Travel Diaries #10 - Travel Diaries
I tried to write something about Japan, but ended up writing about writing about Japan.
“Many years before I kept track of the years I felt I would
Look back otherwise why did I write down everything that entered my mind?”
- Leslie Feist (from Broken Social Scene – Hug of Thunder)
I must have been terrified of forgetting everything. Or maybe I just had no-one to share the trip with and was reduced to holding reflexive conversations with myself in cafes around Japan, always writing as much as I could. It seemed like every time I sat down I’d find myself writing something. As if I was giving myself homework, perhaps in some small way to justify the fact that I was even there in the first place. Or maybe I was just bored and couldn’t connect to the wi-fi, so I’d set to creating my own news feed out of boredom, scratching with my pen an itch that I couldn’t quite locate.
I’m here back at home leafing through and checking back on hundreds of pages of various notebooks, diaries and journals over and over like Einstein’s madman looking for the written evidence of my weekend in Tokyo, so I can piece together now some kind of story or account of the whole experience, and I curse myself for my idleness – why haven’t I written more?
There must be one missing.
I look for it again.
The tragedy is that when I read through the ones I do still have in my possession, carefully transported over the years from home to home and country to country, building up in number and occupying greater and greater weight in my luggage, I see that they do not contain encyclopaedic documentations of life in Japan or Vietnam or anywhere else I’d been, or even accounts of what I did on my travels – or not entirely anyway – though now I wish they did. They’re altogether much more mundane than I remember.
Some of them are marked ‘Notes’, some, not labelled at all; the former with the intent of tracking so-called important things, personal admin and to-do lists and email reminders and so on – things that could be justified as ‘work’; the latter, presumably, intended to be recreational in nature. By now they’ve all merged into one over the years anyway; no longer do I segment the workings of my brain between work and play; it’s all just ‘work’ now.
The one I’m looking for is not in the pile with the others, it is not in any drawer in the house, nor under the bed nor hiding in a suitcase at the back of my wardrobe that remains half unpacked, still scattered with business cards and train tickets and tourist brochures after all this time and several subsequent changes of address.
Though in my head I can vividly remember hours and mornings and afternoons I spent writing in cafes in different cities – extended breaks in between bouts of travelling, to some people’s eyes, though I believe that to sit alone in a cafe in a foreign country and do nothing else only observe what you see is one of life’s greatest pursuits, and the purest form of travelling you can do – my body’s own spatial awareness even remembers the compass directions I was facing onto this street or that, and I know that if I sit at the kitchen table now or the front-room desk facing the window that I’m facing roughly the same direction I did in that café in Tokyo or this bar in Osaka. I even know what I was writing about, and yet I can’t find the notebook.
I find addresses, anecdotes, street names. I know there’s one missing, I’m sure of it, as I find only a brief summary of those last few days scribbled in a bar in Asakusa on the night before I flew home. That’s not it – I know it isn’t – but still I flick through it again. All I remember doing now is writing. Hopes and dreams, travel itineraries, observations of universal laws. I end up reading almost every one of those books from start to finish, an offline rabbit hole, like digging through a photo album in another life, the last few years of my life catalogued in some fashion, though not always as straight diary entries. I find hotel bookings, sequences of subway stops, budgets, basic Japanese phrases. I’d write in cafes, in restaurants, in bars, in hostels, in guesthouses, at work, sometimes on park benches or low stone walls. Five-year life plans, song lyrics, conversations I’d like to have with friends, yet another Sunday night affirmation that this would be the week I’d definitely quit smoking.
It's all a bit of a mess.
At times everything that came to mind had to be written down somewhere, like swatting a fly buzzing around the edges of my ears. If I wasn’t walking, or actively looking at something, or talking to someone, I’d be writing, often losing natural trains of thought or conversational threads because there was something I just had to write down, my mind wandering until I could get my fix again.
Instead of torturing myself with the thought that I’ve lost, discarded or thrown it out, or – worst of all – had it stolen from me, I reassure myself that it must never have existed, supported by the fact that I’ve no memory of experiencing the crushing grief at having first discovered it was gone in the first place; I’d know all too well if it had happened.
And now this phantom notebook has my heart broken, as I wonder what the hell I was doing with my time, for those days – and, at times, weeks or months – where no recorded evidence exists. I must have been doing other things, the things I’d presumably later write about, or – God forbid – maybe I was doing nothing. For flickering split-seconds I wonder if that weekend ever even happened at all, or if I dreamt the whole thing up.
Simone de Beauvoir once noted that the things you omit from a diary are more important than the things you put in. Although I believe she was referring to the self-deceptions through which even honest hearts and minds work, I reflect on it now in more mechanical and practical fashion. My notes and writings can do the work of memories and even serve as time capsules, but life has happened really in the moments around the making of the record, whether writing or taking photos. The irony is that the time you feel most greatly present is when pursuing some kind of art, but when looking back on the past, you must acknowledge that everything you seek has happened in your life outside of those moments. The danger with photos and notes too, is that in focusing what’s in the frame or the sentence, everything outside of it is discarded and forgotten, it becomes that much harder to recall or remember.
“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
– Joan Didion
I curse myself now for my lack of productivity and for not spending more time writing, though the mercy of not having spent all of my days like that means I was actually out, seeing things and doing things and meeting people, though it is the sad fate of the writer that if things are not written down in some form they are subconsciously assumed never to have happened at all. I remember clearly certain periods of the months I spent in Japan; and yet for those periods where no notes or written evidence exists, now I feel like I did nothing at all. The existence of some notes but not others, like the photograph, frames what’s missing as much as what it contains. In my mind all I did was write, though I scroll through photos now that confirm I was doing other things at the times I believed I was sat at a desk.
But then I just forget about the notebooks and just begin to write, and a wonderful thing happens: words come out and the story comes forth, without even needing the notes I still in my heart believe I made. And although it may come now in a different form to what I thought it would, there is still a story there that captures some truth and facts of the weekend. The facts we choose to record are often arbitrary, as we do not know when we’re truly present in life what the story will be in the future, what things will stick out and stick with us. To try to predict it too much would be to kill what you’re doing right now, and it is in trying to force your path through life that you often take the wrong route – it’s not up to us which story will be lived or will last to the next generation.
As Van Gogh once expressed, painting is not about capturing an accurate depiction of the visual world, but bringing to attention the beautiful parts of it; giving us a new way of looking at things, or certain aspects of it. To rely too much on exact details is to give yourself up to writing about nothing more than your memories, rather than the object of them; you become a photocopier rather than a writer. It is to objectify the place you’ve been, to try to recreate it as a painting rather than a living thing.
I must remind myself too, that what I’m looking for in these notebooks are not really the details of where I was or what I saw, as photos, markers on online maps, Whatsapp messages and emails of booking confirmations do that job quite well (even monthly playlists I’ve saved on Spotify are useful memory aids). And even personal diary entries are of little future significance, but to read them again is never the point anyway. They are simply things to put on paper in order that I may express myself through writing at that moment in time. It doesn’t matter what I write, only that I write something.
This means that what I’m looking for now are not so much memories, as the written evidence of my existence. If I allow myself to indulge in the vice of nostalgia, then I should be content to simply remember all that time I spent writing with great satisfaction, even if I had taken each page and ripped it out and burned it as I’d gone along.
A further secret: the reason I appear to be a travel writer, is simply that I began writing while living on the other side of the world. I sat about the place, and wrote, and thought after a while it might be rude not to write about the things I saw around me as well as those within. In all honesty, the facts of anything I or anyone else writes are just window-dressings and outfits put on over what it is they are really attempting to write about. Sure, some people write purely factual or scientific accounts of things, but that reveals a lot about how they view the world also.
And I find some measure of peace in knowing this, that ultimately it doesn’t matter what I did or didn’t write down, that all of it is still in there somewhere, only to be recalled when life demands, present in how I see the world and go about it, not in detail but in spirit. But still, it gnaws and nags at me and feels like the physical part of my brain that contains those four or five days of my life – I barely remember now how many it was – and probably many others, has been extracted and held ransom or discarded and left on some table to be thrown in the bin and rot somewhere; and I feel like my life would be so much more complete; that my memory of that trip would so much fonder now; that I’d sleep better at night and get out of the bed with that little bit greater ease each morning, if I could just find that f*cking notebook.
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