Journaling against Dracula

Screenshot of the "Flower Diary" item from Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls. It shows a thick hardbound diary with abstract floral designs on the cover. Flower Diary: The lost diary of a young lady. Advanced magical theory mixes seamlessly with youthful ponderings.

Been thinking a lot about luddism lately, in part because the social media addiction synergises so competently with the mental fatigue I was left with after my last bout of covid. and I have been thinking about things like:

And what that all adds up to me is: We should keep diaries. As in, on paper.

Yes, becoming a political prisoner for your diary is a very real possibility, but IDGAF. I would much rather get arrested for doing something with a chance to help the world, than spend my time on the stage performing this rehashed trope of “complacent masses who refused to pick up guns as the nazis took power”, which is a role that's not only 20th-century-derivative but also boring, depressing, and doesn't go well with my outfits.

I've toyed with the idea of journaling in a conscript (perhaps my own Vinescript) or even a full conlang, but in the end that's a deterrent to the important thing, viz. to write. Journaling is intimidating. I type at 100wpm, if you're used to computers, moving into longhand feels painful. But one thing that I learned from #bujo, and later longhand creative writing, and then working on my thesis on paper, is that the slowness is a feature. It changes how your mind works, your relationship to language and the text; compared to typing, handwriting increases focus, attention and retention. It does, however, takes time. When I wrote my Holocaust poem in a frenzy while travelling through Berlin, I basically spent my entire time hopping from café to station bench to café writing nonstop, revision after revision, trying to capture what I experienced at Platform 17.

Then again, typing also takes all day if you account for drifting into the Internet because you have a device in your pocket. And even if you don't, if you had a e-ink typewriter or some other toy—again, your relationship with the text is just different by virtue of the slowness. A bit like you're editing and writing at the same time. I don't think I would have been able to write “Two is for Joy” if I had composed it on a keyboard.

This will be a very niche analogy but maybe some of you have had the experience of playing NES/Famicom Castlevania after getting used to SotN or other titles of the Igavania era. Suddenly everything is so sluggish. Your Belmont marches forward without the slightest haste, steps slow and imperturbable like the march of inevitability. Your whip flickers back for a beat before going forward. The Belmont commits to every jump, you can't change direction in midair, whatever you decided to do you have to face the consequences. Hordes of the undead knock you back undignifiedly, not terrible bosses but random bats flying you off-platform with the slightest brush of their wings. Used to the backdashes and fluid double jumps of an Alucard, a Soma, you feel like, wow, this game sucks. But it cannot suck. There's no way that fucking Castlevania has bad controls, Castlevania III has such high ratings, Rondo of Blood, Chronicles have such a stellar reputation. You must be not getting it. So you persevere, and then, eventually, it clicks; you realise how intentional these old games are, every screen carefully laid out like a puzzle; here's your set set of verbs, here are the enemies, how do you get through? You jump and whip a bat, and you keep the action button down; the Belmont walks backwards, with slow dignity, calmly dodging by a few pixels the hitbox of a bone thrown by the skeleton on the platform above; you move forward, then back, following the skeleton's movements, waltzing your own 8-bit danse macabre to chiptune Bach; it all fits together perfectly, like the elaborate gears of a clock tower. The Belmont is exactly as fast as they need to be.

That is how writing longhand feels like when you're used to typing.

Some time ago I was at a political conference travelling with a comrade, and a local comrade (a stranger to us) was kind enough to host us on her sofa. On the last day of the conference she wasn't at home so I decided to leave her a thank-you note, and I engaged my entire gender in it, writing a cute little one-page note with round letters and doodles and colourful pens and highlighter, the works. I wrote about how the trip went for us, because then she would know that her hospitality allowed all these experiences to be part of our personal history. This was the trip during which I had that misadventure where I forgot my bokutō at the top of a mountain at night and ended up climbing up and down twice, with just a tactical flashlight, futilely retracing my steps and failing to find the telltale iris-pattern sword bag anywhere, until I gave up and headed home and realised I had forgot Álmdrósar not at the top of the mountain as I had assumed, but rather on the sidewalk by a lamplight, after hiking down. It was down there all along.

So I wrote a summary of the entire misadventure in few sentences, a bit shorter than the one above, and my comrade read my note and said like: kinda incredible how you managed to condense the entire thing in such a small space. Because to her I had told the entire little drama, much of it by dumbphone calls as it happened, with great granularity of detail; and looking at the note I wrote, yeah, I accepted the compliment; there is an artistry to it, to sketching just the life lines that convey the energy, the feel of the subject you're portraying, with minimal hand movements. But I didn't even think of it, it just comes naturally when you're doing longhand. We had a conference to go, i couldn't sit there writing all morning. One thinks about which words to set down when it's impossible to change your jump mid-air.

That is what I think I should be doing with a paper journal. Think about what happened in the day, to me and to the world at large, and sketch the lifelines. Leave a record of what it was like to be a lesbian immigrant when the nazis came back in the 2020s and nobody took the threat seriously; and maybe my record will perform to someone in the 2120s, when nazis return again like fucking Castlevania Dracula, the same role that Weimar-era lesbian magazines did for me, viz. show that I'm not crazy, or that I'm crazy but I'm not wrong; how surreal it is, that everybody keeps going to work like nothing is happening; and this hypothetical future queer would learn, like I learned, that this entire thing is so very precedented, that we are here and have always been here, and that it's up to us, the living, to risk our necks this time. To commit to the jump.

Or maybe my diary will be destroyed by fascists, or more likely just be quietly forgotten and buried in a dumpster to rot with me. But the act of having written a diary will surely do me good in some way. At least it's not social fucking media.