Today I went out for a beer with a box of my old notebooks.
The box down center, not the four shelves behind it; the corpus and I have a date next month for Collage, when I cull whats worth keeping from a decades worth of shopping lists and examination notes.
What I found this evening in the box of small notepads was the most potent concentrations of my idle musings. When I was, literally, “muse-ing,” I was experimenting in letting the muse caress me with blessedly good ideas. I remember that period of my life, when I filled up three quarters of these notebooks, and I was actively practicing the art of attracting the muses attention, by allowing a vacancy in my creative space where she could come to dwell.
The effectiveness of this channelling waxed and waned, and I can measure the barometric pressure of my manifestation of the muse when I read through these old notebooks, all while delighting in the brilliant ideas I had a decade ago.
Some of them continued to grow and develop, and others perished nobly, as whetstones against which I practiced the art of conceiving.
Some few still take my breath away, and for this virtue, I cannot bear to part with my notebooks. Because I know that for all my life, an idle hour spent perusing the archaeological record of my mind’s development is worth any inconvenience of allotting the space to store such treasures.
“the archaeological record of my mind’s development”
That is such a unique way to put it. I know how you feel. I’ve got at least 13 journals from the last twelve years. I consider them my legacy to those who come after me, and it is interesting to go back and read some of them.
I worry that leaving a legacy like this (shabby notebooks written in a scribbling hand) will be more work to decipher than any legacy-inheritor would care for.
I’ve often thought of mulching them when I am an old man, and planting a rosebush that grows from old poetry.