A Little Q And A (Part Two)
INTERVIEW CONTINUED FROM LAST BLOG POST (1/10/19)
WGAT–So, you write in a journal every day in longhand with pen, paper and notebook, right?
GDUDE–I do. Definitely an anomaly in these digital days. Not sure why I chose that. I think I knew that the haptic nature of pen to paper would feel more attached to me and more personal and more from my heart, without the mediation of keyboard and monitor. Hemingway said he wished he could carve his novels in wood and I know what he meant.
WGAT–Haptic?
GDUDE–Relating to the sense of touch. It was a new word to me, too, a year ago. I plead guilty to loving the feel of a new cool word in my mouth, like Tolkien did.
WGAT–OK, so you got the haptic Hemingway thing.
GDUDE–Right, it’s kinesthetic and visceral and muscular and caffeinated and edgy. I’ve been through a lot of pens and many pounds of notebook paper. I’ve written in different rooms and in different seasons and in different moods and states of mind and I’ve written in the morning. At some point I decided to alternate blue and black ink. One day black, the next blue, then back to black and so on. There’s some serious heft now to all the old pages and there’s some real height when they’re in a pile. It feels substantial, a body of work. I’ve never re-read it all, though I’ve looked at certain sections and passages and dates.
I’ve made notes on the weather and jotted down observations on big events of the time and little happenings in our neighborhood and garden and about why I love my old moldy motheaten balaclava. I have spilled coffee and dribbled oatmeal and peanut butter on pages. There’s even some blood from mystery cuts. I’ve written about how hard it is to start writing on many days and the tricks I’ve used to begin.
WGAT–Did you have a model for how to do a gratitude journal?
GDUDE–I don’t remember ever seeing one, at least one sustained over a long period of time. All I knew to do was just start listing stuff I was grateful for every day. Mostly, I’ve sought to just look at my days through the eyes of gratitude at dawn, making up the form as I went along.
I have also learned about just letting the path reveal itself. That’s what writing this journal has been like, the way Antonio Machado expressed it–
“Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road– Only tracks on the ocean foam.”
Writing like this, sorta free form, and screw it to whatever it sounds like, has often helped me calm down. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. It must bleed out a little of the pressure, these cursive little lines uncoiling from this pen. PSSSST….relax. I don’t have to say everything right now.
WGAT–You’ve written a good deal about how writing about gratitude is another kind of mindfulness.
GDUDE–Writing absolutely helps me be mindful. That comes to mind almost like an apology or justification for my nearly life-long habit of making notes on everything, wherever I go, like burdock clinging to corduroy, whatever seems important to me, in the moment, for whatever reason. I like to think I’m being all Kerouac, the way he kept his sketchbooks. I don’t know what, if anything, these notes add up to or could be, but I know this–they have been a way for me to be more mindful and intentional. I’m not sure why I must make notes (it almost feels DNA-level, deeper even than habit), but more mindfulness and gratitude has absolutely been a byproduct.
Sometimes I feel like a furtive smoker, looking for a place to quickly light up. I need to stop and jot stuff down, in the same way, just as furtively, after holding ideas in my memory, until the list is too long, just like going too long between butts.
TO BE CONTINUED
