Notes on Notes

Back in November a conference titled "Take Note" was held at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The purpose? To assess the long history, up to the current state, of the practice of note-taking.  While this at first seemed to me another painful, self-reflexive mise-en-abîme that academia prides itself on -- an event in which literary scholars, historians, and psychologists could pontificate on the marginalia of their own professions -- it quickly occurred to me that there was a kernel of an idea here that could give way to some lovely observations on reading, note-taking, and memory.  This kernel, I thought, could be best served, not by the medium of sober academic scrutiny, but of whimsical, stream of consciousness literary expression. Yet before I was able to have any marginally profound thoughts of my own I quite by accident came across a passage in a book I had chosen at random that reflects on this very theme.

Within the second page of Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage -- a sometimes hilarious and consistently insightful contemplation on the very deep-rooted anxieties that surround writing, procrastination, and settling down -- we come across one of the most apt descriptions of the purpose of note-taking I have had the pleasure of reading.  Within a somewhat rambling caveat to the fact that this is a book that is and is not about D.H. Lawrence, Dyer sets out to preface us with some of the difficulties one encounters when beginning such a large literary undertaking.  He writes,  "I even built up an impressive stack of notes with Lawrence vaguely in mind but these notes, it is obvious to me now, actually served not to prepare for and facilitate the writing of a book about Lawrence but to defer and postpone doing so.  there is nothing unusual about this.  All over the world people are taking notes as a way of postponing, putting off and standing in for."

As one who has completed a senior thesis in the humanities, I am all to familiar with this specific conundrum of note-taking as a non-activity, as the mere self-imposed roadblock to that work you tell yourself you should and you need to and you want to be getting to.  Whereas formerly I had always been impressed with those who so meticulously color code and label and organize such copious amounts of notes whether it's on a legal pads or an iPad, my conviction that this is at least partly a waste of time has now been justified thanks to Dyer.  And yet here I am again, taking notes on someone else's work in order to postpone the work I originally intended to set out to do, to write some original thoughts on the nuances and particularities of taking note.

As one who had always been passionate about drawing and painting, one who was always sure that this was the talent or the interest that set her apart, I often oscillate between kicking myself and contently accepting the fact that my four years at a liberal arts college has turned me away from the practice of visual arts and towards the analysis thereof. Whether or not this was indeed an unfortunate turn of events should probably be left unanswered for it remains a fact that I have spent the majority of my last four to five years, instead of using my pencil and pen to outline the forms I see, I have been using ink and graphite to underline the work of others, of course with the purpose to comment upon later. However, as Dyer has adroitly pointed out, the latter half of the note-taking experience, the thought of return to comment further, to add one's own critique or insight, often never comes to pass.  For this reason it is the quality of the line, and not the contents it supposedly aims to highlight, to which I am now drawn (forgive the pun).

The quality and thickness of an underline, its slight waver, the measure of a check mark or question mark, and the range of a ballpoint as compared to a fountain pen, have all become greater parts of my daily life as a liberal arts student. I've turned from sketching everyday scenes to this even farther removed form of gleaning. My last recourse towards beauty and creation in this act is the quality of my line, my underline. Of course the quality of the underline is cursorily related to the content being highlighted if only in the perfection of the line of the printed word, expressed more fully when juxtaposed with my unsteady, imperfect highlight (I could say organic versus machine but I won't). The act of underlining is a promise to that content that I will return, that this phrase or part of a thought merits careful, sober, and heavy inspection. But if we are all being honest with ourselves we would admit that such a promise rarely reaches its fruition.

To what do we then owe this "forgotten" content?  Is it truly forgotten? Perhaps not if you consider that your edition of this collection of essays or novel may eventually make its way into the hands of an unsuspecting college freshman buying his or her spring semester reading list off amazon for the used, discounted price.  However, I believe that for me it is only partly about this often unfulfilled promise to that obscure passage of Benjamin or Kracauer, it s also a manifestation of an unfulfilled promise to myself to continue to create my own original content, visual or literary.