OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Wordcount

September 28th, 2009

One more thing you notice when you drag yourself to the journal every morning on waking is that while every day has been endowed with a standard number of hours, the number of words that you need to capture the twenty four hours since the last time you picked up the pen is highly variable.

Some days it’s as though the pen cannot keep up with the words in my head, some days there’s a lot of staring into space, adjusting, fidgeting. And I try to figure out the difference, that the easiest or maybe simply the most joyful is the connection of things that becomes a new idea to me, or a recognition of some thought as an old idea in a new form. Some days there are emotions to be worked through, things that when I felt them I might not even have been able to identify exactly because my feelings like to wear masks and I tend to have to take off one after another to get at what exactly what I felt. It turns out righteous indignation is indeed rare, and fear doesn’t like to be recognized at all. But I don’t suppose that this is the bulk of the journal either. Stalling for time I catalogue sounds, dogs and birds and the neighbors’ fountain, rustles of leaves, and the heaving sighs of busses at the stop a few houses down the street. So is the different between a fast three pages and a slow three pages only the level of detail?

I should never run out of words, I suppose if it is so, because there is always more detail to cover. Only it starts sounding like an English 101 paper attempt to bulk up the word count, the inventory of items on my desk, the tedious recounting of things that don’t change, feel as if they will never change, houses passed walking Rainer to school with Christmas lights out in September or already fully decorated for Halloween, interesting plants I don’t know the names of, what I heard on the radio, what I read before falling asleep, the weather, the annoyance of power tools buzzing and the behavior of people parking on our street in front of my house, details that don’t mean much to me, watchfulness without any real object.

And I think what I try to make my way to, however slowly is that the factor in the number of words for a day may not be detail but attention. Minus a sensory deprivation take, can one not assume rough parity among days for the number of details present? Or that details are mines which this casual habit of three pages a day is in no danger of stripping bare, that the presence of details is, as a matter of functioning, emotional truth, if not mathematically accurately, infinite. Or that fractal-like, the closer one looks at a detail, the more detail there is to it?

I try not to go all tree-falling-in-the-woods-with-no-audience but what is a detail unlit by attention? Can attention create details?

I hold my pen posed above the paper, thinking, one second, two, three, it plunges back down, onward, leaving the messy trail.

And it’s not that every detail has equal weight. Time is a detail, but a tyrannical one. The amber translucency of the honey in a jar on my desk from doctoring tea for my sore throat is a more pleasing detail, less startling, less interesting — everyone knows the color of honey, I have no new take on describing it. I want a detail that is unexpected. Deviant.

I play as if I could create a taxonomy of details, the idiosyncratic, the personal, the universal, the artificial, the red herring, the negligible, the trite, the repetitive, the sensory (could I invent an abstract detail? what about something statistical that you do not perhaps experience directly?

And where does my attention go on the days when I struggle to put a single word more down? Is the attention vested in a day any less fixed than the hours? Or do I hide it from myself when my attention is spent on envy and covetousness and feelings of deep inadequacy, the days when I suspect I am a better friend when my friends are having a hard time than when everything is going well? Days when I get that seventh grade feeling that the rest of the world is having a much better time, having a party to which I am not invited?

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