Good lord I write a lot of notes. I used to write them down in little notebooks that I stuffed into my purses and backpacks—notes from lectures, scraps of conversation I eavesdropped on the train, titles for poems I haven’t yet written, a list of foods the gastroenterologist said I should avoid. A whole big jumble of things that don’t go together. These days I most often use a software program, called “notes” or “stickies” or something like that, on either my phone or my laptop, whichever is on hand. The digital notes are just like the handwritten ones in that everything is thrown together, all the contents of my mind mingling awkwardly like guests at a wedding: So how do you know Katie? Oh, we go way back!
I’ve spent a few hours already this morning reading through a digital stack of these notes on my computer; they’re piled high, as it were, in a menu that’s 115 items deep. I’m digging through their contents in an attempt to use them for their intended purpose: To remind myself of ideas I had for writing projects. To my surprise, what I’m finding almost more interesting than the ideas is the notes themselves.
So far I have found: sequencing plans for the anthology I edited last year; tips on growing lavender; and a letter to my previous therapist, never sent, that I can’t bring myself to read just now. There’s also another, shorter letter that I wrote to a doctor whose method of questioning made me feel unsafe, and who I accused of not being trauma-informed. I don’t remember whether I sent this letter, but I have a feeling I did. I wonder if she received it, read it, did anything about it. I also wonder why my own recent memories feel as slippery in my mind as half-remembered dreams.
At the top of one note, for no apparent reason, I’ve written a line inspired by a meme from a few years ago that has already stopped getting passed around: I’m neither joking nor serious, but a secret third thing.
In another note, I found a transcript of text comments from the last meeting of my beloved qi gong class, which I took over Zoom during the pandemic lockdowns. Everyone chimed in at the end to share what they’d gotten out of the class, and I copied the comments because I was already missing the people, already feeling the future loss of our weekly meetings.
(5:48 PM) this has been a wonderful healing experience
(5:52 PM) Rest is as valuable as movement.
(5:52 PM) possibilities, energy, kindness
Yet another note is a bullet-pointed list of tasks I needed to do to prepare for an upcoming trip, most of which were unsurprising. But I ended the list with this grandiose statement: Set up backyard for ultimate success. What on earth could I have meant by this? My small garden out back is as rangy as ever—the lemon balm is bursting out everywhere, including cracks in the stone wall behind it—and I consider that it is always successful, quite without my intervention. Stuff grows, it dies back, the wheel keeps turning. In the meantime, I get to enjoy looking at (and smelling, and sometimes eating) the things that grow there. What other metric of ultimate success could there be?
It’s funny, looking at old notes you’ve written. You want to think that the thing you call your memory is like a recording device, and that everything you’ve experienced is in there, in sequence, accurate and reliable. A written note is intended to evoke the moment you thought of something, and bring all the details back to mind. But it doesn’t, always, does it? Where do those memories go?
I’ve been writing and publishing things like articles and reviews for many years now, long enough that I know the strange sensation of reading something with my name on it that I don’t really remember writing. This forgetting is an opportunity to meet the person I was when I wrote it. I often enough feel proud of her, the way I do when I meet any sweetly ambitious young person, and think: You’ve got something here! Keep going! But because they are fragmentary by nature, my jotted notes and lists, even recent ones, can seem less familiar than my decades-old book reviews. Who was this person who wrote these things down? And why did she do it?
One of the notes I read this morning is titled simply THINGS TO DO IN NOVEMBER (2022). Directly under a list of places I planned to look for editing jobs, I’d written a quote from Wim Wender’s gorgeous, poetic movie Wings of Desire, in the original German. (I’m always trying to keep current with my classroom German.) “Der traum vom haus im haus.” It means The dream of the house within the house, and it’s part of a longer meditation on ordinary things that are also transcendent, which is a major theme of the film:
Der traum vom haus im haus. / The dream of the house within the house.
Der schlafende Nächste im Nebenraum. / The sleeping neighbor in the neighboring room.
Die Ruhe des Sonntags. / The quiet of Sunday.
Der Horizont. / The horizon.
Der Lichtschein vom Zimmer im Garten. / The light from the room in the garden.
Das Nachtflugzeug. / The night plane.
Das Freihändig-Radfahren. / The hands-free bike ride.
Die schöne Unbekannte. / The beauty of the unknown.
The dream of the house within the house. I’m not sure why I took down that line in particular, when all of these are so evocative. Most likely, I simply loved the way it sounded in German and wanted to remember it; because it’s a poem it sounds more beautiful in the original language, and that beauty invites you to repeat and ponder it. It’s probably also the case that I didn’t fully grasp its meaning and wanted to think about it some more. This is what I make of it now:
A house is an inanimate object. The poem is talking specifically about a house (haus) and not a home (which is heim in German). A home, in contrast, is intangible, an idea or a feeling. We make houses into homes with the living that we do in them. If the object that is a house has a “dream,” it’s of the home within it; the home, in other words, is a thing dreamed into existence. This is the magic of intention: of wishes, plans, and jotted-down notes. Our dreaming alone doesn’t make anything happen, but without it nothing ever will.
I have so many notebooks filled (I 'm old school) and just can't bring myself to throw them away. It's a clusterfuck, really.
I use ColorNote on my phone. There are a LOT of grocery lists - more inventory than a shopping list. Christmas cards and gifts lists. Notes on people/friends/vendors.