Notes, Murmurations: On Notebooks, Coleridge, Kathleen Coburn, Composition across Time (a lecture given in October 2024 at Vancouver Island University)
What I wanted when I began to write is what I still want: a freedom-sensation that could return. I thought poetry could be that thing. With my companions, we called it “that thing”, not daring to define or limit its recognition. It’s less the nominative than the returning part of the proposition that has proven difficult or at least elusive. So I’ll begin by tentatively defining poetry this way. A freedom-sensation that could return. The conditional tense seems essential to me. Not certainties, but possibles, in a setting. A setting, a form, such as this room we’re now gathered in, is useful.
But beginning always feels impossible. I’ll remind myself here, at the start— Begin by returning. Freedom already exists. It’s hidden in the intimate texture of the present, in the janky sites and gestures passed over, unnoticed by capital. For me, the necessity is in the transcription, the annotation of that textured, evasive thing, that gestural intimacy, as I have sensed it in the present tense of a daily life of making, reading and writing and thinking. This transcription work attempts to seize upon the present’s irregular, innovating temporality, by turning towards it. Begin by bringing new senses to work on the perception and expansion of freedom within the present. Which is to say—begin with existent desire. Assume the freedom sensation that I’ve always craved exists, cavorting just beyond the frame of representation.
Whatever becomes possible in the poem keeps changing, transforming. I won’t be able to capture it here, this evening. There’s no given net or formula for the possibility of freedom. But I think that although there is no net, there is a ground. This ground is the site, the support, and the temporality, of return. Poetry is the room I turn to, return to, in my life, and this evening. That’s the verse—the turning to a chosen constraint. This site is peopled. Less the turn of the line-end, or the caesura, than the turn of a chosen form of life, which is shared, contested, transformed and transmitted.
A line from a notebook from 2022 drifts towards me: What if I am already happy?
In 1984 I bought a spiral bound notebook and simply began to fill the gridded pages. I was 23. I wanted to remember everything and I wanted to understand sentences. I wanted to find inside of grammar what was absent or secret in memory. Using sentences as my instruments I would begin by describing everything around me that was visible or felt, the paintings and the textiles and outfits, the rooms and the trysts, the posters showing the actresses, the little necklace of the boy and his pout, the parks and the dank inner courts and the odours of stairways, then I would locate the withdrawal at the core of my description. I would find the absence in syntax; I would add negative space to the visible. I intuited that this would take time. There would be no hurrying. So at the beginning of my work, the notebook was a workshop in which I learned to construct sentences that attempted to track or capture the secrets within the present time of composition. Gradually my understanding of the space of the notebook has changed. Over the past 20 years, by rereading, transcribing and reworking my archive of notebooks, (how many of them are there now—30 or so, then the further few dozen now at Special Collections at SFU library) I have been experiencing these accruing objects less as roughly neutral sites for a learning process, or gathering receptacles, in the way that Ursula Leguin talks about her carrier bag theory of stories (although they are these things too), and more and more as the material agents of conceptual events which are taking place below the surface of my consciously framed projects, joining the spaces and inscriptions contained by the pages in dynamic relationships. These relationships are not intentional or willed, however willful and even stubborn were the researches and readings they contributed to. I often jot things down, as anyone does, more or less systematically, as I research for essays and lectures, and during the background work for poems, or for teaching. The different, non-volitional activity that I will describe here happens across irregular temporal spans and builds an alternate temporality. I have learned to see the notebook as an external organ of the imagination. I’m thinking here of imagination in Coleridge’s very dynamic sense — it’s the psychic organ that associates and recombines received sensual data to make new meaning, new images, which are not the same as what already exists, but which relate to the existent by means of our bodies, our memories, and our ways of living together.
When I say notebooks I mean notebooks, not diaries. Nor ledgers, journals, daybooks, minute books, appointment books, genealogies, notepads, scrapbooks: none of these. Notebooks. Green marbled or supple slate grey, some with inner pockets containing receipts, grocery lists, newspaper clippings, snapshots, a dried leaf, a snip of fabric, some labelled on the covers with pasted on squares of paper, some dangling ribbons, some with pages torn out. I used to assume that my dependence and insistence on notebooks was personal and elemental. I’ve learned that its part of a material history of epistemology. Knowledge isn’t neutral. It’s supported by learned conventions of transmission and relationship, many of which are social, and therefore material. I’ve learned that the notebook is a Romantic invention. To my surprise, I discover in the midst of my vehement avant-gardism that historically I’m Romantic. That’s what the turn of research can enact.
The turn I’m repeatedly referring to—already rime structures thought— feels less volitional, willed, than intuited. I can’t tell when it will arrive, or how it first came to me. My work here isn’t to concern myself with origins, but to give the turn of verse a space, to try to provide a site for its appearance. By intuited, I mean there are senses that aren’t currently named and quantified but which nonetheless act, receive and transmit. Marx, in his 1844 “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts”, reminds us that “the forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world, down to the present.” Since I came across it around 2005, while working on Lucretius’s materialism, or was it in 1989, in some blurred-out dirty photocopy that had circulated from hand to hand on Adanac Street— I can no longer be certain— I have held this statement as a sort of talisman, loving the philosopher’s insistence that sensing is not a given, but rather is formed— and distributed I would add— by practice (sensing for Marx is a culture, and so infinitely historically malleable and inventive). I’ve appreciated that Marx further specifies that economic possession is an “estrangement” or alienation of all of the senses, a forced restriction of experience. One way to think of the elusive idea of freedom is as nonalienated sense experience. This experience moves outside, or in spite of, the metrics of market theocracy. At the same time as I have tried to learn how to recognize and describe the historical work of sensation, in order to approach and discover the existing presence of freedom, my work in poetry has shown me that there is no limit to the number of human senses. The infinity of sensing has no number. While conventionally we count five, the English Baroque librarian Robert Burton, in 1621, to give just one example, (although his Arab precedents in the anatomy of the mind ought to be named—Ibn ‘Arabi, Averroes, and Avicenna), Robert Burton, as I was saying, in his encyclopaedic treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy, counted eight senses, because, following the philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi, he included in his sensual anatomy the internal senses—memory, imagination, and common sense. Or even eleven senses, because the three internal senses function differently in wakefulness and sleep. Marx says that we createhuman sense “corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural substance.” The creation of sensing then must include and foster the inner senses. Perhaps the inner senses alone are free. They’re not necessarily confined to or possessed by the individual. The inner action of images, which is to say the imagination, also moves and transforms mentalities— collectively, trans-historically and in nature. I think, with Lucretius and Marx, that freedom is the dynamic imagination of nature, or at very least is in nature, as the clinamen, that anti-law of uncaused movement. The clinamen is a wild turning. I think it can be glimpsed in the notebook. I’m proposing that the notebook is an organ of the imagination.
I kept filling notebooks with my descriptions. Noting was my element, a different water, a bizarre air. Descriptions of rooms, of skies, annotations of garments, encounters, perfumes, dreams, seasons, and eventually, readings, as I recognized that not only the visible and sensual world called for notation, so did the intricate or overdetermined or brash or shy movements of my own thought. Notebooks of all sizes, the cheapest ones, with coil bindings and glossy covers, nothing precious: each was a unique theatre. I suppose that in the notebooks I discovered my stubborn mind.
I became a reader of Robert Burton’s baroque encyclopaedia of the inner senses after I learned of his stylistic influence (how exactly? I can’t recall!) on my great love in prose, the modernist novelist Djuna Barnes. For Barnes, Burton’s sprawling, inclusive, enumerative sentences patterned an exploratory grammar that held contradiction as core to historical experience and desire alike. There is such a polyvalent web of transmission for Burton’s work, and another one of those points or nodes of transference is Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English poet born in 1772, and dead in 1834. That’s 70 years before the birth of my maternal grandmother, who lived 92 years, to give this duration a personal measure. Sometimes, through my ancestors, I feel that I can really touch what gets called history, this sensing web of immaterial transmission. Coleridge had in 1800 proposed to his friend Charles Lamb that he should compose a forgery of Robert Burton—feigned fragments. That year a new edition of the Anatomy of Melancholy had been published, after a long pause in interest in Burton, during the rationalist 18th century, and the two friends shared a single copy. Books are expensive. Coleridge was reading their copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy in February of that year, and copied out a brief citation from the book (a phrase that Burton had himself taken from Macrobius) into his notebook: “I never travelled but in a map, in which mine unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated.” By September in the notebook Coleridge had listed Burton and his book at the top of a projected series of topics for future essays. The list ends with “Smoking” and “Drinking” as its two final topics, and is sandwiched between a list of local mountain names, and a detailed description of a particular countryside walk. (CN 802, 803, 804)
Coleridge kept notebooks, many notebooks. Their late editor, the Toronto Coleridge scholar and academic Kathleen Coburn, between 1930, at the age of 25, and her death in 1991, described, transcribed, re-sequenced, annotated, and oversaw the publication of all 70 of them, as well as organizing their purchase from Coleridge’s descendants by The British Library and Victoria College at the University of Toronto. It began almost accidentally, during a two-year scholarship at Oxford, when she first travelled to the Coleridge family home in Devon, and was shown the alcove near the library fireplace, which still contained all of the poet’s notebooks and papers, Mapping would be another term for this massive lifework; Coburn characterized the trove of notebooks as “an extraordinary mental landscape”. This landscape is composed of some 7000 entries, which Coburn numbered chronologically in her edition, although the material sequence found in the notebooks themselves jumped synchronically, since the poet often wrote into blank spots in previous volumes, or wrote from front to back and back to front simultaneously in a single notebook, making each bound volume a polytemporal composition. The numbered entries range in kind, from brief, fragmented jottings, to long discursive passages on philosophy or theology, later used by the poet in sermons or lectures, and also quotidian lists, remarks, problems, jokes, recipes, and transcriptions from books, some in his hand, and some in the hand of his beloved Sara Hutchinson. Coleridge would also re-transcribe earlier notes at later dates, changing and ameliorating as he recopied.
Here, by way of example, is a starling murmuration Coleridge saw in November 1799, described in notebook 4, which Coburn describes as “black leather, with a leather tongue clasp, and a fold along one side to hold the metallic pencil”:
CN, 582
“Starlings in vast flights drove along like smoke, mist, or anything misty [without] volition—now a circular area inclined [in an] arc, now a globe—now from a complete orb into an] ellipse & oblong—[now a balloon with the] car suspended, now a concaved semi[circle and [still] it expands and condenses, some [moments] glimmering & shivering, dim & shadowy, now thickening, deepening, blackening!—"
In October 1803, the starlings return in notebook 21 (red leather with a leather tongue from the back cover which fits over a loop in the front, forming a clasp. There is a pocket inside both front and back cover) (he is travelling on a sleeping coach, sleeplessly to London, and one asks oneself what murmurations appear at night within the unwilled, dark duration of insomnia):
. . .“soon after this I saw starlings in vast flights, born along like smoke, mist—like a body unimbued with voluntary power/—now it shaped itself into a circular area, inclined—now they formed a square—now a globe—now from a complete orb into an ellipse—then oblongated into a balloon with the car suspended, now a concave semicircle; still expanding, or contracting, thinning or condensing, now glimmering & shivering, now thickening, deepening, blackening!” (note 1589, 1803)
Between the two murmurations, a little more than four years. But they are in a sense a continuation of the same murmuration—Coleridge has reworked the initial description. The 1803 transcription is lengthened a little, and refined. Why is Coleridge returning to and altering the earlier description? He tells us, in a note from December 1803 (the image of the murmuration has stayed in his mind, remaining active, for months) “My spirit with a fixed yet leisurely gaze following its ever yet quietly changing clusters of thoughts, /As the outward eye of a happy traveller on a flock of starlings.” (CN 1779) For Coleridge the returning starling murmuration is a figure for the swirling, coalescing and dispersing motion of thinking, as well as an explication of his theory of motion, as presence and absence in ongoing irregular fluctuation. In her annotations Kathleen Coburn says of Coleridge’s descriptions of this period “one notes his kinetic responses—a desire to cross bridges, pass under arches. . .” (CN 1899) The notebook, as an external organ of imagination, both map and laboratory, is the material support that permits this leisurely but kinetic gaze to turn and return to form new mental relationships, where the mind’s movement crosses and links— like swallows beneath bridges— points in time, and across landscapes.
I’m describing the Coleridge notebooks now because they are the immediate foreground of my current reading. Each time I open them—to check a reference while composing this lecture, to find out what Coleridge thought of Robert Burton or of botany, to attempt to read straight through in the evenings, which is impossible, since I’m inevitably pulled into the labyrinth of Coburn’s gregariously thorough annotation of almost each entry—I’m delighted, stunned, irritated, bored, piqued, and also overwhelmed by their scale, since they fill ten thick hardcover volumes. They seem to contain everything. I didn’t come to them through any scholarly interest in Coleridge, or even (not yet!) in the notebook genre. To be honest I hadn’t read much Coleridge, not since I was a student in the English department at SFU, studying the Romantics with Rob Dunham, who furthermore was a Keatsian. A couple decades later, my interest in the Romantics extended more to Wordsworth and his ambivalent position in revolutionary politics. I began to read the Coleridge notebooks because I simply fell upon them, by chance.
I live and work in a fairly remote rural region in Central France. Our house is at the edge of a village of around 200 people. It’s a quite poor region—small scale agriculture, no vineyards or wine production, a scattering of small factories turning out plastic bags and concrete building blocks. At evening in winter I watch starling murmurations over the fields from the upstairs windows. In our village most people are retired, and the younger ones are often long-haul truck drivers, or paid homecare workers. It’s an economic desert. There are no surviving services in the village other than the post office, and by the skin of its teeth, the elementary school. This year three children were born. The nearest shopping towns are both 20 kilometres distant. One of these two towns has an English language bookshop, with a very good stock of used books, run by a British man, James, who regales me with stories of having worked at Faber and Faber in London in the 1960s, where he knew TS Eliot. Well yes, I was impressed. His shop naturally attracts anyone in the larger region with a real interest in English literature, or simply in reading in the English language. Thankfully for his business there is also the internet. I browse there two or three times a year, and three years ago, during my seasonal browse, I noticed, on a top shelf, the bulky, creamy row of the Coleridge Notebooks, which seemed to function upon my curiosity by magnetic means. I dragged the step-stool to the shelf, pulled down the heavy first volume, and read the opening page. The entries were curious and compelling: two written out arithmetic problems meant for a child; a card trick; a fanciful etymology of the origins of the word smile; an analogy concerning cities, cottages and ruins; the beginning of a Sermon on Faith. What compelled me was the space travelled between the entries, the vivid suggestiveness of their sequence—immediately I was plunged into the odd associations of a stranger’s mind. In fact, yes, I was inside a mind but not my own. It was utterly addictive. I arranged with James to buy them on instalment, using my Governor Generals’ runners-up prize, which I had just received for my novel The Baudelaire Fractal, as a down payment. It was a sizable investment, the equivalent of three month’s rent. I learned that these volumes, along with several other books from a serious Romanticist’s library, had belonged to the Welsh-Canadian Coleridge scholar David Miall, who had retired to this region of France from Edmonton, and his job at University of Alberta, and then fallen ill. Although I never met him, Miall’s fine pencil marginalia, stick-it notes, underlining, slipped in bus schedules and various ephermera, some from a French village not far from where I live, now accompany my Coleridge reading. The traces of David Miall’s life interspersed in the notebooks among the traces made by Coleridge, what I have gleaned of Kathleen Coburn’s life in Oxford and Toronto by reading her published memoire, In Pursuit of Coleridge—these fragments open endlessly into the realization that the daily composition of thinking is a deeply familiar, common art.
My grandmothers, Olive Snare Robertson, and Elaine Lynette Hodgetts Kennedy, each kept notebooks, and I am lucky to own two of them, which now form part of my archive. What did my grandmothers note? Household accounts, doctor’s appointments, the clothing sizes of the various grandchildren, gift lists, the names of four varieties of roses seen in the botanical garden in Edinburgh, travel details, bus schedules, reminders, drafts of letters. These were small, pocket or purse-sized cheap blue-lined booklets, one spiral bound, the other stapled. My grandmothers were not intellectual or literary women but they had their own forms of culture, as everybody does. They wrote in notebooks, which in my turn I do daily. I would have seen my grandmother’s notebooks sitting on the telephone table, or being slipped back into a handbag after use. I am not sure to what extent my grandmothers read books, or if they did. I don’t recall seeing them read or hearing them talk about it, although each kept a shelf of books in her apartment, and obviously when we visited I would sit in front of the shelves and one by one pull out the encyclopaedia volumes or the strange book of poems by Robbie Burns, which had a particular musty odour. One grandmother was a sewer and a hobby painter, painting small oils as we called them of rural Ontario scenes; the other, who showed me how to snuff out a candle flame between my bare fingers, I would characterize as a walker, and knew Toronto as only a walker can. One sold Avon cosmetics door to door for a time, the other worked as a bank teller then a babysitter. Both were homemakers, cooking, cleaning, mending, shopping, decorating and upholding the events of the family calendar. But on their smaller scale, my grandmothers’ notes are not altogether different in kind than Coleridge’s, who also listed plant varieties, household necessities, recipes for ginger beer, travel observations, the development of his children, and drafts of sermons in the variously sized and procured blank books he began to fill in 1794. Coburn, his editor, calls the earliest ones memorandum books. The notebook is a domestic writing genre that contains and preserves transient instants of attention. It is commonplace
The Edinburgh roses my grandmother noted in July 1967: Sea Pearl Floribunda, Anne Watkins Foribunda, Grandpa Dickson.
Here I think of Sara Hutchinson copying out the long index of plant names from Witherings’ An Arrangement of BritishPlants in Coleridge’s notebook in the summer of 1800, having borrowed the Withering from Wordsworth because the book was so costly— and I think too about the odd little preposition “out” in this locution “copying out”, the way it suggests the transcribed text has been extruded from the original, like a cast object being turned out of its mold, or an outpouring, the text flowing out to the world through the conduit of the pen.
What happens between the desire for the rose and the copying out, between the notebook and the poem? How does that space become plastic, expansive, volatile? The mind moves across the plenum or detritus of the present to fall upon the forms of its own attention: a proper name, a phrase, a sentence. A note is a mental sensation of incipience, a tiny item from and in the composition of the present. Barthes, in The Preparation of the Novel, develops what he calls a Theory of Notation, describing the “drive, the physical pleasure taken in noting down.” There is nothing rarified about this pleasure. Anyone’s notes are a representation of reality. Vis à vis the pleasure of this realism as its own end, Barthes cites Baudelaire (97): “One’s sense of temporal and existential proportions is disturbed by the innumerable swarms of intense feelings and ideas…” Reading Baudelaire in Barthes, I think of Coleridge’s 1803 fragmentary note on “a host of little winged flies on the snow mangled by the Hail storm” (CN 1779)— how like writing are those mangled flies on snow! One of Coleridge’s names for his notebooks was Flypapers! It’s true that just before noting I feel an interior sensation, somewhat pleasurable, somewhat irritating, a buzz of flies. An association. Perhaps this disturbance can be assuaged by the action of noting: I feel for my pen. Between the desiring sensation and the notebook, between the citation and the buzz of association, within the small effort of copying out, and then within the small variations introduced in the copying, a kinetic freedom opens, a thought begins. What gets noted? The “purely, gratuitously, inexplicably, enigmatically noteworthy” Barthes unhelpfully specifies (p 192), which is to say, life, but in its detail, not its stories.
In 2003, when I was preparing to move to France from Vancouver, I organized a quantity of my papers to deposit at Special Collection at Simon Fraser University. I was 41, still a young poet. It was difficult then to make decisions about what to send to the archive, so I decided that to better inform myself, I would read all of my accumulated notebooks, from beginning to end. To give some scale to my attention, I assigned myself a transcription project— I would copy out each sentence containing the first person pronoun, compile an exhaustive index of the pronoun I, as I discovered it in my rereading of the old material, before I sent it off to the university. Because my notebook essays were rarely autobiographical, and often citational, the I-saying list was not long, but I found it interesting, in its unevenness, in its buzzy, swarming associations. There was a sense of voice throwing, a nesting of I-sayers within I-sayers. I devised a compositional technique to use all of the transcribed first person sentences in a poem, without selecting or editing for quality—I would only resequence and recopy. I wanted to create a structure or a shape for life’s unevenness, which ought to include the purple, the overdetermined, the cribbed, the banal, as indeed my notebooks did. So I doubled my list, alphabetizing one version and splicing it into the other, to create a long rhyme structure of arbitrary pattern. The resulting poem, which I called “Face,” was constructed from 15 years of I-saying sifted from my notebooks, doubled or recopied, then placed in an internal rhyming relation to make a murmuring double loop. Although the poem began as a reading device or a screen, to render archival decision making more immediate, I was fascinated by the possibilities of the method I had fallen upon. I returned to reread the entire sum of notebooks a second time, this time transcribing each note I encountered that referred in some way to place or to site. My thought was that I would make a site or a landscape for the distributed “I” that I had composed in “Face”, call the second poem “Utopia,” and that as a diptych, the two poems would together make a chapbook. Meredith Quartermain published it under the title Rousseau’s Boat, with her Vancouver press Nomados, in 2004. I considered the poem to be autobiographical, which had not been the case with the work I had published up to that point, since my early work, through my 30s, concerned itself with the politics of historical literary genre, such as pastoral, epic and georgic. I remained interested in the indexical method I had used to compose the two autobiographical poems, which in a sense took selected imprints from the then 15 year duration of my writing life. Several years later I returned to the project to reread the notebooks again, and to further compose four new long poems, each from accumulated notebook gleanings retrieved according to predetermined constraints. The expansion to six autobiographical index poems, under the contracted title R’s Boat, was published in 2010 by University of California Press, just before I turned 50. In 2021 I returned to the poem again, to make an expanded edition for Coach House books, further contracting the title to Boat. I constructed two new poems for Boat, my 60th birthday version, and since my accumulation of notebooks has continued, there was much more material to reread, and the resulting new long poem “The Hut” was much longer than the earlier poems in the project had been, plunging me into the problematics of extended duration. This time, my keyword blurred in the process. Where the earlier poems were simple in their screens—the pronoun ‘I’, place or site, first lines, last lines, for the poem “Palinode” all negative statements, rearranged as rhyming couplets— in Hut I began with the key concept Heart, meandered to Animal, and indeed continued to meander as I reread everything over a couple month period, since now there was a more substantial accumulation. My earlier passion for constraint had loosened, and so did my re-composition protocols—I began Hut with the sunrise, then moved forward from daybreak intuitively, so that now the book begins with an exhaustive morning, and ends with the tiny notebooks of night. In rereading it now, it seems to me that what I was attempting to capture in the return to so many old notes, was the sensation of existing in time. At first this sensation had something to do with an even stillness, a quality described by Rousseau in a Passage from his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, which I have used as an epilogue in all three versions of the book, retranslating it each time. In my most recent translation, it reads “The ebb and flow of this water, its sound continuous but lapping the distances that ceaselessly caught up my ear and my eyes, replaced the inner emotions revery had quenched in me, and sufficed to make me pleasurably sense my existence without troubling to think.” Rousseau is describing the spacey peaceful feeling of drifting dreaming on a lake in a boat, and at the beginning this passage described for me a quality of sensation I experienced in rereading the notebooks as a prolonged drift. Now though, twenty years past, the existing in time sensation has less to do with peaceful revery than it does with grief and loss. Hut is a prolonged tracking of grief experience, I would now say, that frames the performed drifting of Boat.
I also included material description of the notebooks, loosely in an archival style, because their janky, textured materiality feels important to record within the cleaner, smoother aesthetic of the printed book:
This work was made under the auspices of opulence
In incandescent occidental forest
In soft pale-green medium-sized notebook
Titled Many notes toward an essay on Girls, Girlhood
[….]
I awake into an original greediness
Into glossy persimmon-crested notebook called Sylvine
Into large creamy notebook with title Precious Ego
Into small blue-marbled notebook with powder-blue cotton spine
Bought in London, December 1999
Glossy black notebook with red ink-edged pages, water dampened
Into many sexes slowly pivoting like leaves
I didn’t set out to write a lifelong poem. I simply wanted to transfer my papers to the archive in an orderly way, and rereading the notebooks seemed like a sensible way to begin. The poem has arrived on its own in ten-year increments, with publishing opportunities forming the propulsion for its iterations. Now that the ten-year pattern of return has established itself through three turns, I am interested to return to the process in the future, for a fourth foray, when I’m 70. The prolonged and regular duration of rereading has given me a space from which to perceive the notebook as a historical form. The accident of falling across the complete set of Coleridge’s notebooks in a rural bookshop is providing an impersonal counter-ballast to the temporal sensibility the process holds open for me. Increasingly it feels to me, that in spite of all my various efforts and discipline, it is not my published books that constitute my lifework, but the steady but improvisational filling of notebooks with the ephemera of dailiness, now over four decades, and the compositional patterns of return I devise for understanding and presenting them.
I was certain that there was a murmuration in Boat; I reread the book carefully and found none. I thought that perhaps rather than containing the represented and transcribed collective flight, the book itself took the form of a murmuration, its poly-centric iterations forming patterns in the media of time and weather, temps.
Or had the heretical murmuration evaded me, evaded the poem, to appear in the novel? I wrote The Baudelaire Fractalbetween the second and third recurrences of Boat. My notebook murmuration slipped into the novel’s narrative. “Some parts of transmission would occur outside perception, but even the more overtly material parts of the compact, the parts of meaning that filled the mind with grand glidings and swoopings and sudden small curls and dark reorts that were simultaneous, overlapping, and yet following one another in a sequence, like the completely absorbing and impossibly inventive movements of starling flocks at dusk, even these parts would never find their completion in description. Always one part of the pattern would break off, glide towards a dispersal, sharply change direction, so that within a single murmuration several separate but superimposed fragments of the image were interweaving to briefly paint a density in the shape of a boot, a sickle, a leaf, a semi-colon.” (p. 148)
How does it feel to write in a notebook? Opaque, erotic and unaccountable. At the same time neutral. A receptacle for all kinds of thievery. The bouquet of complaint. The amplification of onanism. The ornament of untruth. A cabinet of ruinousness. I craved this nervy unaccountability and its freedom, this homemade space of all unthought relationship coupled with the generous thrill of graphic accident. The constellation revealing itself in time across the splay of soiled pages, word under word, phrase around space, scribbled line belatedly joining plundered noun to dreamed verb, could all at once destroy a year-long ontological query, or sketch a rude portal to a long-unripe image which now dropped like a summer fig. Beginning as the neutral recipients of my earliest experiments in description and annotation, the notebooks became agents, louche guides untethered to habit, the discretely flourishing sites of impossible contiguities. I wrote in them with a pen moved by the gregarious secrets of my body and the strangeness of the city, the specificity of islands, with a pencil sharpened by doubt. This pleasure, deeply provocative and private, has never suffered or flagged. So with workaday fidelity I continued and still do continue to fill notebooks, carefully assuring that I always have an empty one ready, should I suddenly, in an unanticipated flurry of night-writing, fill up the last. Always there is a small one in an outer pocket and a larger one on my desk. They stack up colourfully, accruing their special grime, tumbled over in the seldom swept corner to the right of my desk.
I take a page. I walk across the page, pausing and weeping, fibbing, taking, going back, dribbling, forgetting how to forgive, lying down and sleeping, dreaming these words and waking to write them, discovering that in the night they’ve changed. I am their imprecise conduit. The notebook’s limits are my body. Or if I don’t want to disturb the sleepy thought by turning on the light and reaching for the notebook I place a sentence in a specific bordering part of my mind towards the lower rear left side darker sector, the feeling of this placing being like an inner moulding or imprinting into a region of soft clay then soft clay I sleep again. The sentence is about the perception of living, perceiving from the edge of sleep, the living very distant, the shapes of it irregular like fields in an old country observed from the air, or an abstract geometrical cloisonné pattern with no reference to an image, the various little enameled plots graphically bordered according to some unknown but still-active historical precedent perhaps reflecting topology, ancient ownership, rivers and forests, disappeared languages and families maybe, their soft clay and coercions. Through sleep and through notebooks I come to love edges and their expressiveness and the humanly made things that communicate long antecedents and inventions of edge. Everything is edge only—Agnes Martin’s paintings, an ancient darned hemp bedsheet with its articulate selvage, the rim of the ceramic bowl made by Lucie Rie I once surreptitiously held in my trembling hands, Bernart de Ventadorn’s Lark song, the fraying cuff of my favourite blue cotton shirt, the stained grey muji booklet. I could say that we are these edges, the edges of our ancestors. We glimpse them, edges and ancestors, from a great distance as abstract patterns, a little bit like geometry, a little bit like love. The poem’s in me at a great distance trembling like a lark in sun. I write all of this or some of this in a notebook in earliest morning in the habitual mauve ink, so I can sleep again then return later, to find and draw the edges of the thought.
I think there are also techniques of cognition paused or abandoned far in the past. I borrow this idea from the weaver Anni Albers, who said that many pre-Columbian fiber techniques, as observed on archaeological textile scraps, are so complex as to have become uninterpretable to even the most advanced weavers of the present. For each ancient scrap found, a set of once-habitual and transmitted manual gestures has disappeared, and along with those gestures, a scale of connected values and relationships. The disappearance is not neutral or natural. It’s force that extinguishes techniques. Our fingers can no longer transmit the gestures that created the fabrics because the site of transmission has been seized and the bodies, which transmit consciousness, have been seized also. Consciousness is technique. I can return this afternoon to these sentences, notice absences in the thinking, wrong embellishments, a place a fresh motif might be inserted in order to clarify the thought, recognizing fully that much of the variety and pattern of what minds have made and enjoyed historically is now inaccessible to perception and understanding. The textures of relationship patterned, the styles of transition practiced, the directions inaugurated, the decorations offered, are now mute, although their remnants linger like an immaterial syntax. My capacities are degraded sketches, or something like fossils. Part of the present is resistant to analysis. We can’t read everything. Lost languages are living their own lives. I want to stay with this technical incomprehensibility. In the warm enveloping water or in the return to the notebook I might become a little free of such of habitual projections and reactions, the political refusals, the blunt defensiveness and the torques of fear, the souring of shame and bitterness, to intuit something of those lost techniques, to continue in their grammars. It is a hubristic notion but I would nonetheless like it to be the case. I would like to receive and transmit the syntax that’s intangible within the present. In this way I might inhabit time with my sentences. The page was never blank. The city was never blank. It's a field of accents.
I’ve given up the guidance of the exemplary models. There’s only chance now, in unknowable and shattered measure. My path’s all displacement and divagation. It yawns and retracts at the same time. There is the feeling that I am only a writer insofar as I am the notebook’s writer—the notebook possesses me, who serves merely to fill its pages. What is noted: events of the mind, now many purposeful memory aids, the flurry of administrative tasks, inklings, transcriptions, citations, dreams, letters, passages from previous notebooks that I want to carry forward for some unknown reason. These are documents of incompletion, indefiniteness, oscillation. Coburn emphasizes this quality of oscillation that she has thoroughly observed across her work with Coleridge’s notes. For her, the essential fact of the notebooks is their movement, which encompasses all of movements qualities and durations. . . But what substantially moves? A composition of nows.
This composing of nows across the two-page spread is a graphic work, a form of drawing, a drawing-out at times, of a little portion of the tumble of images and sensations that constitute consciousness. Coleridge notes “The movement, when the sould begins to be sufficiently self-conscious, to ask concerning itself, and its relations, is the first movement of its intellectual arrival into the World. It’s Being—enigmatic as it must seem—is posterior to its existence.” Where for Coleridge the free disjunction of elements in noting pertains more broadly to consciousness. His composition of flight is a trembling mind as dispersion, not a unity. In March 1827 he wrote on the 1st leaf of notebook 56, as a title: “Volitilia or Daybook for bird-liming/ small thoughts, impounding stray thoughts, and holding for trial doubtful thoughts.” I concur with Coleridge— consciousness is volatile. Nothing will remain of it that is not noted. The turn in time to attempt to recognise the mind’s movement is the only freedom.
The poem flies across the notebook, that lumbering, implausible external organ, at a great distance, trembling like starlings.
