Words are things
"All Nature faithfully"—But by what feint
Can Nature be subdued to art's constraint?
Her smallest fragment is still infinite!
And so he paints but what he likes in it.
What does he like? He likes, what he can paint!
For the past month I've been experimenting with a paper journal. I found an A4 notebook at the thrift store a few years ago and finally decided to ruin it.
It's regular, lined, unnumbered paper, the only way I can imagine writing in a journal. There are journals that provide a set space for the day's events. This isn't inherently bad but it makes me raise an eyebrow: as lived, some days have a week's content in one, some days never start. Worse, these formats demand certain responses. A day-by-day journal with a set entry size requires an entry regardless of if you have anything to say. If you don't fill in the box, Duo the Owl will appear to mock you for breaking your streak with corporate-approved snark. If not much happened, you're liable to strain and dig up inanities, and if too much happened, the nuance of the day is likely to be steamrolled into 2D.
Journal writing has made me mull over some of the side effects of the process. I've written inconsistent "journal" entries in a markdown file for many years, but there's something very different about pen and paper. A digital record can be backspaced, edited, palimpsested without trace. It would be effortless for me to add a paragraph to this post half a year from now, and I'd leave no memory of the old version! I could write ten thousand pages and it would occupy no more physical space than the picture of Ikaruga Luca I saved a few minutes ago. The record is ephemeral in ways pen and paper is not.
Not only does the journal last longer, but it has power over us in a way I don't think digital writing is capable of. Looking at a journal is all one needs to trigger a memory of writing in it, of a time that we held it in our hands or took a pen to it. The memories come without conscious effort and we don't have much control over which memory might be evoked. But something more sinister can happen at the same time; the journal also records events, which we otherwise might forget; in time, a journal can become a physical totem representing all of its contents, and only its contents, the shadows of which might be evoked simply by spying it on a shelf as you pass through a room.
Words have power over our memories, and we should not underestimate them.
The old masters
Our writings are not destined to outlive us by long, but let's take the great artists as the ideal edge case. Where does Milton live today? How is Dante paying for his rent? What did Montaigne have for dinner yesterday?
These authors are dead, and their writing is still here.
What if Montaigne had only written on the days he had the moody blues? Would we still read the saturnine version of his writings, with essays like
67. On Sadness
Today was pretty bad. I got a drop of coffee on my favorite volume of Plutarch, and stubbed my toe in the field. Things are pretty rough tbh. I think Cicero wrote about something like this but I'm too bummed to check.
Some academic might still read this as a curio if it happened to survive, but the pages of these diaries likely ended up as kindling on a cold winter night some three hundred years ago.
As for our own writings, we're not claiming to be leaving a chronicle that will be read in a thousand years, so it's understandable if our scribbles are impressionistic and fractured. Bad days happen, and the calendar changes. The days we forget—and we forget a lot of them—disappear and no longer belong to us. They enter a ledger beyond our understanding and if those days are preserved at all they are not retained on this side of whatever our respective ends will be; aside from the lingering impressions that shape us they effectively no longer exist.
That is, of course, unless we write them down.
Writing is more than recording a thought or event. The process is physical, and the simultaneous physical act combines with the impression and creates something deeper than before. Channels are carved into the bank. This is calcifying behavior; without extreme circumspection, the word's power to redefine an event we no longer remember in fine detail will dominate.
To plainly state a consequence: writing down everything bad that ever happens is the same as creating a bad life.
For biological / survival reasons we feel the bad more acutely than the good, but we also have a tendency to want to document the bad as a panacea; this is a dangerous feedback loop that means we're always at risk of creating a negativity ledger, a physical "doomlog".
This is a real feature of history and of information generally. Words document events, but it takes readers interpreting the words to transform them back into events. And the process of interpretation is deeply distorting. Have you ever read your own writing and wondered what the hell you were trying to say when you wrote it? The distortion works on ourselves, not just on others. If we're not careful, we can end up bastardizing our own lives for our own future selves. This is a danger even if we're operating in good faith, which...
[Meridious again]
"It is not necessary, [the judge] said, that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts-to the extent that they can be readily made to do so-should find a repository in the witness of some third party. Sergeant Aguilar is just such a party and any slight to his office is but a secondary consideration when compared to divergences in that larger protocol exacted by the formal agenda of an absolute destiny. Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning."
— Blood Meridian
Let's take a detour through Blood Meridian. The above passage appears in chapter VII. The judge has just finished describing black Jackson's origins to Sergeant Aguilar in Spanish, which Jackson does not speak. When he asks the judge what was being said about him, Holden delivers the above harangue and the other members of the troop guffaw at the performance.
The essence of the passage is not as complicated as the judge's [very deliberate] obfuscation suggests (lucky for you, I've lost count of how many times I've read this novel).
Holden controls history by regulating what information passes into the historical record, and he does not hesitate to alter the record as it pleases him. The subject of this lecture is Jackson, and he isn't given the dignity of knowing what is being said about him. Furthermore, Sergeant Aguilar doesn't even understand the lecture, which was full of Biblical and ancient Greek references, but he is now in possession of the words. Aguilar, if asked about "black Jackson" in the future, will be able to deliver a specific and misleading explanation.
The judge is laundering his version of things through third parties, "posting witnesses" who will testify to his approved history. He does this in other forms throughout the novel, including his habit of drawing objects and destroying the originals. He makes himself the only source on information and becomes the distorting lens through which the past will be understood.
Whoever inherits the sole record of an event has no way to check it against anything else. When we doom into a journal, we hand authority over to the record; in half a year, will we remember enough to fill in blanks we didn't write down in detail? Will the record come to define the event for us? We begin as a benign judge, probably not distorting the record deliberately, but writing in elation or grief or anything in between. In six months when all the nuance has faded from our memories, we've switched roles: we are now the sergeant, repeating a story we no longer have power over. The record gains authority over memory.
Practical takeaway
In summary, I need to be very careful not to use a notebook as a dumping ground for bad thoughts. Eventually those entries will function as highway on-ramps to other, unrecorded memories, and if all of the on-ramps say "wrong way" it's not going to be a pleasant journey through the past.
Words are things. When written, they're more permanent than us. Bad things happen! We usually learn from these events; with circumspection, parts of them deserve to be remembered. Just remember to write down some good moments on those days, even if only in the margins. A new fact learned, the taste of the wind, a butterfly cruising by the window.
I'd personally prefer the world forget my bad days, lest those days gain power over me and who I'd like to become.
The only defense we can mount is an offense. When writing, stay conscious of the broader impact, and remember that writing is not only recording the day—it's choosing what gets to define your memory of those days in the future.
"Your mind will take on the character of your most frequent thoughts: souls are dyed by thoughts. So dye your own with a succession of thoughts like these."
— Meditations
Thanks Marky Mark. I quote this line too much but it never loses its weight. What we think dyes our souls, but what we write channels what we think, and encodes objects with the physical memory of those thoughts. Write about the coffee stain if you need to, but never skip the butterfly. We're not just dyeing our souls, we're dyeing history.
06.23.2026
