. Within notebooks, those thoughts are sometimes yet to be joined up or added to. Sometimes, several things can be woven together (Solnit’s great skill). Sometimes, you start with a lifeless lump of clay and attach more clay to it; sometimes with a block of wood or marble and begin chipping away. People, creatives especially, enjoy seeing the genesis of a work, the seed of an idea. They are fascinated to know that the most iconic madeleine in all of world literature was first drafted by Proust as a slice of toast with tea. Without a shared discovery of notebooks, loose papers and scribbled thoughts, we would not have Pessoa’s most wonderful work on what it is to be human. Were it not for a trusted partner going against a writer’s wishes, we would have Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but not The Trial and The Castle. Camus’ incomplete last novel contains perhaps his most beautiful writing: the unfinished manuscript was pulled from the wreckage of the car crash which killed him. Perhaps the notes that remain hidden, the drafts that are superseded and the writing that we don’t share are so powerful because they contain more of someone or something to whom or which we have already assigned a measure of value or distinction. And if not that, then we know that we are also curious and prying, and both jealous and mistrusting, and so notebooks, and their scrawl and their ciphers, and their good and bad grammar, and their original insights and even their part-time plagiarism are what make each of us uniquely a self that is interesting to another.

‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter. Sometimes it arrives on Saturday or Sunday, which is fine: Friday was always intended to denote the week’s end. On rare occasions, it turns up on a Tuesday, and I lament that that previous working week never did quite recognisably end.