Jotted lines

You look at the page of lyrics, and it's hard to shake the feeling of amazement: there's Lennon, feeling his way almost without apparent hesitation toward a string of lyrics that would soon become virtually canonical. It never fails, really: that frisson that we get from seeing inspired spontaneity pour out onto the page, where it immediately hardens in turn into something public, permanent, and significant. Most of us struggle, over the course of long lives, to attain even a fraction of such broad significance: how amazing to do it in the course of a few moments, on a piece of notebook paper, or on a cocktail napkin.

Not that we need, of course, to aim at a public significance. Sometimes, more private meaning suffices: a jotted note to a lover or rapidly rendered equation on a chalkboard can fit the bill, even if it never enters the collection of the British Library. And so we sketch, and scrawl, and improvise: indeed, yesterday morning found the three of us at the Berkeley Springs, WV McDonald's, oatmeal in front of us and pens out, trying our hands at of-the-cuff comic strips. It's far from simple, it turns out, to produce such a compressed visual narrative of lasting import - and yet it was fun nonetheless to try to get Cleo to guess the implied arc, or to smile at the implications. Admittedly, that smile could be slightly bemused, as in her response to my story of a hamburger eaten by a grateful alien:

But, still, it was fun, and we ultimately spent more than an hour jotting down ideas and competing in games that soon filled the margins of the Sunday Post.

Clearly, I don't have any special abilities when it comes to cartooning. If anything, I'm even more hopeless than your average doodler: in the example above, the images are crude, and the story almost nonsensical. But if one tries, and keeps trying, then the sheer accumulation of efforts can perhaps become meaningful in its own right. I recently dug up the rather detailed journal that I kept in 1992-3, while living abroad, and while I am often embarrassed by the prose (with its over-reliance on Kerouac) and by the sentiments on display (consumed by friendships, I was rarely observant in any meaningful sense regarding the broader social and physical world that surrounded me), I also find it riveting. Forged on the fly, often composed at moments of exhaustion or partial distraction, it's revealing, even as it's also limited. It's a fair window into a space that no longer exists.

As is this blog. And although this blog's entries are, rather like the cartoon above, often reductive, crudely rendered, and written in a relative hurry, they also represent something simple, and simply honest: a portrait of the author, and of his thoughts about his daughter, over the course of five years. Again, it's no document of general value, but it has served, I think, a useful personal purpose.

And, in that sense, has perhaps almost run its course. Cleo's fifth birthday is now on the distant horizon, and as she makes weekly strides in reading and writing, I think increasingly that soon she will be able to tell her own story. Thoughts of mathematical balance, too, intrude: around her fifth birthday, I'll make my 500th post, and the blog will attract its 20,000th view. Might that be a reasonably time to end the writing?

Lennon, who could scrawl a timeless hit within the span of a few minutes, likely might have chuckled at such a thought. But the few revisions in his rendering, above, imply that he faced a similar question nonetheless: when are we done writing, and re-writing, the story that we want to tell? After all, even when we put the pen down, and cease writing about those whom we love, we often stop and think about them.