A snowy sunny Saturday, some mending at my side, AM Joy on the TV. January always seems to open a new book, a fine new book … first chapter, first entries … everything is possible, once again. I love January! I enjoy beginning things, and now that I am older, I’ve also learned the extreme joy of finishing things. Sigh. January is always a time for reflection, recursion, rejoicing in solitude. A.M. joy every single day!
I’ve come up with a brilliant scheme to combat writer’s block while getting to work on my own backed-up archives. I touched on this a few entries ago, but I didn’t actually follow my own advice. Instead, I wandered around Medium, reading writers young as my grandchildren describing their own systems for getting on with the job. Those systems involve paper and pen and filing cards, which I’ve been exploring the past few days. And yet here, all the while, the solution was within my own hard covers.
Every January I tend to look over my vast, vast collection of hand-written journals, and this year is no exception. I look from the page to the scanner and back again. Should I digitize each of them? Or, should I try typing them into a computer? Will there be a posterity? Or is that too optimistic? Too solipsistic? 🐔
I’ve started to go through my old paper journals, and I came upon this short phrase that Bill wrote in one of them. It’s from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules, should you want to do some research. It’s an old, inevitable theme at the beginning of any year – life is fleeting and art is lingering. 🐔
This will be a perfect year if I just follow Jerry Seinfeld’s advice and “Don’t break the chain.” Yesterday I picked up the skein of daily writing, but I didn’t actually publish it because Self-Doubt has been at the controls, and she is stodgy and as hard to move as a mule. Today I have assigned Common Sense to the big board, and she has begun wiping up and putting things to right. Steady as she goes.