'Try to Make Something New'

Almost the only thing I ever write down so I don’t forget it is the grocery list. Sporadically I kept a diary when younger but each time the essential tedium of recording quotidian events defeated me. I discovered that most of my own life, the practical stuff that consumes so much of my time, is too trivial to preserve. And I didn’t reread these ghastly transcripts of the day’s events and my precious reflections anyway. Some things are meant to be forgotten. I no longer keep a commonplace book. I find that my memory of what I have read remains fairly reliable. Kay Ryan speaks for me in her essay “Notes on the Danger of Notebooks”: 

“We must run roughshod over what threaten to become memories. For the truth is that memories are indistinguishable from matter in that they can neither be created (despite the claims of vacation brochures) nor destroyed.”

 

Ryan’s ruthlessness I’ve always found refreshing. As a poet she combines a drily comic tone with philosophical heft and a well-oiled bullshit detector. She defies us to take her seriously, when we’d rather laugh her out of the room. She continues:

“For of course it is only within the context of loss that anything can be said to be found. That seems ridiculously obvious, and yet we struggle against it. And isn't finding, the moment of finding, our supreme thrill? We call it discovery and make much of it, forgetting that it is the gift of loss.

 

“Still, it is as dangerous to cultivate loss as it is to try to stop it through the keeping of notebooks; we are a self-regarding creature and we will watch ourselves losing and become bewitched by our own affecting actions. We are so moved by ourselves. This is natural, but it is distracting. What can we do?” 

 

A young man asks why I write. I write to keep myself amused, not to document my life. Even I don’t care much about that. If others share my enjoyment, I’m happy and take it as an endorsement. I like pleasing people and getting a morale boost as much as the next guy. But if I stopped finding pleasure in playing with words, I would give it up without guilt or remorse. I think Ryan is brilliant and she is one of my mentors, though I’ll never be a poet. Here’s how she closes the first section of her essay:

 

“I think we should try to do something, try to make something new, try very hard to write a poem, say; desire very much to articulate something that doesn't yet exist, something we don't yet know; try so hard that currents are created in the electric broth of what is not lost but not kept either, currents which draw to the mind the bits of the not lost and not kept that join together through the application of great mental force, extreme mental force, in some new and inevitable sequence appropriate to the new realm of the neither lost nor kept. It is incredibly stable when done right.”

 

[Ryan’s essay was originally published in Parnassus in 1998 and collected in Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose (2020).]