For the Record

What to do when you find a blank notebook in a dumpster

Barbara Hepworth, Winter Solstice, 1970

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Friends,

When I finished my masters program in theology and the arts, I had no idea what was next for my life. But when I was wandering around campus with friends, I glanced into a dumpster and discovered my next step: I found a tattered, green hardback notebook with the word “RECORD” stamped on the front. Inside? Blank page after blank page after blank page. The perfect place to start a new season.

I remember reading somewhere that the road to mastery starts with copying those who’ve come before us. Think of musicians singing cover songs, cooks testing 100s of recipes, cartoonists tracing the linework of old comics. The best way to find your voice in any creative effort, ironically, is by engaging the excellence that has come before us. So I decided to use that “RECORD” book to copy down poems.

More specially, I used my three library cards and got on a routine—for a long while, I traveled around every week to different libraries across Los Angeles. I would wander the aisles until something spoke to me, and leave with a pile of books to read and search for the next poem to write down. No clicks, no algorithms, no suggested reading—just literally wandering around and trusting the institution (library) and the process (wandering the aisles) and the response (hand-copying poems) to get me somewhere interesting. I pulled the RECORD book off the shelf as I’ve reflected on another year of Still Life, and here’s a page:

The book is filed from the first page to the last, and it’s falling apart. I filled up this RECORD book years ago, and now that I flip through, I have my own personal anthology of over 100 poems that meant something to me during a time of disorienting transition out of school and into the world. It’s a gift, and many of the poems are still comfort to me today. I’ve certainly shared many over the years in these letters (long-time readers will recognize that Jane Hirshfield poem—it was the first I ever shared in these letters).

Copying down all these poems by hand slowed me down. It forced me to read deeply, to practice a certain way of being alive. I didn’t just read the poems with my eye and engage with my mind, I slowed down and engaged with a pen, with my hand, with the page itself. A strange thing happens when we read or copy the words of others—we try on their words, their ways of thinking. We’re burnished by the specificity and depth of language until it becomes our own habit of mind, our own habit of thought. The poets’ words became our words, the poets’ minds shapes our own. Here’s an example from Franz Wright, one of the first poems I copied down:

“The Reader”

The mask was gone now, burned away
(from inside)
by God’s gaze

There was no
I, there
was no he—
finally
there was no text, only
what the words stood for;
and then

what all things stand for.

In a culture obsessed with efficiency and saving time and saving money and being as smooth-brained and frictionless as possible, pulling a notebook out of the dumpster and driving around LA and spending hours in libraries is the opposite of efficiency. But the struggle of intimacy—with others and our own lives—is just that. A struggle. The effort is the point, and the effort is how we cultivate curiosity and courage and grow beautiful things in our lives to share with others.

Take care,

Michael

p.s. This December, the Jesuit Media Lab has been doing “daily advent meditations on story and song,” and I was honored to contribute a reflection on Sleeping At Last’s “Snow”. Welcome to all new readers who found their way here from this reflection! Interest in more of Still Life? Explore my archive of letters here.

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“Sabbaths 1999 VI” by Wendell Berry

We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Remember" by Joy Harjo”

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

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