American Mussorgsky

My writer friend Lola seems to always seems to have a big enough bag with her at all times for taking notes on actual full-sized notebooks which she seems to categorize by topic. She’s a serious note-taker, that Lola, and doesn’t appear to mess around with little notebooks. Jessi, however, keeps little notebooks by the toilet in order to capture thoughts that may arise from the collective unconscious upon first waking for a few moments on the Throne. Writers, they have systems for such things.

As much as I’d like to be so systematic, I’m a helpless random-scrap-of-paper person. I’ve tried keeping notebooks, but I forever leave them on the coffee table or lose them—I have about a half-dozen such notebooks lying around at any given time, never where I need them when I need them. When I hear something I want or need to write down for later use, I use whatever is around at the time, then expect to find it later and use it as a prompt to write something no-doubt brilliant. This means I have stuff scribbled on the backs of matchbooks or coasters or receipts or sometimes important things I actually need.

Once in a dark theatre I wrote down a few dirty references David Sedaris made, you know, so I could look them up later to see what they mean. It turns out the piece of paper I'd dug out of my purse to write on was a medical training exam I had to hand in for work that will forever go on my permanent employee record. That’s the thing—these moments often come at the inconvenient times. I fully admit that I do idiotic, careless things while driving, I’m not so bad with cell phone dialing or iPod messing or lip-glossing while careening down the highway. What’s probably going to kill me is writing while driving.

The reason all this comes up is the fact that a while ago I wrote down something I really wanted to find last night and I couldn't find it later to save my life. The four Buddhist truths of consciousness (or whatever—I lost it, after all), or maybe it was the four Tibetan words for the stages of the cosmological cycle? Something like that. Anyway, I wrote it on the back of a bank receipt while driving down Hiawatha Street during rush hour, and the search for it soon became more about the determination to find it than what it actually said.

At home, I dumped out my paper recycling bag and sifted around for it. I didn’t find it, but I did find a random scrap where I wrote down something from the Composer’s Datebook (MPR) that says, “Roy Harris had been described to him as an ‘American Mussorgsky,’ which probably intrigued the Russian-born conductor, and when Koussevitzky learned that Harris had been born in a log cabin in Lincoln County, Oklahoma, on Abraham Lincoln's birthday no less - well, perhaps he hoped the 41-year old Harris might produce music equally all-American in origin.” To which I say, What the hell? American Mussorgsky? Why, I ask you, was this so intriguing that I had to scribble it down to save it for later?

Sometimes it makes sense. In my quest last night, I came across several cool articles I’d saved, some definitions to interesting words, a few notes from Wikipedia and this lovely poem by Kim Garcia:

Eager
Above the snow, a single maple holding forth
its dying flame. Among the feats of Nature:
the wild
greening from dry bulb, sour alchemy of rot, a rusty
handprint of lichen;
the eager
space-seeking species springing up after fire,
as though they took no lesson from destruction
but to begin again, twice as joyful.

That, my friends, is beautiful. That is a writing prompt.

So, this morning as soon as I got in my car, I pretzeled my arms under and around every seat looked through cubbies and cup holders and I found it crumpled up under the driver’s seat. I at least usually stuff them in my purse, but there you go. It says:

The big crunch
World System Evolution
Emptiness
Formation
Abiding
Destruction
Eras of…
Cycle/Formation, Endures,
Destroyed, Void
[subsist, begin again].

In the end, I'm happy with my system. I don't want to force myself to keep things neat and filed away--it's not me. And don't even talk to me about getting an electronic note-taking palm pilot or any of that rediculousness. My system is creative and interesting. I find what I need when I need it. Perhaps I'm whatever an “American Mussorgsky,” is, which may be why I saved that Composer’s Datebook scrap of paper after all.