Today I Wrote Nothing is a journal entry by Jack Rusher, published here Wednesday, March 05, 2008. It is part of Journal.
Nor yesterday, either.
1. Which is great when it’s great, and vice versa.
While reading a recently published collection of Daniil Kharms miscellanea called Today I Wrote Nothing1, I ran aground upon this passage:
We lived in two rooms. My friend had the smaller room, while I had a rather large room, three windows across. My friend would be out all day and would come back only to spend the night. As for me, I was in my room all of the time, and if I went out it was either to the post office, or to buy something for dinner. In addition, I had a case of dry pleurisy, which gave me all the more reason to stay put.
I like being alone. But then a month went by, and I got sick of my solitariness. Books didn’t entertain me, and I would often sit at my desk for long stretches of time without writing a line. I would pick up my notebook again leaving the pages blank. And then that sickly state on top of it! In short, I started to sulk.
The city I lived in at the time was loathsome to me. It stood on a hill and everywhere you looked was like a picture postcard. I became so disgusted with those views that I was happier to stay at home. And really, other than the post office, the market and the store, there was nowhere to go.
And so I sat at home like a hermit.
I read this at the end of a day during which I wrote nothing, a kind of day I’ve been having much too often lately. A weird combination of ennui, demoralization and procrastination has stood between me and any sort of positive productivity.
2. “I know, I’ll just do a little background research on the social habits of Tibetan snow foxes to prepare myself to write this next chapter.”
Part of the problem is the device with which I’m meant to get the work done: a computer connected to the Internet. It is, as my friend Paul put it, like sitting down to work in front of the greatest toy ever invented. What time isn’t wasted on configuring, re-configuring, upgrading, and otherwise tinkering with the tool itself is gobbled up by pointless peregrinations on the web2.
Introspection allows one to see the nature of the problem, but it also leads to a danger that the work will become very meta — poets writing poems about how difficult it is to write poems. No one wants that.
Lost at sea in a lifeboat, he drops one oar overboard. Now he’s paddling in circles.
3. Substitute whatever metric you use to decide if your day was wasted.
After some weeks of failing to adhere to one’s own rules — watching oneself read email before the first 500 words of the day are written3, for instance — it becomes obvious that self-control is not as simple as making a policy decision. There are, evidently, other voices involved in the moment by moment decisions of our lives, ones that may not agree with our conscious ideas about the best way to spend those moments.
The question starts to come up: who’s in charge here?
An organ grinder and his monkey argue over, as they say, creative differences. The grinder is happy to go on playing covers of the latest pop tunes, but the monkey wants to compose serious art music. They end their partnership, after which the grinder goes on giving the public what they want, and the monkey releases a critically successful record called Cymbolism that sells twenty-seven copies in the domestic market. Later, the monkey dies in obscurity.
In as much as I’m able to make myself do what I’ve told myself I will, there will be a new piece here no less often than every Sunday night for the rest of the year. Wish me luck in enforcing my will upon my unruly self.