Life at the Marginalia

The other day, I took down four books of notes and ramblings to the basement. I added them to a collection of other notes and ramblings that date back to a diary from high school in 1972. I wrote that diary in French. Before you think me a pretentious little snot, know that I once went up to the blackboard in class and wrote “Je suis un chien” to indicate that I had a dog. The entire class laughed, including the teacher.

My collection includes daytimers and appointment books going back almost as early as the diary. They cover decades, various places I lived, and different jobs with long-forgotten concerns that, even if I were to remember them now, would interest me only as a curio of the past. A personal souvenir like a rock you’d pick up on a mountain trail.

Some people might think this excessive. Not me. I like to think of it as being thorough and detailed, although we all know who lurks in the details. But this isn’t hoarding in a socially unacceptable way. It’s not like I am a pack rat. My collections are organized and stored in ways that allow you to walk through my basement unencumbered by stacks of yellowed newspapers and cat litter. Then again, I do have newspapers from the Dallas assassination. A daughter’s improbable napkin holder. An uneven fish ashtray. Some things hold their value over time.

A lot of that value comes from the doodling I did while taking notes. I never gave them much thought until I realized that collectively the images constitute a sort of illustrated manuscript. They aren’t distractions. They actually help capture the essence of what I was trying to record in writing. After all, words are ways of capturing a shared experience in time. They recreate that experience. Images and doodlings aid in that recreation visually.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not like a Medieval monk working in the marginalia of a manuscript to turn it into a work of art. But the doodlings allow the right side of my brain to express itself in ways that the conscious, directed left side cannot. While the left is performing executive functions like summarizing, analyzing, and critiquing, the right draws itself out—literally—in images. The result is something that might be called “journal graffiti” as opposed to a more formal illustrated manuscript.

I actually don’t like the left-brain/right-brain distinction. It’s too facile an explanation for complicated processes that in the end function together as a unified whole, not separately. The images, colors, and drawings in my notebooks tell part of the story; the writing, another. You can have one without the other, but why would you? How can you? As an earlier generation put it, how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm once they’ve seen gay Paree?

Life at the marginalia is more involved than you might think. It’s certainly more than I thought. It involves a shared reality, an experience of time, and a way to express yourself creatively. The reality is shared between you and a past version of you as well as between you and anyone who comes along later to read the notebook. It’s about time, because doodlings, like graffiti and cave paintings, are a way of staking your claim in the universe. Yes, you were here and you mattered, at least to someone at some time. Demons and all. The creative expression is obvious and cannot be stopped. It breaks through like weeds in a crack in the sidewalk.

None of this has to be done perfectly. In fact, the more imperfect, the better. It’s more human that way. This reminds me of the homeless man I met in São Paulo who made his living carving furniture out of fallen tree bark. It was involved. It was intricate. It wasn’t for everyone. Yet, the guy was determined to make it work. And he did. More importantly, it gave him an identity among the locals and tourists.

So, I keep notebooks. I doodle. I cherish a fish ashtray and a napkin holder that defies Euclidean geometry. I keep the Dallas newspapers and the French diary in which I proudly declared myself a dog. I keep all of it. It ain’t so bad. It’s living at the marginalia.

---

Image credits: Katie Hunt from St Albans, UK – Books in the monastery museum, Uploaded by Fæ, Public Domain, Link; Malnazar, – BAHiv_eQwc6iOg at Google Cultural Institute, Public Domain, Link; Giulio Clovio – oQESK2eVxSpvSA at Google Cultural Institute, Public Domain, Link; Walter Callens – originally posted as armenia, Link; Fyodor Dostoyevsky — Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18972346.

Want more? Go to Robert Brancatelli. The Brancatelli Blog is a member of The Free Media Alliance, which promotes “alternatives to software, culture, and hardware monopolies.”