(When you return to the pages of your own journal, you are someone else; so if you weren't writing especially for others, you may find that you don't understand yourself. Or: that now to understand yourself calls for much the same kind of thing as trying to understand someone else.)

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.

There is a new RSS feed for this blog. It doesn't work perfectly yet.

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?)