The tenth-century Japanese court lady Sei Shonagon kept a writer’s notebook in which she recorded a miscellaneous catch-all of things charming and annoying, rhapsodic descriptions of nature, odd facts, and malicious observations of her countrymen. She claimed to be chagrined when it was discovered and read, though a part of her must, at least subconsciously, have had readers in mind all along. Now considered an indispensable classic, Shonagon’s The Pillow Book was also, if you will, an early blog.
Writing is one way of self-making. That a would-be author often nurtures to life a professional literary voice, as Sei Shonagon did, through the act of keeping a notebook, is a phenomenon to which many writers in this sparkling, splendidly useful anthology bear witness. These essayists find numerous ways to pay homage to their notebooks, which they describe metaphorically as: a laboratory, a mirror, a brainstorming tool, an icebreaker, a wailing wall, a junk drawer, a confessional, a postcard to oneself, singing in the shower, a playground for the mind, a jump-start cable, a memory aid, an archive, an anthology, a warehouse, a tourist’s camera, a snooping device, a role-playing arena, an observation-sharpener, a survival kit, a way of documenting mental illness, a meditation practice, masturbation, a witness stand, a therapist, a housekeeper, a spiritual advisor, a compost bin, a punching bag, a sounding-board, a friend.
Such sweet-natured gratitude is expressed to these journals, as though their coming to be filled with words were an accident of grace performed by someone else, like a genie! The writer and the journal-keeper are sometimes two, companionate, sometimes one, indivisible. Oh, there is the occasional resentful note, the fear of surrendering your life to the practice of journaling, of being lured into narcissism, hypergraphia, or gruesome addiction. And there are the lingering uncertainties: should the notebook be spiral or bound? A book or computer file? Written in every day or only when the mood strikes? Performed in private or in public, at home or at a library or cafe? Is a writer’s journal a separate literary genre, to be parsed by scholars, or just a more pretentious diary? Should the prose be rough, untrammeled, uncensored, or artfully composed, like finger exercises for a pianist? Arguments can be made on either side; and, generally speaking, every side turns up in these pages.
I salute the editor of this valuable collection, Diana M. Raab, who has done such a sensitive job of gathering these diverse, eloquent, and experienced voices, and encouraging their thoughtful, heartbreaking, rambunctious, free flights of testimony and speculation into being. Freedom is a frequent theme in these pages. The freedom to try out things, to write clumsy sentences when no one is looking, to be unfair, immature, even to be stupid. No one can expect to write well who would not first take the risk of writing badly. The writer’s notebook is a safe place for such experiments to be undertaken.
Above all, the writer’s notebook is an invitation to the Muse. The phonic similarity between the words muse and musing seems suddenly to make perfect sense. We call to our better self (another name for Muse) with these intimate scribbles.
Phillip Lopate