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 ABOVE: Variations on our Daily Diary practice

“Concepts can never be presented to me merely, they must be knitted into the structure of my being, and this can only be done through my own activity.”

M.P. Follett , Creative Experience

Dear Students,

Which part of our mind chooses what we will remember about the day?

 The daily diary practice, which is required for this class, is easily misunderstood as variations on a dry request to list things that happened in the last 24 hours.  The top of the mind finds little value in this activity and dismisses it as tiresome task to be done quickly or not at all. Sometimes students will leave blank pages in their comp books with the intention of filling them in later – often with fake entries.  These are very easy to spot, and they always make me sad.

The point of the daily diary exercise is not to record what you already know about what happened to you in the last 24 hours.  Instead, it’s an invitation to the back of your mind to come forward and reveal to you the perishable images about the day you didn’t notice you noticed at all.

We began with the five to six minute diary drawn on a single page.  On the left column we wrote down seven things we did.  On the right, seven things we saw. In the bottom left box we wrote down something we overheard, and in the bottom right, we drew a picture of something we saw.

The point of this practice is to begin to notice when we notice something.  It’s akin to a certain sort of ‘waking up’ – and becoming present in a different way than we usually are in our day to day lives.  We catch ourselves noting something that has caught our eye or our ear. We begin to realize these flashes of awakeness –(which can oddly feel also like dreaming) , are happening to us all day long  “whether from some object, scene, event, or memorable phase of the mind–the manifestation being out of proportion to the significance or strictly logical relevance of whatever produces it.“  (Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971. P. 18.)

The top of the mind rarely values or conserves these moments, and certainly doesn’t see them as the unwilled manifestation of a different sort of attention, the attention of the part of ourselves I like to call the back of the mind, which is the image-using part of ourselves.

The second variation of the Daily Diary, which you’ve been asked to do during the last week, is to list six ‘scenes’ from the day before and to choose one to treat as an ‘X’ page image.  I ask you to picture yourself in the scene and answer the ‘X’ page questions in complete sentences. The practice here is to notice how much you do recall about a certain circumstance once you begin to ask yourself about it.  There is no place without a time of day, a season, a circumstance of light or lack thereof—the X page questions are intended to allow you to experience the difference between the answers provided by the back of the mind and the top of the mind.  One provides the answers spontaneously, it’s almost a kind of ‘seeing’ the answer, the other reasons it out, thinks its way to an answer.  The more you notice these two ways of receiving answers, the more likely you are to believe in this other part of you that is there and ever-there, riding along with you and noticing things it can present to you later.

The side-effect of this practice is the resulting diary page, but the diary page is not the practice.  I’m interested not in the content of your diary, but evidence that you are gradually becoming aware of this other part of your mind that ‘speaks’ in images.

After writing the ‘X’ page version of the diary,  I also asked that you spend three minutes doing a non-photo blue quick sketch of the scene and then spend seven minutes or more ‘inking it in’ — (by inking it in I mean clarifying it. You can use black color pencil to ‘ink’ it in).

In this way you’ve ‘spoken’ this scene in two languages.  One in words, the other in picutures.

Our new variation on this daily practice,  the “Four Scene” diary, is somewhere in between the original one page six minute diary, and the single scene ‘X’ page.

You begin by drawing a rectangle on the comp book page about half an inch from each edge.  Write yesterday’s date at the top. Divide the page into quarters.  Begin with the first scene that comes to you from the day before.  It doesn’t matter if it’s interesting or not.  Think of it as a snapshot of that moment in time and begin by telling me where you are, writing in the first person present tense.  Let me know what time of day it is, and write a line that helps me know what season it is, what kind of light you’re in—fit what you can into that first quadrant.  You won’t be able to get all of the X page questions answered in that spot so you’ll have to pick which are the most important to the scene. 

As soon as you finish, start the next box with another scene.  It can come before or after the scene you just finished.  Don’t try to figure out what was the most important scene of the day.  The back of the mind might ask you to write about a 30 second ride in an elevator, or about standing in line somewhere, –something that on the surface seems mundane. Give it the opportunity to reveal itself.  What is ‘nothing interesting’ to the top of the mind can be something very different to the back of the mind. 

Repeat this two more times,  then draw the same rectangle divided into quadrants on the next page and draw each of the four scenes.  You can go straight to ink here if you like.  Take at least three minutes for each quadrant.   The idea is to ‘speak’ the scene in both languages, writing and drawing.

If you regard this assignment as a dull task and give it to the top of the mind to complete, it will stay just that: a dull task with dull results that you dread and seldom complete.  And I will feel sad for you at the end of the semester.

If you regard this practice as a not-yet-understood means of deepening your experience in this mysterious, sad, hilarious, beautiful and terrible world, one that creates increasing conditions for insight and intuition, then you may find ‘reason’ enough to convince the top of your mind to let you give it your time, even if the value of the exercise remains unclear for now. 

 Sincerely,