On Recording

"Often times I forget that I have a body, or need to take care of it. When I'm forced to be reminded of this, my diary usually ruptures."

Note: This is part one of a two-part series, submitted in response to the Health Gossip questionnaire. Read part two here.

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Some time ago, Lily approached me to ask if I'd contribute something to Health Gossip. I was initially unsure of what my contribution could be, before settling on the idea of some sort of diary; the idea of maintaining a food log seemed funny. I've built a habit of referencing etymology when dealing with a word that seems 'loaded' in some way. In this case, "diary": 1580s, an account of daily events, a journal kept by one person of his or her experiences and observations, from Latin diarium ‘daily allowance’; later, "a journal," neuter of diarius "daily," from dies "day" (from PIE root *dyeu- "to shine," in derivatives "sky, heaven, god"). Often times these roots will lead me in directions I wouldn't have otherwise tread. In this case, the diary's relation to “dyeu” — of shining, to “Sky, Heaven, God” — and then of relating this practice to my health.

I wouldn't describe myself as “healthy,” and I often struggle to strive towards a balanced notion of health. I have a schema of what I want to direct my energy towards: Mind, Body, Soul, and Spirit. This practice of etymological research has become embedded within the practice of my diaries, which tend to center around reflections towards Mind, Soul, and Spirit. Often times, I forget that I have a body, or need to take care of it. When I'm forced to be reminded of this, my practice usually ruptures.

Last year, I maintained a diary for a large portion of time. It functioned as a container that subsumed a significant portion of my life, that I felt compelled to constantly migrate myself into, rather than scattering my data across a number of locales. I did not use dates but entries to delineate it. For many days, I wrote multiple entries. It began when I was subletting in New York and spending a large amount of time among people while also abstaining from drugs and alcohol. At a certain point, I broke this abstinence. At a later point, I left New York and spent the following months significantly isolated between France, Spain, Morocco, the UK, and India. There were weeks of silence. The events of the diary shifted — things read in books or seen on walks or on walls grew in significance. The minutiae of digital interactions with friends bled in, as did the occasional links with (mostly) online acquaintances. At a later point, while in India, I was bit by a mosquito and infected with Dengue fever.

I did not write in the hospital, nor did I regain the momentum I had once before. It took me over a month to recover my strength. At that point, I left India to avoid the risks that accompanied reinfection and to stay at a friend's place in Chicago. Before, I was producing a prolific volume of text. That diary was over but I attempted to continue writing by annotating it, finding it difficult to quit the accumulation. Later, I would slip on a wet subway grate in Brooklyn and break my two front teeth. At that point, the weeks of silence ended indefinitely. I had removed myself from attempting to write in this manner, or at least in this container. Occasional bursts, where the writing served the same purpose — to think through situations at hand — emerged. I had not removed myself from anything, and had not stopped stopping, rather choosing to start in different places instead.

I tend to relate writing to machines: the interface one works with is important, as is the feedback loop that accompanies visibility. Who is reading, how they respond, how accessible the information is — this then changes the writing that is produced. The machine in question was unable to write these situations of health into text (three visits to three hospitals, all almost entirely unwritten). A question of production emerged: was it good to produce hundreds of pages of writing, rather than a series of fragments? I would deactivate my accounts to do this — the writing that would go into a story or a tweet would be stretched. How and where I looked changed, stretched; how I thought changed, stretched. The writing became more about a mechanism of thought, an active process of thinking, rather than a process of recording. This was the important part, not the text itself.

What I found, or rather what I made, with the machine to follow was a system that did not allow for the production of long texts that were transformative mechanisms of thought. The result: several lists of substances consumed separated by days, with a few longer entries that mimicked older writings of genuine change and a couple of days that passed unrecorded as texts.

Around the mid-point of this recording period, I met C. on a bench after a night of not sleeping. He had been in London for some time and we were catching up. I talked about this, as I had talked about this with others as well — knowing that the discussion of it would shape the machine, the matter of whether or not I would recursively include the conversation about the writing in the writing.

Only this is no longer that. And there was the matter of days — the main tension with this machine. I said that I didn't believe in them, that I was forced to adhere to these sorts of delineations now more than at other periods of my life, and this was the first time I had escaped them in some time. C. told me something along the lines of, “You know, you're not exactly who I'd go to for health advice.”

S. Paul (@gnostic_samsara) is a writer and artist living in Queens. Read more on his blog here.