I’m looking at pictures of other people’s scrapbooks—notebooks filled with magazine cuttings about their favourite pop or rock star. There are concert tickets too, and lyrics, also cut out from music magazines.
It brings back memories of my teenage efforts to collect writings and images about my favourite stars. I mostly collected photos and lyrics. Sometimes I included an interview. I don’t remember any particular notebooks, but I do remember plastic folders full of torn out pages, ready to be cut out neatly and glued down. It was a project that I never could quite realise.
Every once in a while, I would get the urge to clean out the clutter in my bedroom, and I would throw a lot of things out. I was pretty unsentimental about it. Now I look at these old scrapbooks by people who clearly have more storage space than me, and I try to understand why I don’t have things like that. Is it because I moved house so many times? Is it because my interests shift and I don’t like the same things anymore? Is it because I have no sense of loyalty to my past?
Or is it shame? Or all of the above? Note how I don’t even let you know who I was collecting information about.
Call it nostalgia or sentiment, that feeling that contracts in my lower belly while swelling behind my rib cage, it’s something that ties me to a certain place and time that perhaps I don’t like to be tied to, because I felt bad most of the time, or at least that’s how I remember it now, even though that couldn’t possibly be true.
I don’t consider myself sentimental. But I like simulated sentimentality. I like to experience it through other people’s nostalgic recollections. People who kept everything in storage boxes in garages or attics or basements. When I get uncomfortable I can just close the browser on my laptop and go do something else.
SIDE NOTE: In French, the word for notebook is cahier. The word also exist in English, where according to WordWeb the first meaning is “a memorial of a body.”
The thick august air muddles my M.E. mind even more than usual. So, here’s a vaguely related poem. It was partly made by rescued lines from discarded early poems. It is inspired by the poem Regret by Julia Copus.
Regret after Julia Copus I’d like to set it on fire, this Promethean terraced house. It used to be so pretty and clean and fresh. Now the windows are flecked with glittering sand and salt of many months. The drapes, heavy. Hems dirty with lint worms. My lips pressed together. On a single night table, two crumpled tissues, white peonies just out of the bulb. A womb mattress carries a indentation of a body in crash position. The house was laughter bottled into brick; it spilled out at every turn. Now just the sound of dry leaves and the ticking clock in the corner of the room. It’s caught just before a full rotation. The walnut scroll work lifting as each breath grows in anticipation. Sinking as nostrils expel melancholy into the pause, the widening gap before the chime. Like an inchoate spiritualist trying to grow with the celerity of a peduncle, to force forward a bloom from an integument. We had words and left sand on the top step. You: wired like a grasshopper; me: damp, cold and rusted. There was something about him so consolingly proper and disastrously inconsequential. It reminded me of a fake Christmas tree in the entrance of the social welfare office. And the hours settled on us like sheets, words bobbing around. Flotsam and jetsam. Prowling in the dark and growing unruly like feeping creaturism.
This is for sure my favourite poem of yours, shows your gift with image and storytelling.
I don’t know if I’ve ever scrapbooked, officially. I do paste odds & ends in my journals, mostly drawings or lines torn from older journals, so I’m continually destroying things and making them into new things. Everything else gets thrown in the fire at the winter solstice. Almost nothing survives longer than 3 years. I’m with you that I’d rather enjoy sentimental archiving from a safe remove. :)