On keeping a note book …..

This is an excerpt of a sort .

From the  book “slouching towards Bethlehem” by Joan Didion . That's her in the photo below. 

The words are her’s . The arrangement mine . The structure , the one I am most comfortable with (poetic ).

Like a music arranger who arranges parts of well known tunes in to the arrangement of his choice, to the beat in his head. 

Why did I write it down? 

In order to remember? of course,
But  what was it
that I wanted to remember exactly?
How much of it actually happened?

Did any of it?

Why do I keep a note ­book at all?
It is easy to deceive one ­self on all those scores.
The impulse to write things down is
 peculiarly compulsive
The content is often
 inexplicable
rarely factual
 useful , only accidentally
Only secondarily, in the way
that any compulsion
tries to justify itself.

Keepers of note ­books
are a different breed altogether,
 lonely
and resistant
Re-arrangers
of things,
Children
afflicted apparently at birth
or  afterwards
with some kind of  presentiment
of loss.

The point has never been,
nor is it now,
to have an accurate factual record
(That would be a different impulse entirely,)
 Or an instinct for reality
(which I sometimes envy
but do not possess.)

I’ve had trouble , always
 distinguishing between what happened
and what merely might have
But that  distinction, to me ,
does not  matter.

What, then, is the point?
Why preserve
everything I observe
(See enough . Write it down
I tell myself)
Why do I string word after word
on empty pages
volumes of how I felt
volumes
that nobody’d read
not even I

But , I will
( I tell myself )
one  morning
when the world seems drained  of wonder
on that bankrupt morning
 I will
simply open my notebook
and there it will all be
Passages
back to the world out there
Dialogues overheard in coffee shops and
 stuffy elevators
The smell of orchids in some rich lady’s living room
while it snowed outside
It’ll all be there
and  somewhere
 I’ll find myself
 and remember what it was
to be me

That is
always the point.

PS:
I confess , I too keep a note book .