I used to doodle a lot. My school notebooks were filled with haphazard notes, framed with tiny pictures of little cars, and intricate filigree designs colored with Bic Bananas, and little boxes filled with ever-smaller concentric boxes, and grid designs colored in alternating two- or three-color patterns; and of course, pages of cursive writing. I was a better doodler than note-taker, and the doodling didn’t distract me. It actually helped me to concentrate.
We went to Catholic school in the 1970s, so we had nuns as teachers. Nuns didn’t like to see students doodling during class, but I was a very good student and they let me get away with it as long as I didn’t make a show of it. Eventually, I grew out of the habit. My high school notebooks (none of which are extant) contained only pages of notes, with the occasional page of random lines in fancy cursive writing. But no more patterns and no more filigree designs. And no more little cars.
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One day, I was sitting in a long meeting (I could write that sentence about almost any day of the week, and it would be true). I didn’t have to present or take notes or anything else except listen. The subject was technical, and kind of boring, so I started to doodle. I filled a page with filigree and geometric designs, and colored them with my beloved 4-color Bic pen. The meeting ended, and I had a page of interesting and colorful designs; plus, I knew a lot more about call center technology and ticketing systems than I had before (any amount of knowledge being more than none, of course).
Still, the people who were sitting to my left and right seemed distracted by the doodling. I could feel them glancing surreptitiously over at my notebook, wondering what I was working on so diligently. I felt sure that they were judging me for not paying attention to the meeting, and I wanted to explain that the doodling helped me concentrate. I hoped that call center solutions would come up later in conversation, so that I could casually demonstrate my grasp of the topic, proving that I’d been laser-focused the whole time. That’s the trouble with doodling. People see you doodling and they think you’re wasting time. But you know what you’re doing. I know what I’m doing.
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As I mentioned here, I read The Woman in White because Nora Ephron told me to. She was quite right. I won’t go into the plot here, but an important thing to know about The Woman in White is that it’s told as a series of first-person narratives, which alternate between characters. Most of the narrators are reliable; they just tell different parts of the story from their own points of view.
An evil plot to steal a woman’s identity is at the heart of The Woman in White. This is especially interesting because the story takes place in 1850, so it’s a completely different kind of identity theft. Toward the very end of the novel, the reader understands most of what has happened, and most of how it happened. Count Fosco, one of the two villains (the other having died, good riddance) is left to tell the rest.
"One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments that man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas,” the Count boasts. “Immense privilege! I possess it. Do you?"
And that’s how The Woman in White ends, with Count Fosco “arranging his ideas” by hand on tiny sheets of paper, leaving his confession in a pile of scraps for the hero to collect and organize and decipher; which of course, he does.
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I love Saturday afternoons; especially when it’s not baseball or swim season, and I’m just driving around running errands and listening to NPR. Not long ago, “This American Life” aired a story about Robert Walser, a Swiss-German writer who spent most of his adult life in a mental hospital. He covered scraps of paper in near-microscopic pencil scribbling that when discovered were thought to be gibberish or a personal secret code, but that instead turned out to be tiny handwritten stories and essays. Scholars spent years deciphering these “microscripts,” which were eventually published to great acclaim.
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Robert Walser and his microscripts made me start to think about what people leave behind in writing. On Wednesday, I was packing up my things to go home from the office, when realized that I didn't have my datebook. I looked through my desk and my bag, and it was nowhere to be found. All of my lists, and all of my appointments and reminders, and all of my cryptic notes to myself were gone. I started to panic a little. Then I remembered that I’d taken my datebook with me to a meeting earlier in the day. I ran back to the meeting room, and there it was. Well, it was on a windowsill, for who knows what reason, but it was there. .
A little later, I was listening to the impeachment hearing as I drove to a meeting at Rockville HIgh School. Every time I listen to or read about high-level government investigations and hearings, I wonder if any of the witnesses share my habit of writing about everything and filling datebooks and notebooks with reams of scribble, and if they think about how they'd explain their notes to a panel of questioners. I'm not likely to ever have to testify before a Congressional committee, so I probably don't need to worry about the discoverability of my datebook, but it’s something to think about. You don't want to be sitting in front of the House Intelligence Committee with the C-SPAN cameras trained on you as you try to explain to the committee chair that you keep detailed notes, but you just happened to lose them.
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I was up very early the next morning, and I watched next-day coverage and analysis of Gordon Sondland’s testimony, which I didn’t get to see live. The Republican counsel questioned the reliability of Sondland’s statements, given his lack of notes or other written records. It's hard for me to believe that a person in a high government position doesn't keep notes. When you’re summoned before the Grand Inquisitor, do you really want to rely on nothing but your own spotty, foggy memory?
Can something be spotty and foggy at the same time? I don’t know. I don’t know. I do know, however, that I have to write everything down, in one form or another. If summoned, I won’t lack for written records and documentation. I’ll just have to consolidate all of it; the years of datebooks, the Keep notes on my phone, the stacks of unfinished drafts on my various hard drives and in Google Docs, this blog; and of course, the pages of doodles and scribbles that fill both sides of the pages of dozens of notebooks. Call me, Adam Schiff. I'm ready.
(Leave a comment or email me if you get the title reference.)
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