How a journal works: in The Inward Morning, just one day after writing out a detailed description of fishing during a fresh trout run, which Bugbee says illustrates, 'as concretely as may be', a 'basic point... so strongly grasped' by Marcel about individuality and universality, he can write, almost as an aside at the close of the next entry:

'... once again, the ideas of individuality and universality come back to me, hand in hand. Earlier this day they were utterly lost to me, like empty word-shells.'

I take this as a testament to the great distance that can lie between what is expressed in a journal and what seeks expression. One day on, a pair of abstract words supposedly put to forceful use by someone else, and appropriated in that spirit by a writer to epitomize his own lived experience, recalled as vividly as one could wish, have become empty, hollow. You might say that they sound like someone else spoke them. That one day might seem like nothing; but I have often had the experience of paging back through a journal, even a day or two back, and feeling, not alienated or estranged exactly, but less familiar with the words written there than I used to be. Which I take to mean, out of touch with what led me to write them in the first place. Perhaps it's something like sharing a moment with someone from whom one naturally comes to settle back into a natural distance over time. Rather than thinking of yourselves as an 'us', you readily think of there being you, and him or her, and then this other thing, not even a pair of people exactly, but almost a configuration, frozen in the past with the mood of that moment. At any rate, something which has become distinct from each one of you now.

Think of what someone who keeps a journal must do to think of the amassed pages as held together by some sort of continuity of self. Especially when the writer exploits a journal's invitation to stand beside oneself, and to write with little concern to, say, get one's point across; to be heard; to be understood by someone else.

I'm surprised not to have found §119 of Dawn quoted more often; it expounds at uncharacteristic length on the talk of 'drives' that elsewhere in Nietzsche can seem to border on the precariously vague:

'…With every moment of our lives some of the polyp-arms of our being grow and others dry up, depending on the nourishment that the moment does or does not supply. As stated before, our experiences are, in this sense, types of nourishment—seeds sown, however, with a blind hand devoid of any knowledge as to who hungers and who already has abundance. And as a consequence of this contingent alimentation of the parts, the whole, fully grown polyp turns out to be a creature no less contingent than is its maturation. Said more clearly: Suppose a drive finds itself at the point where it desires gratification—or the exercise of its energy, or the discharge of it, or the satiation of an emptiness—it's all a matter of speaking in images—: then it observes each of the day's occurrences with a view as to how to make use of them for its own end: whether a person be moving or still or angry or reading or speaking or fighting or rejoicing, the drive, in its thirst, fingers, as it were, every situation the person gets into and, on the average, finds nothing there for itself; it must wait and thirst all the more: a little while longer and it grows faint, a few days or months more of no gratification and then it withers up like a plant without rain. Perhaps this cruelty of chance would spring to mind more vividly if all drives wanted to take matters as seriously as does hunger: which refuses to be appeased by dream food; most drives, however, especially the so-called moral ones, do exactly that: if you will permit my suspicion that our dreams have precisely the value and meaning of compensating to a certain degree for that contingent absence of "nourishment" during the day.…'

My interest was especially captured by the offhand caveat: 'it's all a matter of speaking in images'.

I'm writing an essay on philosophical journals. Lord knows I have plenty of notebooks around, but when I got to a certain point in my essay I had for some reason to go to the store and buy a blank notebook to hold in my hand, like I needed to look at it to imagine what it's like to write in one. A little like Thoreau buying farms, maybe.

A woman, a customer, came to the counter in the coffeeshop: 'Would you mind keeping my kale in your refrigerator?'. I can remember, several years ago, buying a big bag of nice cheese and then stopping at the Second Moon to write; I had to ask M. to keep the cheese in their refrigerator.

Lots of similar cases:

'My uncle just gave us a ton of venison. Can we use your freezer?'

At a table, or perhaps on a bench, in public: 'Do you mind if I set this here for a moment?'.

'Will you keep this in your pocket?' ('Your purse?')

'Can I park my car in your garage until I get back?'

'I need a place to keep my files while I reformat my hard drive, can you give me space on your account?'

'I just need to stash my (gun, dope, dead body) in your place (trunk, garage) while…'

'OK, remember this number for a minute: two three one…'

'Will you remind me that I have to…'

The woman with the kale had to joke about remembering to get the kale back. Or maybe the barista did. Someone had to, pretty much, given what they were doing.

A white truck stops in front of the coffeeshop; it fills every inch of window at the storefront. Inside the light becomes blinding. The room becomes a field of light.

When the truck leaves the room is thrown into darkness.

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Said of Sontag, a use for a notebook: 'grounding'.

(One of Cavell's favorite, methodologically salient words, 'response', probably suggests how one ought to start in diagramming his work. Does it seem like such a diagram would be awfully close to the text itself, in some way, in contrast to a diagram for someone like Descartes, where the ideas of 'the order of being', 'the order of reasons', and their possible divergences from the order the Meditations actually take, would seem to license a great distinction between the diagram and the text?)

Frye says that to some extent 'structure' and 'system' are synonyms of 'diagram', so of course I had to consult the OED to get a feel for the etymology. I'm surprised to find that the Greek diagramma (see the LSJ and Middle Liddell entries here) has the uses:

I. 1. that which is marked out by lines, a figure, a plan, or 2. a geometrical figure, diagram; II. a written list, register; III. a decree, edict.

For the second sense, an obsolete one for 'diagram' in English, the OED has 'a list, register, or enumeration; a detailed inscription; also, 'the title of a booke', and its citation from 1631 is about monument inscriptions: 'An Epitaph is..an astrict pithie Diagram, writ..vpon the tombe..declaring..the name, the age..and time of the death of the person therein interred'.

(Then there is diagrammizo (LSJ here), 'divide by lines: hence, play at checkers'.)

I find this surprising because I had been thinking about what one might say about the presence of the diagrammatic in certain forms of prose, where a literal diagram with the pictorial clarity of something like Plato's line doesn't automatically suggest itself. You do get the sense that for philosophical writing with a metaphysical ambition and aiming for a certain degree of transparency in its 'view' of the world (not just words in a book, or words expressing thoughts, but words that are a means for the recognition of what really is, what exists, in the world), diagrams concerning an author's ontology can naturally be read off their writing. And they needn't even be dictated; there is plenty of choice about what one might wish to represent in such a diagram. Taking after a teacher of mine, I often represent Descartes' ontology with a table, mainly so I can represent the dependencies of certain kinds of things (modes, finite substances) on others (finite substances, infinite substances). I suppose if one wanted, a diagram of the meditator's self, or mind, and its contents, could easily be made. Spinoza, same sort of thing.

What gave me pause, in thinking this way, was trying to apply similar thoughts to someone like Kant, someone at least within the ambit of easily diagrammable early moderns, but also someone to whose thought this notion of transparency seems iffy to apply. It's been a long time since anyone tried to teach me any Kant, but I still recall the difficulty they had representing the idea of the self, or at least the 'I', that is supposed to fall out of the transcendental deduction. Likewise their attempts at drawing screens between the knowing subject and the things themselves, or between some sort of formless manifold and the subject, or at somehow representing the field of experience as structured by categories provided by the subject; and woe at any attempt that seemed to suggest we had better hide a thing-in-itself somewhere back behind some other part of the diagram, a fat scribbled dot or an X or a question mark. Kant's own tactic in §16 seems telling: 'It must be possible for the "I think" to accompany all my representations...' sidesteps any pictorially diagrammatic aspirations in favor of the discursively logical, the linguistic. And as far as I know anything about Kant (gossip, hallway talk, summer reading), there's nothing inappropriate about treating him as logic-centric, in a broad sense, and in a way that harmonizes with my feeling that the notion of transparency (of prose as a window to the world) does not suit him.

So far so good. What gave me pause was the obvious thought, in connection with Kant, that his logic-centricity ends up somehow being the complement to the shape his prose takes, the multiply articulated structure of the first Critique, the array of terminology that coordinates somehow with that structure, the legalistic way its sentences unfold, the large sections whose aim is to give arguments about arguments (rather than, say, arguments about things). It seems that an unsurprising effect of all this is that 'diagrams' of Kant's thought tend to look like his writing, like the complicated tables of contents - in fact, like the diagrammatic devices he preferred, tables and parallel columns and such.

Well, that didn't give me pause. But what did was: appreciating that something like this hyper-articulation of the verbal means of philosophical writing seems characteristic of a lot of philosophical writing after Kant, what might one think about the possibilities for extracting diagrams from this writing, when it lacks that complement to the prose, the logic at the heart of the project? There, at least, efforts at diagramming, however complicated or multipart they might get, seem to enjoy the promise of bottoming out, or at least terminating, in something solid, or at least appreciably limited, graspable: lists of categories, forms of judgment. (Imagine the attraction this must have.) Past a certain point, once logic becomes dissociated enough from traditional categories, this rooting down in logic even seems to mean that the diagrams come themselves to populate the philosophical writing, almost to infect it down to the word, letter, symbol. So far so good; one can always suppose that the surface appearance of modern philosophical prose diagrams out in terms of what it has to say about such structures, or what is expressible in such structures. But... what if an author is something more like Wittgenstein, or something more like Cavell? Where should efforts to diagram their thought seize upon the terms to be represented and related in diagrammatic form?

I ask because I've got two thoughts in mind. One is that when Frye includes 'chapters' and the whole rhetorical apparatus of prose-navigation - one of my favorite tools, or starting points, for investigating the poetics of any prose - I have the sense that he's not wrong - even what is thoroughly, conventionally rhetorical about a text, and even what it it borders on or meets up with the paratextual, is somehow diagrammatic - but that these are features of a text's diagrammatic character that should properly be subsidiary to whatever has most to do with its dianoia, its thought (Frye likes to gloss this as 'meaning' in Anatomy, which is fair enough in connection with the interpretation of philosophical writing, too).

The other thought is that, for certain kinds of philosophical writers, what you are likely to come up with when you seek diagrammatic structure in their writing is just the sort of stuff that has to do with the shape of the text more than the shape of the thought. And if that shape of the text does not seem to subtend 'an argument', as for example I think the Investigations does not and as Part Four of The Claim of Reason makes no pretense toward doing, then to what avail would someone writing about such a text (e.g. me) try to capture something of that shape for the purposes of communicating something of the workings or the effect of the text to one's own readers?

The surprising thing about the etymology of 'diagram' is that it invites retrieval of the sense that there's nothing particularly distinguished about the at base Platonic notion of the diagrammatic, as a permanent kind of relation among elements of thought or elements of the world, such as might serve as the typical referent of philosophical writing - nothing particularly distinguished about this as against the notion of a list, of stuff that is together just in that it is all written here in the same place, side by side or one after the other, and otherwise together because of what the list-maker means by making a list, not necessarily because of something about its items (conceived independently of the list-maker or the list-reader) or the relations between them. (Shades of Foucault's Borges.) A sequence is not a list, but there seems to be some affinity between them. And a great many of the forms of prose I would like to say are nondiagrammatic are also fundamentally sequential. Though perhaps they would seem more diagrammatic if I were to represent them using selves and readers, acts and lives.