Day 51: The World on the Page: On Keeping a Journal, Part Two

My best journals are lived in.  They're stained with coffee and wine, a little greasy from croissant crumbs and cheese.  And they take place in the present tense.  I can open up a page and I'm there again--at the fountain square in Cassis where I drank a cappuccino and indulged in a whole lot of people-watching, the market just behind it with a stall of surprisingly large skirts, the café overlooking the sea where a cherry tomato from my fish platter went flying across the room and the waiter winked at me solemnly and said, "Je l'ai vu," I saw that.  That week I did a lot of people-watching.  I wrote about the middle-aged motorcycle mamas, still hotties, in their way, whose greetings to one another were so boisterous, the cheek-kisses so exuberant I could hear the smack from a few feet away. 

I was so happy that week, even though I was on vacation by myself and was homesick for my husband and my dog.  I knew I would probably be writing about Cassis someday, and I realized that if I wanted to remember that scene again, I would have to look down too, to remember the ground beneath my feet.  I didn't used to do this.  And I saw that the street was pink, all tiled, a fine, glinty pink, and I wanted to take off my sandals and feel the stone against my skin.  I hadn't noticed this when I was walking up the street looking for somewhere to drink coffee and write in my journal. 

I dug through that journal the other day when I wrote about the dog I saw in Cassis waiting for its person to come back from the market.  I would have forgotten the details if I hadn't written it down.

(Day 49: What the Dog Sees in Him).

Sometimes, at the end of the day, I can record enough to remember it later.  It's just a skeletal sketch, really.  We went here.  We did this.  But I'm always happier with the result when I just plop myself somewhere and open my journal and try to take what the English art critic, John Ruskin, once called "word-pictures".  I want to feel the world on my skin and to see it again like I'm watching the movie, or better yet, like I've transported myself there again.  I want to inhale it and taste again what was on my plate.

Here are two passages from nonfiction writers I love, Patricia Hampl and Frances Mayes, whom I think would not be able to write the exquisite memoirs they craft unless they kept journals and brought them with them everywhere.

Near the end of Blue Arabesque, Patricia Hampl writes from the balcony of her apartment in Cassis about what she hopes to remember about a season of four months she has spent in France, about what she wants to take with her back to her home in Minnesota.  She writes:

Beyond the flowers and sea-foam, there is always a wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee smell coming from the cafés that ring and define the harbor, and brief puffs of gasoline from the delivery vans and Vespas that go by . . .

Sitting here, a person without any employment except to look, I have an uncanny sense that things here in this light, the world itself and all its haphazard parts, have a way of coming together to form something—the sun, the lick of the morning air off the sea, the ruined medieval château on the crown of the bluff across the harbor almost effaced in the light, insubstantial but enduring like the past as it recedes and enriches itself in the mind.  (186-190)

And here is Frances Mayes in Lisbon, from A Year in the World:

We leave and meander until we're lost in the Alfama: the labyrinthine historic Arab quarter.  You'd need to drop stones to find your way back to where you started.  Arm's-width streets twist, climb, double back, drop.  Whitewashed houses with flowering pots and crumbling ruins with gaping courtyards open to small plazas with birds competing in the trees for the best song of the morning--a soulful neighborhood for spending your days.  If I lived in Lisbon, I would choose to live here. . . Open this door and find the memory of a Muslim mathematician consulting his astrolabe, pass this walled garden and imagine the wives of the house gathered around the fountain under the mimosa. . .

Colors: Islamic turquoise, curry, coral, bone white, the blue layers of the sea.  The scents of baking bread, wet stones, and fish frying at outdoor stands.  The aromas of coriander and mint and big stews and roast pork emanating from the small neighborhood restaurants, the tascas.  As we wait, I admire a walnut cake with caramel frosting served to a man across from us.  He sees this and reaches over for my fork, handing me back a large bite of his dessert.  The waiter brings platters of fish fried in a gossamer, crispy batter,  and a spicy eggplant the old Moors would have loved.  We are astonished.  Here's the real local food.  (83-4)

My travel journals are rarely this vivid, but when they are, they remind me anew that rushing through a place, seeing as much as you can and checking things off a list, is not the way to make them live on in your memory forever.

In this picture below, Kerry and Zoe and I were exploring what was left of the village of Montaillou, in the Cathar region of Languedoc we both love so much.  The Cathars were a heretical Christian sect who were killed by the Pope's armies during the Albigensian Crusades beginning in 1209, and were later burned at the stake during the Inquisition.  Among the reasons they were considered heretics was that they didn't believe you needed to go to a church to feel the presence of God.  I'm writing about the Cathars in my novel and in some of my travel memoir.  They fascinate me.

In this one village, the heretics managed to hang onto their faith a century after all the Cathars had supposedly been exterminated.  They kept their secret for a long time, but they were found out at last.

Zoe and Kerry and I looked for ghosts, but we didn't find any.  Instead, we ate a good picnic and watched the grass move in the wind, and took a nap.  It was a day of quiet, stillness, and contemplation, savory tasting and lazing, and when I look at this journal, I'm so happy to remember that we were there.

This is kind of scrapbooky/dorky, but I always stick postcards in my journal of the places I go, which you can see on the left-hand page, so that I have a reference point for what I'm writing.  Maybe it's cheating, but it helps me remember.

Day 50: Being Alive Twice: On Keeping a Journal, Part One

When our mother was dying, my sister and I found the key to the self-storage place out near Kamms Corner in Cleveland and we found our childhoods and hers stashed in there, in piles and drawers, boxes and under sheets.  It was like she'd been keeping a hope chest, nurturing the hope that one day her girls would come home.  Old report cards.  Toys.  Photo albums.  Letters.  Books.

(I just want to inject here the fantastic news that my sister, Mira Bartok, is up for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Libraries' Association Award for her beautiful memoir, The Memory Palace, in which this storage locker plays a very large part, as does our mother's diaries.)

Among those sweet and heartbreaking items was my diary from age 13 to 17.  It was one of those small, red ones girls used to have: the kind you close up with a little lock you can wear on a chain around your neck like a locket with a heart.  Our mother had picked it open long ago, trying to get clues, I suppose, as to who I was as a teenager and who I was consorting with long after the fact.  I don't envy her trying to figure it out.  The story keeps changing.  Now and then--well, every other page--a new boy's name comes up.  I don't have the book in front of me, but trust me, it's all along the lines of, Bob is so cute!  Dave is a hunk!  Gary gave me a ride on his motorcycle!  And then the one that made me smile when I read it again: I like meeting people from out of state!  I'd been working the counter at McDonald's and a bus-load of athletes from maybe Michigan came in, and I'd enjoyed chatting with them about their lives in that exotic, distant world.

I like meeting people from out of state.  Probably I meant boys from out of state.  Probably I just meant that I liked meeting boys.  But to say--"out of state"--that meant other places, other lands.  That was the closest I could get at that age to voicing this wish: I want to see the world.  That was what I really meant.  And even though my journal was tiny, and even though, in five years, I never filled it, I was asking for something that seemed at the time an improbable wish.  I wanted to get out there and see what there was to see.

Before I started writing this post a few minutes ago, I did an inventory of my journals.  I counted 66, but I'm sure some of them are stashed somewhere.  I don't look through them that much, and when I do it's because I'm writing a memoir piece or a travel essay and I want to check the facts.  Where did my husband eat goat?  What year was it, again?  But sometimes I can open a page and the world comes back.  That's when I know I wasn't as lazy and artless as I usually am in those pages.  I was being nice to my future self in the journal and helping ensure that reading it, to quote the poet Linda Gregg, who was quoting her former lover, the poet, Jack Gilbert: "was like being alive twice."

"More world, just when you think you've seen what there is to see."  Mark Doty writes in Still Life with Oysters and Lemons when he's discussing both a painting he loves, and about "coming back to life after a period of grief."  I'm not currently in a period of mourning, but I know I will be.  And I imagine there's a time when you see the world in black and white and gray, and then one day color returns.  And it comes with the desire to see what there is to see just around you.  He writes:

Desire brings us back.  My exuberant, golden new dog, racing down the sand slopes of Beech Forest toward me, sheer embodiment of eagerness, given over entirely to running, wind streaming his long ears back, his eyes filling with me.  The roses, in June, which deck the front of this house in a flaring pink crescendo of bloom, old roses, dense flowerheads packed with petals, with handsome and evocative names: Eden, Constance Spry, Madame Grégoire Staechelin.  The startling quality of presence in Paul's eyes, when they are suddenly direct, warm blue-brown, catching lamplight.  The particular whole-body enthusiasm with which he gives himself over to something he loves, outcries of delight that know no reservations--for Joni Mitchell singing a moody ballad, for the sight of our old retriever, Arden, sitting poised in the falling snow, completely happy, his dense black curls gone arctic.

The world on the page.  To be able to bring that back.  To see and smell those roses years later, and to trace the patterns of white snow on the dog's black head after she has been rolling in it.  Or to capture Zoe's stillness--how she stares at the river for hours and hours.

It's like walking through the world living it twice already--in your body and your senses, fully, completely--and on your stenographer's pad.  Hello world, you say.  I'm taking dictation.

I've been trying to figure out how to do this, while not excusing myself and excluding myself from that life itself, the life I want to be awake for--in the iced-over garden, in the snow with the dog staring at the river.

And I still like meeting people from out of state.