Recently I was walking along in the snow, ensconced in my hood and my thoughts, and I thought: wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a device that could capture and record everything that’s running through my mind right now, impressions in surround sound, unfiltered by the unreliable choosiness of memory? Maybe it could even extract individual lines from the harmony, themes from the counterpoint, so that I could play them back later one by one. Of course, this is what Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were trying to do in their prose, and lots of other artists too in lots of other ways, not to mention all manner of scientists with their needles and nodes. It wasn’t an original wish by any means, but still I wondered: if I could hear the melodies of my thoughts, what flitting insights would I find, what deep echoes of my days?

Perhaps tellingly, this is the only thought I remember from that particular walk.

Sometimes when I want to hold onto passing ideas, I have the foresight and diligence to type them out as notes on my phone. These notes are sporadic and inconsistent; they require the right combination of circumstances—proximity of phone, body still enough and fingers warm enough to type, and sufficient distance from the moment to consider the interests of my future self—and this probably means, unfortunately, that the most important things are left undocumented. But what I do manage to record becomes such a joy to revisit—like a fragmentary archeological record of instructions and inspirations. I thought I would share some of these gems, both ancient and recent, with a little context added. Below, in chronological order, are ten representative examples.

**

I wrote my very first note on the same day I got my first iPhone, which was shortly before I moved to Montreal, eons ago. This note is a short, incomplete transcript of a conversation between my parents and my brother about the prospect of getting a dog. On August 7, 2009 at 9:22pm, I typed this:

Having a good dog requires a lot of time and energy. A good dog is a factor of the owner. It’s hard to say, ‘I want a good dog.’

The point is we’re getting a dog and it will be fantastic.

As soon as you move away I will run over it in the driveway.

The first line is my mom (who is always reasonable), the second line is my brother (who wanted the dog), and the third line is my dad (who didn’t).

To be very clear, my dad was JOKING about his murderous intentions. Evidence: they got the dog, whose name is Seamus, and every morning my dad shares a banana with him in the kitchen (Seamus eats more than half).

I was as yet too clumsy-thumbed to transfer the full texture of their dialogue into the touchscreen of my new phone. But this is a delightful time capsule nonetheless. My mom’s thoughtful caution, thrown wildly to the wind by my nineteen-year-old brother; my dad’s hyperbolic threat, which really expresses (reluctant) assent. Seamus was still an “it”; he would be born exactly seven weeks after this exchange took place, and they brought him home eight weeks after that. Both my mom and brother put a great deal of time and effort into his care and training, and as a result, he is a very good dog. He loves eating, swimming, and car rides, and although my brother moved away several years ago, he has certainly not been run over in the driveway.

I have been through three iPhones since then. Seamus, who is now eight-and-a-half, looks a little older and stiffer every time I visit.

**

Quite some time later, there was this note, which I typed on December 12, 2013 at 6:46pm:

I am in my class’s exam right now.
Boo!
🙂

Rather juvenile, I know. I confess: I anticipated a certain amount of gleeful pleasure, when I taught my first class in the fall of 2013, in sitting through their final exam with computer, notes, phone, and books all at my fingertips. It would feel, I expected, like floating on a lifeboat in a sea of anxiety. Such notions were not without their masochistic dimensions, I am ashamed to admit.

When I entered the classroom, a few minutes after the exam had begun (professors do not actually have to attend formal final exams at McGill), the invigilator came rushing over, sign-in sheet in hand. “There’s a free seat over there,” she hissed, gesturing to the end of the back row. “No, no,” I whispered, understanding her confusion; “It’s okay; I’m the professor.” She looked at me, puzzled, maybe not hearing. “The pro-fess-or,” I whispered again. She frowned. “I’m the PROFESSOR.” The last one came out very loud. It seemed to hang in the air for a moment, like an accidental and full-throated belch, before dissipating in the buzz of the fluorescent lights. Several of the students turned in their seats. The poor invigilator looked mortified. I had the same feeling that I get when I step on the tail of one of my cats.

I was wearing my grown-up blazer—houndstooth, and a little too big—in which, incidentally, I have three times been taken as younger than I am. But despite its warmth and flair, and the diversion of my phone (and computer, notes, books), in the end, my heart hurt for those students, my first. I remembered my time in the sea.

**

Not long after that exam came this note, typed on January 1, 2014 at 1:14am:

Happy 2014 to myself from Kait’s house.
2014’s gonna be MY year.

I had this idea because my birthday is on the 14^th, and the first time I ran in a cross-country race I got a ribbon for being 14^th, and since then I have always considered 14 something of a lucky number. It feels so familiar. I had been waiting for 2014 for years.

I wrote this quiet New Year’s assertion at one of those points in the night when the conversation fades and the music has been playing so long it seems as much a part of the room as the chairs and rug and empty glasses. Lazy, awkward, and attentive, we look at our phones in the lull, waiting for the collective next move.

2014 was okay. I’m not sure it was MINE, though.

 

**

The next note comes from a fairly substantial repository of dissertation-related thoughts. On March 29, 2014 at 11:39am, I wrote:

All poetry after romanticism is fragments, the problem is making these fragments cohere, and in middle silences they can’t reconcile the aspirational impulse—though eventually they learn to do.

Evidently I lost sight of grammar in the frenzy of my epiphany. But this was a crucial breakthrough, and it became one of the dissertation’s central arguments—and one of my favourite arguments, too.

When I’d gotten the wording sorted out (I finished the last major portion of new writing for the thesis almost a year to the day after saving this note), the idea became something more like this: The writers who emerged from the fallow periods in the middle of their careers with the most innovative new work and the most sustainable new outlooks were those who came to accept that their poetry would always seem incomplete (or fragmentary), because it would never quite live up to the visions (or aspirations) that they might once have had for it. Creative paralysis set in when they fixated on “completion” (or coherence); when they let this notion go, they felt free to move again. Phyllis Webb put it this way: “if you don’t set up any proposition about success, perfection, completion, then you’re not going to wind up with an idea of failure. You’re going to wind up with process.”

The phone note reminds me of this important argument’s origins, as a fragment among fragments.

 

**

Here’s a pretty typical kind of note. On July 12, 2014 at 4:12pm, I wrote:

5:45 st-Paul metro station, line 1
Rue de l’ecole de medecin

These are two different locations in Paris. The bottom one was the street of a café I was supposed to try (I did, and ate quiche, and also realized that I had been taken there for hot chocolate by a professor from the Sorbonne eight years earlier), and the top one was where I was supposed to meet a friend later that day (I didn’t need to write this down, but he looked at me expectantly upon delivering the directions, so I felt like I should do something—and I’m glad I did, at least for the guidance of my memory, now, if not of my body, then). I arrived at the St-Paul metro station early, and sat on a bench in the late afternoon sun reading James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Pigeons milled, commuters swarmed, and children played in a tiny temporary fairground nearby.

**

Many of my notes are shopping lists and recipes. For example, on September 26, 2015 at 4:09pm, I wrote this list:

Spelt berries
Red onion
Pepper
Kale
Lemon, limes
Sweet potato
Basil, cilantro
Tomatoes
Spinach and strawberries/pomegranate

Spelt berries. These proved a great challenge to find, despite the abundance of health food stores in my neighbourhood. In fact, I’m not even sure I ever did find them, although I found something like them (spelt kernels? Grocery shopping in French does occasionally trip me up). This was for an excellent spelt berry-lentil salad with a lemon-tahini dressing that I have made several times since. I kept making it, that is, until the original bag of spelt berries, or spelt berry-like grains, ran out; I have not found them again since, and the health food store where they were finally purchased has now closed.

I might have been expecting company when I wrote this, for I see also the main components of my favourite having-company salad, spinach and pomegranate—or strawberry, if pomegranates are unavailable, which is possible, though they are undeniably commoner than spelt berries.

 

**

I love this next note, and return to it more often than to any of the others. I typed it on November 1, 2015 at 9:19am:

I am always startled when a pay phone rings. It is so imperial and forlorn, like the best poem of a minor poet…
(Leonard Cohen in Beautiful Losers)

He forced all her tiny toes into his mouth, his tongue going like a windshield wiper. Francis had done the same for lepers.
BL p. 341 (note Francis)

I can’t remember why I wanted to take special note of St. Francis, here. I do know that this was weeks before my dissertation defence and I was worried that someone might ask me about Beautiful Losers, which is why I was rereading it. (No one did.)

The first quotation contains one of my favourite images ever. I think of it all the time.

I could probably fill all the gigabytes in my phone with lines from Leonard Cohen.

**

Sometimes the passages I record are meant to be inspirational. Here is an example, from March 3, 2016 at 1:01pm, typo left intact:

As you have seen,I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
–Eudora Welty, final lines of One Writer’s Beginnings

I cannot overstate how much relief I find in the fact that writers I admire have had sheltered lives, as I have. They are not all Ernest Hemingway driving his ambulance or even Virginia Woolf suffering inner turmoil. They are just ordinary people, attuned to the daring of dailiness.

Eudora Welty’s house, which I visited last summer in Jackson, Mississippi, reminds me of my grandmother’s. I walked over from my hotel on a very hot Sunday afternoon. A performance of some sort had just concluded in a nearby church, and I passed through its dispersing audience—linen-suited locals with lilting Southern voices—to enter the quiet, upscale neighbourhood. There were a few dog-walkers roaming the leafy streets as well. This seemed remarkable because no one walks anywhere in Mississippi (“Where yo’ truck at, girl?” a woman had called to me from her porch the previous evening, as I panted up one of the steep hills of Vicksburg). The sidewalks outside Welty’s house were cracked and uneven. Air-conditioners whirred and birds chirped with great vigour. It smelled like humid earth and a gathering storm.

**

Here’s something from this past month. It concerns three separate occurrences, the last of which took place on January 30, 2018 at 3:43pm:

One sister giving the other sister her glove
Red-lipped boy videotaping the train coming in in the late afternoon sun, long shadows
Boy with backpack walking along the sidewalk sedately carrying a very large block of ice

The first one was on the bus. I see now, though, that my record of the event might sound misleading. This was not a moment of benevolence. Rather, the older sister, who was probably about 8, took off her glove, passed it wordlessly to the younger sister, and then did something with her bare hand—I don’t recall what, but it must have required moderate manual agility, like adjusting her hair or scarf or fishing in her bag. When she was done, she reached out and took back the glove (which was not actually a glove but a waterproof mitten, purple or black) and put it on again. The entire exchange was accomplished in silence, and I was struck by the easy, practiced comfort of it all, as though they had made exactly these gestures a thousand times. The younger girl seemed to extend her hand all the way from the depths of her daydreams, and she did so before the older one had even offered anything. It was like a little dance, I thought, the habit of intimacy.

The second scene occurred in the Brockville train station late on a Sunday afternoon. The sunlight, which might have been the most memorable part of this snapshot, could only possibly be described as thick, maybe viscous, like honey. That is a cliché but it was a cliché kind of light. The kind that poured in like butterscotch and stuck to Joni Mitchell’s senses. The kind that Emily Dickinson observed as having a “certain Slant” on “Winter afternoons.” The train was stopped, and I was dozily watching the people trundle by outside with their suitcases. What caught my attention was a camera, or maybe a phone, sitting on a tripod immediately below my window. No one seemed to be attending to it; what was it doing there? It looked like a lost child alone in a crowd—imperial and forlorn, like Leonard Cohen’s ringing pay phone. And then, as the train lurched back into motion, I noticed a boy running toward it from the other end of the platform. We were headed east, he was running west; his shadow stretched so far behind him that its tip might have been pinned to the ground somewhere in the distance. His jacket was blue and his lips were very, very red in the sunlight.

The third scene was something I saw out the window of an Uber on my way to the Montreal airport. It was also late afternoon. Again the air was heavy with an orange light that made everything—trees, snow, houses, parked cars—look very still and sleepy. School had obviously just let out, because children paraded along the sidewalk like ants. This particular boy was walking alone. His arms didn’t quite reach all the way around the block of ice. He carried it neither proudly nor resentfully, but just as a matter of course. It sat patiently in his embrace like a small dog.

 

**

Here’s the last note, again from a book, and important. On February 9, 2018 at 10:02am I wrote:

“‘I’m okay,’ is all she says. There is a big empty space where the rest of her words are supposed to be.” [Vermette p. 305]

This quotation is from Katherena Vermette’s The Break, which I have recently finished reading. I spent years studying the big empty spaces where words are supposed to be—silences—and I still instinctively pause whenever I see them described or discussed. The Break is all about silences—especially the billowing, flapping silence of the victim, who cannot speak for so many reasons—and Vermette evokes these “breaks” in communication beautifully. (The “Break” of her title refers to a snowy field in Winnipeg’s North End, which also symbolizes the “big empty space” of silence.) But The Break is also, I think, about the intimate silence among friends or family or women or people with a shared history—the moments when “all she says” is all she needs to say for the listener to grasp her meaning. This wordless understanding—the silence that connects rather than breaks—lies at the root of compassion.

Something else about The Break that I did not record but will certainly remember: Vermette writes winter with remarkable accuracy. The novel had to be set in winter, for reasons that are as varied as (but similar to) the reasons that both Fargo and James Joyce’s “The Dead” had to be set in winter. But on a simpler level, the descriptions are those of someone who knows the shapes and moods of the season. One of the characters “falls up the snow-packed front stoop” (I’ve done that). Another notices the “cloud-packed sky” at night, which “reflects light so it is almost as bright as daytime” (I’ve travelled under that sky). And another “wakes up smelling the snow. February is blowing into her small, messy bedroom.” I admire this: along with her sensitive ear and her ability to render the emotional spaces between people, Vermette has a well-developed capacity—no futuristic brain implants required—to capture the impressions that settle on her as she passes through the day’s weather—the sun, the wind, the texture and smell (the smell!) of snow.

I had forgotten all about the smell of snow.