#scurf92: on not numbering
::bizarre newsletter alert:: i wish someone paid me to write a better, more fleshed out newsletter, so going to keep this weird (which is also sort of on-brand)
I did not number the pages on this new diary I’m currently using. It’s more like a notebook, but I veer towards using the childhood word “diary” for it, for unknown reasons. In doing so, I break away, out of the set pattern. One because I want to feel free out of the shackles of page numbering and the mad rush of wrapping up all the pages on a diary, notepad or notebook that comes with. Second because I want to give myself a break from the monotony of seeing the same accusatory numbering on notebooks, page after page, sheath after sheath, notebook after notebook. I want to feel untethered in a strange senescence of my own making, that I need all the more thanks to the pandemic induced confined nature of my life.
On some days I also want to feel my way out of the oppression of reading the numbered pages of a book. If it’s a slim volume, I don’t want to be too quick and finish it all too fast. If it’s a thick novel, I don’t want to constantly live under the threat of the pages never getting over. Either way, the page numbers dominate my being, governing from the morning hours to the night-time wondering of my months.
When I decided against numbering the pages on my notebook, the first time since last year, I wanted to know what it felt like filling or not filling the pages of a notebook without really knowing how many pages you’ve filled up and how many more are left to go before you get to pull out a new notebook and scribble your name atop it.
The nameless pages then accrued a new meaning to me. They became analogous commemoration of my inert childhood urge to write, to just fill up pages after pages without having to be accountable for any of it. In not numbering the pages, I afforded myself the freedom to fail, to write, to not write, but most of all, to be okay with everything.
Next on my list is to try not date the pages on a notebook. Just a vague month hovering at the first page of the notebook and the closing week on the last page should be enough. I would like to see if the timelessness of the pages would make my words come undone any different.
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There are quite a few unknown pleasures of not numbering a notebook’s pages. In a way, each time you start to write you do so with a native furore. A vibrant, octane urge that throbs through your entire being, making you the writer you are, pouring itself out on the pages unhindered. The manic thirst, the tribal instinct, the feral beat taking charge, in a way hammering your entire being out on those finished slabs of wooden pulp. There is no mistaking that overwhelming urge then. You either go page after page filling the blankness with words senseless and sensible, or barely scribble one paragraph and curl and writhe at its inchoate ugliness, wanting to burn that bite-sized paper off.
Either way you come close, as close as is humanly possible, to see the shape of your inner parched-ness. You see how it takes charge of you, rendering you into a mere placeholder for all the words that want to be vomited out of you.
In short, it keeps the spark alive. It brings the words alive out of you, their shapes like grey embers shining in the deep of a winter night, sooting but also soothing. All this happens in a way that enumerating, padlocking, and counting pages does not ever lead to.
Allowing either the writing wilderness or the shamanic quiet to take over is pleasant and cerebral and warm and whole in a way only a lover’s body can be. You do not pretend to know; you don’t want to know. You want to lose control — going word by word, filling in the blankness, leaving behind inquisitive queries as breadcrumbs. Your bleak, unhindered, unkind words seeming to bewitch you. You surprise yourself, beleaguered, defeated, not fully comprehending, but all the more pleased.
One more experiment, you think to yourself, that did not backfire — not realising that it’s just one more day that did not dim itself before leaving you with a flood of senseless words. The banal writing helping purge you of the terrible guilt that has haunted you. Still, you tend to count the number of pages you write in a day, unable to hold back, letting the power of numbers take over you. On days you feel happy about having conquered the five-page mark, on others you are animated at the mere two sides.
But you realise you will never know how many pages are ever going to be enough. So, you trundle back to hopelessness that lies at the centre of your small decision to not number those pages. You have an idea, an inkling, a ballpark figure in mind.
You’ve filled such diaries by the tens (at least), so you tell yourself: this is a 120-page blank paged notebook. You figure out you still put down dates each time you have deigned even the smallest clutch of words on a page. So, you go by that — relieved at the prospect of at least one measure, that one way to keep a tab on your own self, so you don’t get lost in the sea of your own creation — sometime with the words, sometimes without.
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(selected) reading list:
https://newrepublic.com/article/161595/audre-lorde-warrior-poet-cancer-journals?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20March%2026,%202021&utm_term=lithub_master_list
https://gen.medium.com/minari-and-me-86ac49d763f6
https://lithub.com/being-a-writer-when-you-literally-cannot-visualize-scenes/
{email me, please, if you want more of these}
twitter March essays list:
https://twitter.com/anandi010/status/1367153153792122880?s=20
recent pubs:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/walking-with-fran/
https://electricliterature.com/why-do-i-write-in-my-colonizers-language/
my twitter:
https://twitter.com/anandi010
my website:
https://anandimishra.contently.com/
music:
https://youtu.be/LAbBrRYjwBY
https://youtu.be/3h1Vc_ur0Dg