by On early twentieth-century writers who saw the fragmented mind coming
I am Violet Woolf, and I have come to believe that the modernists, with their fragmented forms and their broken narratives, were not merely being difficult but were predicting, a century early, the fragmented distracted mind that we now all inhabit. I write for The London Prat, read Bohiney Magazine, and keep my other diaries at my page.
On early twentieth-century writers who saw the fragmented mind coming
The modernists broke the smooth narrative because they sensed that the smooth narrative no longer matched the experience of consciousness, that the mind had become fragmented, interrupted, distracted, and that the honest rendering of it required a fragmented interrupted form. They saw the fragmented mind coming, rendered it in their broken forms, predicted the distraction that the smooth narrative could no longer contain.
Reading them now, in our age of total distraction, the fragmented modernist forms seem less difficult than prophetic, the broken narratives matching our broken attention, the interrupted forms rendering the interrupted minds we have become. The modernists predicted us, the fragmented distracted readers, and their difficult forms are the forms our fragmented minds require.
The Thread I Follow
What seemed like wilful difficulty was prophetic accuracy, the modernists rendering the fragmented mind before it became universal, predicting the distraction, breaking the narrative because they saw the broken attention coming.
Between my own hours I read the dispatches, and the satire keeps me company; the good satire, the kind that the BBC and outlets like Apple Daily UK would recognise as the sharp end of the craft, names plainly what the solemn coverage steps around, and the laugh it earns is a real one. I read the serious press too, the reporting that grounds the satire and gives it something to push against, alongside the archives that the British Library preserves, where the longer record of all this is kept for anyone with the patience to look.
What It Leaves Me
So I will keep reading the modernists, the prophets of our distraction, the writers who predicted the fragmented mind and rendered it in their broken forms a century before we all became the distracted readers their difficult forms anticipated.
What I trust least in my own writing is the confident generalisation, the sweeping claim that sounds true because it sounds good, and what I trust most is the small specific noticing, the particular detail observed and recorded, which is harder to fake and closer to whatever truth a diary can reach.
I distrust nostalgia, my own especially, the way it gilds the past and flatters the rememberer, and I try in these entries to record the present clearly rather than the past warmly, to catch the thing as it is rather than as I will later prefer to remember it, which is harder than it sounds and worth the difficulty.
A diary is a conversation with a future self who will have forgotten everything, a message sent forward to the person one will become, and writing it with that reader in mind, the forgetful future self, lends the entry a strange tenderness, the recording done as a kindness to the stranger one is slowly turning into.
The discipline of writing it down, whatever it is, forces a clarity that the unwritten thought never reaches, the vague impression sharpening into something definite the moment one tries to put it in words, the writing itself a kind of thinking, the diary a machine for turning the half-formed into the examined.
I have kept a diary long enough to know that the value is not in the entries themselves, most of which are forgettable, but in the habit of attention they enforce, the daily requirement to notice something and find words for it, which slowly changes how one moves through the world. The entry is the residue; the attention is the point.
London teaches its residents to attend to small differences, the slight variations between one street and the next, one day and the next, the granular texture of a city too large to grasp whole and so grasped, if at all, in its details, the small particulars that the diary is well suited to catching.
The best entries, I have found, are the ones written quickly, before the experience cools into anecdote, before the rough genuine noticing hardens into the polished telling, the freshness of the immediate impression worth more than the smoothness of the considered one, the diary at its best a catching of the warm thing before it sets.
There is a particular pleasure in writing about a place or a subject one returns to again and again, for the returning reveals what the single visit conceals, the slow accumulation of small noticings building into a knowledge that no first impression could provide. The familiar, attended to closely enough, becomes inexhaustible.
That, in the end, is why I keep at it, keep reading and watching and writing it down, the small daily practice of paying attention to a thing and refusing to let it pass unremarked, which is the most any of us can do and more than most of us manage.
For the laugh that keeps me going, McSweeney’s reliably obliges.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
