This morning I was flipping through my copy of the Bicycle Sentences Journalย that illustratorย Betsy Streeter sent me and I was quite taken with this final paragraph by Grant Petersen. (Iโm a big fan of his blog and Just Ride.)
He touches on why I keep a diary, why I keep itย on paper, and the magic of keeping a logbook. The mundane details can bring back sublime memories, andย what you think is boring now may be interesting in the future: โWhat seems bland when you write it downโฆ will seem epic in thirty years.โ
I have a new studio routine where when Iโm unsure of what to write about, I revisit my notebooks each yearย on todayโs date. (I have notebooks going back 20 years, daily logbooks going back 15, but Iโve kept a daily diary for 5 years now. Thatโs where a lot of gems are buried.)
Flipping through these notebooks will usually yield something worth writing about. (This morning, it was William Burroughs on language.)
Reading my diary this way, which I first learned from reading Thoreauโs diary, also shows me the cycles and patterns of my life.
(For example: Cocteau Twins and the beginning of spring are somehow intertwined in my life. What does that mean? And what does the fact that their lyrics are barely understandable mean when matched with the Burroughs? Spring is a season of rebirthโฆ When babies are new, they babble and make noise without languageโฆ do they sound like spring to me for this reason? You can see how these thoughts, none of which I had when I woke up this morning, come forth from just reading myself.)
Another way to think about it: Keeping a diary is being a good research assistant to your future self.
This is the advice that art critic Jerry Saltz has tweeted over the years:
Be a good assistant to yourself. Prepare and gather, make notations and sketches in your head or phone. When you work, ย all that mapping, architecture, research & preparation will be your past self giving a gift to the future self that you are now. That is the sacred.
Iโve never had an assistant. I am my own best assistant. My assistant-self is my past self loving my future self whoโll need this previous research when I reach for something in my work. My assistant-self has gotten ideas for whole articles, essays from minutes of research online.
Artists: The beautiful thing about giving yourself a little break & not working โ those are the times when new ideas flood in from the cosmos & set your โassistant selfโ in motion, the self that will be there for your โfuture-self.โ Curiosity and obsession always fill the vacuum.
Artists: Be your own best assistant. Do your research. Get your tools and materials in order. These will be the ancestors, spirit guides and self-replicating imagination of your work. This will allow art to reproduce itself in you. Youโll thank yourself during & afterwards.
I have my many moments of self-loathing at my own lack of progress, but one thing I have done right, at least in the past half decade or so: I have been a good assistant to my future self.
Joan Didion said of re-reading notebooks, โI think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be.โย This is especially true if they have bothered to preserve themselves so we can visit them later.
Yes, a diary is a good spaceship for time travel: for meditating on the present, flinging ourselves into the future, and visiting ourselves in the past.
Fromย Leonard Cohen: Iโm Your Man (2005):
If it is your destiny to be this laborer called a writer, you know that youโve got to go to work every day, but you also know thatย youโre not gonna get it every day. You have to be prepared, but you really donโt command the enterprise.
Sometimes when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise โ we somehow embrace the notionย that this vale of tears, that itโs perfectable โ youโre not gonna get it all straight.
I found thatย things got a lot easier when I no longer expected to winโฆ.
You understand that, you abandon your masterpiece, and you sink into the real masterpieceโฆ
And also: โYou have to write down what youโre going to abandon.โย
I loved Henrik Karlssonโs piece, โA blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.โ
He writes:
A blog post is a search query. You write to find your tribe; you write so they will know what kind of fascinating things they should route to your inbox. If you follow common wisdom, you will cut exactly the things that will help you find these people. It is like the time someone told the composer Morton Feldman he should write for โthe man in the streetโ. Feldman went over and looked out the window, and who did he see? Jackson Pollock.
So what do you write about to find your people?
You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.
If you do this, Karlsson says, โYou will write essays that almost no one likesโฆ.ย Luckily, almost no one multiplied by the entire population of the internet is plenty if you can only find them.โ
This is really a great summary of the best thing that writing and sharing your work can do for you.
One of the many things Lynda Barry has taught me: Ifย you donโt know what to write in your diary, you write the date at the top of the page as neatly and slowly as you can and things will come to you.
โGoing through the motionsโ is often thought of as a bad thing, but it is the artistโs great secret for getting started.
As I wrote in Steal Like an Artist:
If we just start going through the motions, if we strum a guitar, or shuffle sticky notes around a conference table, or start kneading clay, the motion kickstarts our brain into thinking.
Get your pen moving, and something will come out. (It might be trash, but it will beย something.)
For a comedic take on this, see: SpongeBob SquarePants.