Culture Slut: An Ode to Phone Notes
“Poetry incorporates seizure, silence, return, and recoil; it notes the pauses, doesn’t dismiss them.”A few years ago, I was visiting my grandmother and our conversation turned, as it often does, to the topic of her diaries. She has written diaries for around 80 years, from being a young teenager sent away during wartime right up to now, in her mid 90s. She writes everyday, recording her thoughts, musing on memories, writing poems and remembering lost friends. She travels through time and space with her writing, from her adult life in London, to her travels in the 40s to India and the Far East, to the parties on Greek islands she attended in the 60s and 70s, and everything in between. She knows no one will ever be able to read them all, but the act of writing them is what is empowering to her. She has always urged me to keep diaries, but as a long term commitment-phobe, it’s been difficult.
Too many times I’ve tried to start writing on a clean white page in a beautifully bound notebook, and too many times I’ve found myself intimidated by the expanse of space waiting to be filled, pages and days and moments stretching out from now to eternity, unforgiving and relentless. But recently, it all changed. I started looking through the notes I keep on my phone, trying to find the name of an author or a book I read a few years ago, and I found a treasure trove I’d never even considered before. I use my notes app sporadically, only when I find something that I know I’ll want to revisit later, names and dates of films, quotes from authors and actresses, and yet here was so much more! Funny jokes that my friends made, ideas I have for poems, the poems themselves, shopping lists, passages from books I’ve been reading, plans I have for upcoming days off, directions and instructions, song lyrics, fragments of dreams and accounts of nights out. My phone notes are my diary, and every so often I find myself diving into my own archives to find something exciting or shocking. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, I always keep my diary on me, as one must always have something sensational to read on the train.
“Poetry is the most figurative, the least literal of least imitative, of the arts. It is therefore the least marketable, the least useful to capitalism. Poetry runs interference: ideally, poetry confounds the law.”In running through my notes, fragments and fractures leap off the screen at me and linger in my mind. For this month’s column, I’ve strung a few of them together as a kind of stream-of-conciousness poem, in the spirit of Burroughs and Virginia Woolf. I’ve taken one or two lines from lots of separate entries and cobbled them together, keeping them in a reverse chronology. It starts with the most recent (maybe even some notes made about topics for this very column) and stretches back through holidays, lock-downs, difficult relationship conversations and therapy tasks. It is comprised of quotes, list entries, my own poetry, everything I’ve thought worthy of noting down.
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The experience compiling it was multifaceted, a flood of memories hitting at once, both good and bad. Lists of talking points I’d made to be discussed during possible-end-of-relationship negotiations. Personal history outlines for the sexual abuse therapy I attended for over three years. Poems I had written about the overwhelming emotions I was drowning in going through it. But ultimately, it’s very rewarding I think. Cathartic. I urge you all, dear readers, to do the same. Check through your phone notes, see if you find any hidden gems. Scour your calendars for past events you’d forgotten about, go through any written diaries you might still have and see what can be made from them by stitching them together in odd ways.
Words & Collages: Misha MN
