drift 2025-11-26

Beginning on November 8, 1850, Thoreau implemented a new writing system that placed his journal at the center of what he was doing. On that day, Thoreau wrote everything he noticed and thought during his daily walk in his journal. He wrote through streams of consciousness (drift, jumps). Thoreau did this almost every day for twelve years until he died in 1962. Before this change, Thoreau treated the date as incidental. However, in this new writing system, he treated the day and the date as essential to his art. What he could write on his life on that one day became his quest. In this process, Thoreau simply writes an entry that explored whatever caught his mind that day. He stopped cutting from his journals and treated his journal as the work itself. The value of Thoreau's journal entries lay in their regularity and completeness.

To accommodate this new writing system, Thoreau changed his walking process. He did 3–4 hour walks every afternoon. In his walks, he invested a high degree of focus and discipline. He tried to find something new to see and made careful studies. He walked with pencil and paper and scribbled brief names and phrases on the spot. The following morning, he used those notes to write long, lyrical journal entries. Sometimes, he accumulates notes for 2-3 days before writing an entry for them.

I am drawn to diaristic works that capture how the mind changes and presents that through chronology—works by Thoreau, Emerson, Bugbee, and religious writers who wrote spiritual autobiographies, which began the genre of religious writing per Pelikan.

I am comforted if not inspired by the simplicity of the day and the invitation that what happens in it is the work itself.

A cicada shell;
it sang itself
utterly away.

(from Bashō, The Essential Haiku edited by Robert Hass)

from Los Baños:

I struggle to feel at night. Most definitely, it is the sertraline waning. The price of tapering to a fourth of a pill every night. The price of desire for a clear mind independent of Big Pharma. For some reason, night walks lessen the numbness—make me feel more. At Onyx, the new Christmas lights blink as night riders dash to their next customers. In two hours, my fiance will wake up to guide morning riders in EST. Dogs help me forget—one sprawls over the laundry water wet pavement at Arayat, while another is sandwiched between its parents on a motorcycle. Students approaching the end of semester flock around open carinderia and food establishments at Ruby. They sit there alive with no need of the future. At this time, I make do of what I see—mostly what is lit by neon lights. Capital has engulfed everything interesting. I remember Annie Dillard, who did an excellent job extracting the most she can from that creek near her house. I haven't done any excellent job, but I do try to extract what I can from this unfinished Belen. At Ela, a dog chews on what seems like a piece of garment. I am chewed by thoughts of the poems I read today as I pass by a massacre of shrubs.

Before the bridge
Lightning
And then a star, alone.

The walkway that crosses the bridge allows only one person at a time. I walked on the road itself so she could use it. After the bridge, he moved to the road itself to empty the sidewalk all for me. Two minutes before ten, suddenly no one is walking along Ela. A deep coldness ensues. I hear shouts from inside a hollow building across the church still open.

At Sandoval, a salagubang's entrails mixed with its shell cracked and imprinted on the concrete. It laid still there as men at the parking space at Vega Arcade clean up a hole clogged with garbage.

that what flows through a poem is the opposite
of the language of commerce because
of its powerlessness to effect.
There is nothing gained
in the excess of meaning.

(from Raymond de Borja's draft translation of Allan Popa's Modus Operandi)

Drifting life away on a boat or meeting age leading a horse by the mouth, each day is a journey and the journey itself home.

(from Bashō, Oku no Hosomichi translated by Cid Corman)