Letter from the Gulag VII

Organization

There are many reasons it’s hard to sleep. One is that it’s nice to listen to the distant trains passing by. Since I was a child, I’ve always lived near enough to the stations, the ones above ground, so that I can hear them through the stillness of midnight. I would wake up, usually around now, sometime between three and four, and just listen.

Since I was a child I was very obsessive about organization—keeping notes in their proper notebooks, labeled accordingly, documenting my days, and saving everything, even little scraps of trash, like receipts, written-on-napkins, or a hat made from a Ricola wrapper. Of course, the longer time goes on, the more they meant to me, as though their meaning rose proportionate to the length of time they lived—or rather, survived. It feels like most things really just survive, and living is, if not an abstraction, just something we do because we have no other choice.

The obsession with organization would sometimes become so bad that it manifested in other parts of my personality. I hated disorder. In music, for instance, I did not like composing a song without writing it down, even if I didn’t need it. Or, because improvisation is a large part of what I did, I always liked to record, so that something from the session would survive. I think what I mean by that is that I wanted it to last long, and maybe even longer than myself. This is why people compose anything, isn’t it? It’s why we erect statues, monuments, buildings, and other sorts of memorabilia that are testaments to our existence, symbols of achievement, and a reminder so that we may never forget.

As I got older, this obsession subsided a bit. I’m okay with one notebook for various thoughts, or sprawled compositions on sheets of folded up paper sitting dormant in them, or just playing music and knowing I may not remember, and really being okay with that. As I got older, I guess I learned to “live in the moment,” and be okay with being the only person that I may share whatever token I may have once wanted to offer the world. Because, it isn’t that it doesn’t matter, but that our desire to be something worth remembering is not unique, and therefore neither are we. We all engage in these soliloquies that try to explain these feelings: that’s what most romantic films are about, aren’t they? It’s so hard to find even one person who understands, so what would make any more. I feel saddest for guys like Bach. His Notebook for Anna Magdalena was for her, not for us; and now he’s not even here, and who among us cries for him? Anyway, I think that if we were to cry at his songs therein, it is because something resonates within ourselves. Tears are never for others; they’re internal projections, physiological responses extricated, because of what we feel about our own shit. Friendship, camaraderie, etc., are forms of relatedness to someone else because we say, “I see myself in you.” But you cannot love someone if you don’t see that. Ironically, that might be why so much of the world is so estranged from each other—there’s too much us to go around, and most people can’t stand to see themselves in others because they can’t stand to see themselves in the mirror. So best not to confront any of it. But anyway.

I’ve been thinking of organization. Part of me believes that it doesn’t really matter, and for whose sake is it really? Why does it bother me? I don’t want it to bother me. But I need to put all of the paper, post-its, and paintings by my sister into their own little scrapbook—because she’s important, if nothing else. Maybe it’s my way of telling her I love her; maybe it’s my way of preserving her through the years; and maybe, in some selfish way, it’s my piggy-backing on her existence—that I mattered enough to have been honored in receiving even a note that says she had a “pawtacular day.”

I’m not a misanthrope or anything, but I think the grim reaper’s job is a bit too overrated, and overstated. I think that instead of collecting souls, there should be someone to collect their residue. Something to the effect of, “hey, this was a really nice napkin drawing, I can tell it came from a really nice place. You might not see it, but just wait till you see your museum.”

There’s love in that job. I wish that could be my full time job. We try to do it here and now. You might experience some really good friends who saved that one drawing without telling you and you just noticed it on their fridge, and then find out that your cousin also had one on her fridge. And that feels good. But not with everything. There’s just too much of us to have anyone be really invested like that. But we try our best, or at least the bare minimum.

So it appears to me that organization is always a way to preserve. It has little to do with physical order for its own sake and more about existential order, that there was chronology here, in this life, for this thing; it’s about writing a book and telling a story, without there ever needing to be words. And the desire to create this order implicates expiration. We acknowledge it in everything we do but we hate to talk about it. I think it makes us afraid. It makes me afraid too. But I’m not talking about it because misery love company, it’s just because if you’ve read this far,

I just love you.