What’s a diary for? That’s the question at the heart of this exercise. “Lesser Conjunctions” is a play on the name for the overlap in the night sky of two enormous planets on the winter solstice of 2020. Like the motions of celestial bodies, this series of essays’ concerns are more with the idea of the “imaginary control” (to quote diary scholar Philippe Lejeune) that writers in particular and people in general think we might have over the world and our progress through it. As I tried to tell the very upset seven year old who had missed the conjunction (“and it won’t happen again for forty years!”) such control is a myth.
More specifically, it’s a series of myths. The study of that mythology was a question that animated the work I did in my first semester at the Graduate Center in Fall 2019. It was the question I found most interesting and most surprising, having I arrived in that doctoral program with the bitter, bad attitude of a person who’d rather be just teaching.
The question of what a diary is for emerged in the course of reading scholarship about life writing and diaries. Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith got that party started, mostly by working against the earlier work of Lejeune, which has some obnoxious graphs. It’s his later work that engages his own diaries, and considers life writing in a more accessible way. In On Diary (2017), Lejeune writes: “the absence of control that characterizes real diaries contrasts with the imaginary control of the novelist” (208). I first took this phrase to think through some passages in Virginia Woolf’s diary. In that context, control is especially fraught: The Writer’s Diary was curated carefully before publication by Leonard Woolf after Virginia Woolf’s death by suicide. But even outside of that specific situation, that phrase “imaginary control” is curious: Is the phrase talking about control that doesn’t really exist? Control of things related to the imaginary? Or both?
In “Lesser Conjunctions,” I’m going to spend some time doing an exercise that is self-indulgent and recursive. As long as I’ve been writing on a Chromebook, I’ve tracked my writing time in a Google Sheet and I’ve kept a running Doc for a calendar year of scraps. That “scrap Doc” contains various things: process writing, warming up, diary, “widows” and “orphans,” the throat-clearing of getting organized.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made me think about time and these scraps a little differently. What has happened in the year that separates me from them might be more visible from this distance, and so I’m going to revisit some lines with the benefit of distance. If nothing else, it’s a chance to remember.
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