Splash No. 207 - Empty Notebooks

Empty Notebooks

Whenever I’m in an uncomfortable patch of life I usually push myself towards two actions: reading more and writing more. I imagine a more bookish self, constantly scribbling notes with one hand and holding a novel to my face with the other. I can’t tell you what I hope to achieve with this self — I know that I feel calmer when writing regularly, but often in a pensive distant way. When I was starting out as a writer, I believed that every successive word I wrote made me a better writer. Now, I’m unsure what a good writer is, as my grammar skills seem to dissolve and the quality of my work varies more than ever before. After reading more and more, my taste continues to change, and my favorite work from long ago becomes my least favorite. Maybe it isn’t just about quality of work though. Maybe with a large enough repository of words the world will become less inscrutable, days will become clearer, or I’ll be able to focus on the smell of the flowers on my daily walk.

As I dig around my room, in search of something or another, I stumble upon notebooks — dozens of dozens of them, gathered over the years a snowball constantly growing. Most are empty, some are partially filled, and in a bulging manila envelope, there are the ones that are completed, filled with inscrutable chicken scratch. The empty and partial represent new selves, the filled hold the potential for rediscovery, revisiting, reflection. These notebooks are all possibilities. 

With each new notebook, I run my fingers across the page, imagining how smoothly my pen will glide across it, thinking exactly what one stranger’s tweet says: “This is it. This is the notebook that will help me get my life together.” In his interview with Ruth Ozeki, Ezra Klein says “the promise of objects is more powerful than the objects themselves. That one reason shopping is so powerful is that an object itself is always— once you have it, then you have the disappointments of having it. It can become clutter. But before, it’s all promise.” 

I wonder when the promise of a notebook fades. Perhaps it’s upon the realization of how difficult it really is to bleed ink onto the page. It’s shocking to see how much the speed of the pen varies. In a work meeting or a class, pages are filled within minutes, while morning journaling takes eons to squeeze even the smallest thoughts into ink. The promise dims when I start to ask myself, “how could I ever hope to fill those endless white pages?” And the notebooks begin to gather dust, awaiting my evolution and tireless hand.

The notebook I currently write in is a sketchbook I bought for art class in middle school. Many pages have been ripped out and the binding grows weaker each day. Behind my notes about job interviews and design ideas lay sketches from my many attempts to learn how to draw over the years. I imagine that in the empty pages, traces of future sketches lay hidden. What if the page is more like a piece of marble, marks being made to reveal the beauty that already exists inside? What if the promise still remains, underneath the dust and past the discomfort of doing something a little frustrating? It never went away, it was just waiting for the right time.

Drops of the Week
 

• PLAYLIST - living purgatory - made a playlist of modern pop-punk inspired music that is particularly angsty

• ARTICLE - "Susan Cain Wants You to Stop Being So Positive and Start Thinking About Death" by Clay Skipper - "One of the biggest takeaways that I have from all these years of examining all these wisdom traditions, and artistic and literary traditions, is that the best thing that humans can do is transform pain into beauty."

• POEM - "Animal Languages" by Chase Twichell - "a long conversation that keeps breaking off..."

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Back once again,
Nikhil