If you write a lot, and if you have an extreme tendency to preserve your past work, then you will encounter an uncanny feeling from time to time.
It’s the contradictory sensation of reading something utterly unfamiliar, while armed with the rational knowledge that you certainly wrote the words on the page.
Maybe it’s a professional article published decades ago. Maybe it’s two chapters of a heavily workshopped and abandoned novel. Maybe it’s just a detailed personal email, from an era when texting was expensive and letter writing wasn’t a distant anachronism.
When reading these items you can feel like you’re encountering another self. It’s almost as if you don’t recognise your own face.
Reading your old writing feels like encountering another self
You run into obscure details and impenetrable in-jokes. There’s the clumsy diction that you wish you could finesse, two decades too late.
Your own thoughts and words can feel so extrinsic that, if you encounter a pleasing or effective turn of phrase, you don’t feel justified in taking the credit.
Strangest of all are those instances when you recognise an echo of your present. Ideas and approaches to life that you might – until that moment – have comfortably labelled as fresh or novel, are revealed as ingrained patterns of thought.
It’s an unnerving strain of diaristic déjà vu. I encountered it recently, in a weird little memoir that dated all the way back to the eve of the subprime mortgage crisis.
A cornucopia of clutter
Searching through archived files on my laptop, I followed an unfamiliar trail of nested folders. I arrived at a junk-shop repository of writing, dating back to the 2000s.
Many of the filenames were cryptic, which turned the process of opening them into a kind of digital lucky dip.
It was a cornucopia of clutter: snippets of family history; grandiose self-improvement plans; the text of a bawdy viral email; a 2002 report on the performance of my pub quiz team, ‘Desperately Seeking Scott McLeod.’
One of the documents – titled Pigeon.doc – was a detailed 1,600-word account of an incident that took place on Sunday 31 March 2007, while I was living in Norwich.
It recounted my discovery of a dead pigeon in the terrace guttering just below my fourth-floor flat, and my laboured attempts to extract the corpse from that inaccessible position.
God is in the details
Nothing of any great import happened that sunny day 15 years ago. But this moment-to-moment account captured my every action and thought in exacting and unpretentious detail.
For instance, I recorded the lingering smell of cooked eggs and vegetarian bacon, my surprise that there were several identical brooms in the building’s basement, and the fact that I only knew two of my immediate neighbours by name.
The episode concluded with a paragraph in which I described the use of diluted handwash with calm authority: ‘I filled the container with water, and now I sluice this soapy mixture over my hands and work it around my fingers.’
Thank goodness this moment was recorded for future generations.
My absurdly committed approach did yield a few nuggets of comedy. At one point, I tried to nudge the bird into a more favourable position using the broom handle, but found myself thwarted by a succession of bars over the guttering.
After a fashion I realise the best method is to scoop the bird along as if it were a hockey puck, generating enough momentum to slide it under the bar and into the next gap. This method seems somehow disrespectful to the bird and I feel slightly ashamed when it successfully speeds up the process.
Likewise, when I finally reach for the pigeon – my hand gloved in a plastic bag – I accidentally grab hold of its wing with my thumb and forefinger, and ‘the intimacy of this gesture makes me feel a bit queasy’, leading me to reflexively drop the corpse back into the guttering.
Eventually I succeeded in extracting the bird, which stared up at me from inside the bag, wearing ‘a moribund expression; it has become a dead object like the broom.’
Documentary evidence
Pigeon.doc is certainly a strange exercise in style. It has very few typos, suggesting I expended a fair amount of time and attention revising it, to ensure that it was a clear and accurate account of the event. My reasons for producing it are lost to history.
The tone emulates that of Nicholson Baker’s charming 2003 novel A Box of Matches, which is written in his trademark plainspoken stream of consciousness. Another likely influence was the Mass Observation project.
Writing about an event gave it value in and of itself, separate to any actual significance
I was fascinated by these unglamorous documentarian approaches to everyday life. They seemed to imply that writing about an event gave it value in and of itself, separate to any actual significance.
But you’d have to believe that, to write in detail about diluted handwash.
The exercise must also have been prompted by my desperate, questing need to find something, anything to write about, beyond the B2B content I was producing during my working week – even if the result was an exercise in forensic domesticity.
Whatever the intention, I had totally forgotten both the bird-extraction incident and my report on it.
Didion, death and déjà vu
Shortly after reading this unfamiliar narrative, I noticed an uncomfortable compositional echo.
A couple of years ago, I found a dead rook in our garden. I felt compelled to write in fine detail about the discovery, and about animal mortality in London.
I didn’t kid myself that this minor undertaking was in any way noteworthy. But after reading Pigeon.doc I realised that it wasn’t even original in my own private canon.
Those grooves had already been worn into my subconscious. They were ready for a new set of wheels to slot comfortably in place, should the moment ever arise.
The discovery brought to mind Kris Straub’s cosmic horror comic, Broodhollow, in which the characters stumble onto documentary evidence that they are suffering from a kind of communal amnesia.
Delving back into their journals and logbooks, they realise they’ve been applying the same stratagems to their problems repeatedly, in the mistaken belief that they’re novel. “How many times have I done this?” one of the characters frets, as he realises that his recent epiphanies are no such thing.
The similarity suggested and enduring compulsion to document the appearance of dead birds
My life had changed radically since 2007 – I’d moved to London, gotten married, had a baby. Yet there was enough of a similarity in the writing to suggest an enduring, unconscious compulsion to document the appearance of dead birds.
The experience brought to mind Joan Didion’s famous observation about the value of staying on ‘nodding terms’ with our past incarnations. Not just because we would do well to remember who we once were. But because the obverse of Didion’s hypothesis is true: that we tend to be much more solicitous of our future selves.
A case in point: I could only have put such a ludicrous amount of effort into Pigeon.doc with a specific audience in mind – the only person who would have any remote interest in the number of brooms in the basement, or what I had for brunch that morning.
The person who, if providence allowed, might bring his spade down on the carapace of a biographical time capsule some 5,400 days later, and wonder what on earth could be inside it.
