I have notebooks upon notebooks, purportedly for class notes, which have margins and even entire pages filled with random thoughts. Thoughts about life, about reality, about politics, about what I should do over the weekend, about what I should do in the future, about who I should remember to talk to more often, and a billion other things.
I regularly text myself paragraphs of rants, rambles, and carefully explicated rationales for complicated ethical phenomena.
I never throw away a single piece of paper without scouring it for remnants or pieces of terms or phrases that I might've scribbled down in a frenzy.
I've started copying all these sources into googledocs whenever I think to, because the internet seems a lot more reliable than any other solid or electronic text container I can get my hands on.
You might say I'm a little crazy about remembering things. I freak out and pull out my phone to text myself when I get a random interesting insight in the middle of a conversation or Disney movie. I urgently race to transcribe anything and everything that is on my mind at that point, scared to death that it's going to disappear and run away forever.
After I write things or explain ideas too, I get incredibly anxious about losing the capacity to do anything like that ever again.
Is this irrational though? In a sense, well, obviously. One could predict based on the previous activity of my brain and fingers that I will indeed have more thoughts in the same vein and will write things of a similar style and/or quality.
But in another sense, it's not so unreasonable. Now, if you'll just bear with me as I justify my ridiculous anxiety...
Practically, I could look at my anxious practice as simply a means of keeping me in a writerly state. It keeps me thinking about things creatively and critically, and it means that whenever I finally get motivated to write something I'll have zero excuse for having no ideas from which to start. And who knows what cool thoughts I'll preserve?
But to look at it more... existentially? cynically? Whatever. At every moment I am a victim of my physiology. The exact mental and emotional and cognitive conditions that I'm inhabiting at this very moment will very likely never coincide again, and thus the subjective experience of the moment is absolutely unique. Finite. This is a bold statement, and it may very well be an exaggeration (*never* coincide?) or a fundamental misrepresentation of the nature of the universe (finite? *absolutely* unique?) but I think (perhaps irrationally) that the thought at the core of the statement is sound. I can't know if I will ever come to these specific thoughts again, and I know that I will never again have this exact experience in and with the physical world that I'm having at this very moment in time, and thus I should do my best to remember it, if it seems to be objectively memorable.
(Of course "objectively memorable" isn't a real thing, and I'm judging memorability off of probably clearly established societal criteria. sigh.)
And obviously this point extends beyond the urge to preserve random philosophical meanderings or phenomenological puzzlings, encompassing all of experience, for this is part of my anxiety about memory that I've referenced already.
I look back at experiences, at entire years of my life, and only so much is left in my long-term memory. Entire years fade into quickly past, barely differentiated clumps of thoughts and faces. Often I'm left with impressions rather than full-fledged narratival memories, and anecdotes from the past come up unbidden by myself, prompted by external stimuli in the present. If I tried right now to list as many stories as possible from my childhood that I remember, I could only force myself to recall so many. But a great many more arise occasionally in my memory naturally, and it would be tragic if I let all of those drift away. Anyway these unbidden ones are the ones that often come bringing new significance and give me new ways of looking at myself or the world, which is rad.
Is it weird that I'm often urged to devote hours to simply poring through my memory and painstakingly committing years of memories, from childhood to college life, all to paper, or even better, googledocs?
But if I do step aside and attempt to focus on recalling memories, nothing bright or vivid or imminently describable comes to mind, and I end up with only flat and rushed descriptions of outlines of a few prominent past events in my mind. It is only in the unbidden moment of recall or novel cognition that the luminance and the full significance of the thought or memory is impressed in my mind, and it is then that I must write.
Or text. Or scribble. Depends whats available.
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