trivialities

some thoughts on keeping a journal:

I have kept a journal ever since I was seven. With very few exceptions, I have written in it everyday, even if it is just one sentence. I go through a ton of pens and paper; half of my closet is densely packed with remnants of these daily scribbles. In the past, when I finished a notebook, I would sometimes hesitate before adding it to my colossal collection—Do I really want to add another book of trivialities to take up even more space?—then remember how fond I am of my colorfully illustrated volumes from my childhood and my newest one would be spared.

Once every year or so, I wipe the dust from their covers and look through them. The older, the better: writings grounded too close to my present are not as interesting as the testimonies of an existence that I have lost long ago. I find patterns, an aspect of the whole that I could not see in the moment. From seven until nine, they were mostly sticky images pressed onto paper with cray-pas that would still cling to my twenty-five-year-old fingers; the text was mostly an explanatory accompaniment. From ten to fourteen, words slowly start to take over most of the page and the images come as an afterthought at the end of each entry. Age twelve also marks a shift from writing entirely in Korean to entirely in English. By age fifteen, images disappear altogether, but there still must have been some interest in the journal as something visual, as I would often use ink in various colors (or maybe it was just trendy to use brightly colored ink at the time). From age sixteen to seventeen, images reappear briefly, but as “ideas” supplementing my angry manifestos. From eighteen on, only black ink, all text, mostly legible and neat handwriting, coherent and full sentences. There is also a shift back to writing in Korean, with occasional English words or phrases.

I always wonder what the trajectory would have been like if I had not moved to States. Would I have so readily and viciously cast out images from my daily meditations? Regardless of the fact that it was infinitely uncomfortable to convey my thoughts in English, once I came here, I insisted upon writing all my entries in that broken grammar and consistently incorrect spellings. My obsession with mastering those cruel and foreign words deemed all else as secondary. In the beginning, the image afterthoughts were a treat after a grueling one-hour of writing three sentences—drawing felt free without the constraints of grammatical and syntactical rules—but I eventually seemed to have found these treats a luxury I could no longer afford; a sense of dire urgency took over when kids continually teased me at school and I could still not speak back.

Voluntary silence can be empowering, but an involuntary one scars for life. I imagine it must feel something like a singer suddenly losing her voice from an accident. The developed consciousness is there but speech is no where up to that level. Thus my journal became both the training and battle grounds with language. Rather than that of negotiation, the relationship has long been my attempts to conquer it, subordinate it, thrust it in the position at my mercy. This is one reason why anger so permeates my language; it has given me power, but only after so much pain and sacrifice.

Now I call my journal writing “meditations.” Though it always has been both, to some degree, it is no longer a tense site of struggle but a calm place of refuge from all outside noises. It is a place where I can finally hear and feel myself. Call it a present inwardness, to modify Marilynne Robinson’s term. When my main battle was with language, I did not notice a significant disparity between the life as I lived it daily and the times of reflection while writing, as life was the writing, the language. But as I grew older, I found my journal a necessity, a means by which I could confirm my own existence. Otherwise, I still feel, I would become swallowed up by the world, both by those of the physical and cyber spaces.

Navigating the physical space of New York City, to say the least, can be overwhelming. Every sound, sight, smell, feeling competes for my attention: too much to hear, see, smell, feel at once, but I try. I try to take it all in patiently, one at a time, but most times, it requires an incredible proficiency at multitasking.

Hence all the ears plugged into a device. Music isolates a person into a single sensory experience, or, at least, foregrounds all the others. Music is the bubble, the refuge from the aggressive excess of what happens outside. When we turn up the music, we choose what assaults our ears. I bitterly laugh when I think about the popular media reports in the early 2000s of studies on the dangers of loud music on headsets and psychological consequences of creating this bubble. Because mp3 players were only the smallest fraction of a much larger phenomenon that has, over the years, grown monstrously out of control at an alarmingly accelerated rate.

When this single-channel sensory refuge expands into a double or even triple—that is, when the device provides not only music but visual and other information—the space shifts from acting as the cozy, dark corner of a closet to a fully outfitted bomb shelter. Smartphones indicate this expansion of alternative space: not only can we shut off the sensory surplus around us through music, but browse through pictures, read news articles, play games, communicate via social media networks, and so on. Mobile access to the internet is the ultimate expansion of this previously bounded refuge into infinity. We can never exhaust the possibilities of activity in cyber space: there always exists another universe, another galaxy that we have left untouched but we know exists.

It is so easy to get lost in the virtual world, especially by leaving the body behind. I associate presentness with my body; I need to see, hear, smell, touch, taste, to know I am still here. I sometimes get the impression that words on the internet are like floating, disembodied ideas. When I see my hand moving over my journal, I know my words come from me. It is my voice, with my handwriting, which, otherwise, a digital device would convert to “Arial” or “Times New Roman.” This daily writing is my way of fetching my words back to myself as a physical being; no one else but I, in this time and space, could have produced them. I need this solitude, the brief moment of present inwardness. Only then do I feel safe from external sensory assault while I reclaim my receding body from cyber space, and can remind myself how much I love and hate the language that now confirms my existence.