This is my entry for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by Bix, on the topic of “Ego”.
Now that i have a bit more free time, i’ve decided to scan the notebooks that have somehow fallen through the cracks in my reviewing system. It’s a repetitive process – flipping to a new page, positioning the Doxie Flip over it1, pushing the scanning button, waiting a few seconds, flipping to a new page – but it’s almost meditative. Which might be why i’ve wondered why i can’t bring myself to throw away my boxes and boxes of old notebooks.
I’m not always comfortable in my own body and i can’t always trust my own feelings, so i’ve always relied on my rational mind — to the point of exhaustion. Note-taking is the only activity that reconciles the three dimensions of my self: it’s a tactile, visual, auditory, and even olfactory experience; it’s often motivated by an impulse i can only explain by writing; and it’s the closest approximation of an “outer brain” that i have.
I write to feel my thoughts on the page, but in doing so, the pen shapes my thinking, and i often end up in a place i wasn’t expecting. My notebooks are a tangible manifestation of my mental space, which is to say, they’re part of my mental space. They’re not a memory, otherwise the same idea wouldn’t come back word for word over the years, they’re a remembrance, as that infamous passage from the Phaedrus doesn’t quite say.
And that’s enough! Memory is fickle; remembrance is powerful. I confide in my notebooks so that they can confide in me later. This scanning campaign reactivated thoughts and feelings i’d entirely forgotten. That’s what my notebooks are: chunks of me that i might want to revisit later. The physical space they take is the mental space they save. That’s why i can’t throw them away. I’d be throwing me away.