Diaries are the language of loss
11月15日 (日ー月) 12:15am JST
There are certain ways in which journals are unsatisfying to me. Namely, they inevitably become records of the unique events of today, instead of the events that weren’t unique. Thus, the unremarkable bulk of one’s life becomes the bottom of an iceberg, supporting the visible bit without breaking the waves.
What happened today that happened every day this month? What tiny shift in the fabric of life has been growing over the past weeks and months? Limitations of space, time, and memory cause parts of even the most unremarkable day to go by without note. Like JPEG and MPEG, writing from life is a lossy activity— it compresses by tossing out those bits whose omission is least likely to be noticed. This is unsatisfactory because it is a part of the nature of all people, and particularly diarists, to believe that every aspect of one’s life is of the utmost importance. My world being the only one I have, it is naturally the world most important to me.
A student wrote an essay about improving one’s hometown, in which she compared changing things to removing a rotten apple from a basket— even still, eventually all the apples will rot anyway. (This student’s essay, one of 20 from a class that I have to check each week, is, of course, an example of the sort of ephemeris, which is ordinarily lost to consideration by the time one sits to write a journal.)
Keeping a journal in a foreign country like Japan is especially frustrating, since what wants most to capture and preserve are the moments in which one’s cultural expectations are upset or disappointed not by a broad stroke but by the slightest touch. Like how I still don’t know how to open the bottles of milk sold at the vending machine at the public bath. The public bath, being more obviously Other, takes the space in one’s record, and the milk goes by without comment.
Or one wants to record those details of life that are at once fleeting and eternally significant, like the frog eyes of the frog eyes of the attending woman as she stares at the TV over her head that the mirror on the dividing wall reflects. Those frog eyes are at once the most and least significant part of my entire bathing experience, much as the ¥500 umbrella, blown apart and rusting in a muddy rice patty, is the most important part of my walk to and from school every day. Things like what part of the train I try to sit on when going to F* or counting pocket change for the bus when going to the deaf school are as much muscle memory as conscious activity, which puts them out of the realm of things that you can recall when lying in bed with a pen in hand, scribbling into one’s diary.
A narrative version of life buries these details to make more room for “plot” like my going to the fashion show/ dance/ concert on Friday. As fun as it was that it felt like people were digging my chilli at the dance, is that as important as only leaving the apartment today to go bathe? How does one rank the moments in one’s life? Which is more worthy of chronicling, my unvacuumed tatami floor or the stubborn 13 class refusing to talk on Friday? How does one compare the few minutes I spent on the Japanese test today and at the Foolish last night? Do I record the logo of the Great Buddha of Takaoka giving a peace sign or the porn shop on the same street? Is it even possible to record the tunnels under Takaoka station or the construction equipment under the overpass on the road to school? To an egoist like myself, watching all these sands pulled out with the tide is sorrowful indeed.
Anyhow, it was a sort of typical week. Except for all the ways that it wasn’t. I taught deaf school by my lonesome, got an iPod photo, and continue to await my girlfriend’s arrival.
There’s a lot more, but there always is.
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