The Art of the Diary

When I’m not writing, I work with other people’s texts at a museum in Stockholm, where I’m involved in contemporary documentation. Yesterday, we launched a diary collection project, an idea I came up with after reading the Swedish theatre director Lars Norén’s diaries and wondering: what if the general public did the same?

There’s no shortage of literary diaries. One person who’s embraced this art form is the composer Ned Rorem. He’s interviewed by The Paris Review under the headline The Art of the Diary, where he talks in detail about his writing process. A piece that includes the following memorable quote:

I first met Ned Rorem twenty years ago. I even know the precise date: February 13, 1979, at a dinner party given by the novelist Edmund White. I know because I read about it years later in Rorem’s diary. (I might have anticipated the entry; after that dinner, while guests were getting their coats, Rorem came over to me and asked, “How exactly do you spell your name?”)

My own diary is about as exciting as a shopping list, and serves more or less the same purpose. It helps me keep my thoughts in order and spot patterns over time. And it’s completely private, apart from the entry I wrote yesterday, which I scribbled down specifically to document the launch of the project (you can read it here, though you’ll probably need a translation tool).

This newsletter contains three diary entries with slightly more literary qualities than a shopping list, each written from a different state of mind: the ecstatically intoxicated, the longing, and the awestruck. All different sides of me.

And by the way: Do you, dear reader, keep a diary yourself? I’d love to hear about your routine in the comments.

Welcome away ꩜
Jörgen Löwenfeldt

✦ A Bit Like George Saunders ✧

O says that what I write reminds him of George Saunders and hands me a book that I lug with me across the country on my backpack tour. I don’t dare read more than a little, because I don’t want to accidentally imitate George Saunders, whom I apparently already resemble, without even knowing it.

The first story is about a miserable hairdresser who stares at women and fantasises about them in provocative positions. It’s a story with no inhibitions, but I have every imaginable inhibition, so how could I possibly resemble George Saunders, who lets desire run wild and unchecked?

To understand what I don’t understand, I read an interview in The Paris Review, where the author talks about growing up and ending up at teenage parties, watching his friends get drunk and stumble around. Young George questioned the logic of it all, felt alienated and prematurely old, but maybe he got younger later, I think, when he wrote that thing about the hairdresser, as I try to find some common ground between us.

Because I don’t have a grandfather who, as a kid, was stopped on the streets of Chicago by someone saying: Hey boys, wanna try driving? Whereupon the driver jumped out of the car and ran off, while grandpa’s buddy eagerly climbed behind the wheel. Seconds later, another car pulled up alongside and riddled the driver’s seat with bullets. The friend died.

Nor do I have a father who, while hanging out with his buddies in the meatpacking district, came across a boy their age hanging from a hook, like a skinned pig. The kid was still alive, and they managed to wrench him down, and presumably the skinned boy lives on, with a healed-over hole in his flesh.

Just the kind of stuff that happened all the time, in Chicago. But even so, George didn’t like seeing his friends lose control, because he had an old soul, and that’s where we’re alike, so I can relate, just not to all the rest of it. Still, somehow we’ve become kin, O thinks, as he hands me the short story collection, and I accept it in the back seat outside Åby and start leafing through the pages, a little alarmed, because I know I’ll end up stealing all of it eventually, and maybe now is eventually.

And then I read about the voyeur hairdresser who, from his foldout chair, imagines sleeping with old women and pregnant women and women whose faces appear on bus ads, and one woman he pictures kneeling on a primitive Mexican sofa in a small adobe hut, daring him to take her (which he most certainly does: soon they’ve made love all the way to a bean field) (while a few gaucho guys strum muted guitars). But I would never write that kind of thing, because I’m too repressed. A little like George Saunders maybe, but also not at all.

✦ Ingemar ✧

I’m standing in the shower thinking about Ingemar.

It’s been a while since I thought about him. I used to think about him all the time. He was an echo of reality in the unreal. He doesn’t exist anymore either, I used to think.

Three years ago he showed up at the gallery opening with artichokes as a gift. That summer we watched Östersund score in stoppage time while Marit, he and I talked about novels. In the fall we played floorball and planned projects, when he got sick. Suddenly sick. Needlessly unfair and unfathomably sick. Two years ago he could still shower and reply to Messenger messages, be guided through a pandemic-empty Nordiska museet and fool around a bit, crossing the line.

Now he can’t, because he only exists as a memory, which is thinning out, because of everything else that just keeps going as if nothing had happened.

There’s war in Ukraine, the soldiers’ children drawing for me, there’s Bank ID for my daughter, there’s overly rich cat food, a plumbing overhaul, pen pals from trains, emptying the dishwasher and filling it again. There’s Seville in December, buying new dishcloths, there’s a packing list for Ingarö, there’s someone in Nässjö asking about Asante Kotoko.

There’s a past that wants to be dwelled on.

There are perfect jump shots in basketball as the ball floats in an arc, walks to Nordea to get hold of that damned little device, there are late nights when the brain feels dried up, and mornings when it’s burst open like a wood anemone. There are hugs in bakery lines, hands tugging hair, selfies that obscure the face. There’s a feeling that awakens when someone wants to breathe you in.

There are children having birthdays, children learning to walk, children saying mama. There’s Bianca Ingrosso and her mother and there’s IJustWanttoBeCool and there are football compilations on YouTube. There are ear canals swelling with noise. There is noise that is someone else’s essence.

All the time, there is no Ingemar, I think in the shower, and I think that I don’t think about that quite often enough, but that this must be how it is, when someone no longer is. And then a little less for each day that everything else is.

✦ The Whistlers ✧

It’s halftime and your team’s down by two. Lightly buzzed and properly annoyed, you’ve found your way to the toilets beneath the stands. One stall is free and you slide in, feeling a pale relief rise through your torso as the stream splashes against the porcelain. You start to whistle. The melody that comes to you is Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie. That’s just what it is. Out of all music, only that.

A bombastic march erupts from within you, through your lips, claiming the air. Everyone in here is forced to endure your whim. The metal walls create a powerful, trembling echo. Riding the double wave of release, you lean into the chorus from your locked stall with a little extra oomph.

Then you hear someone whistling along, what you interpret as a harmony line. It’s a sharp whistle, far more skilled than your own. Together and anonymously, you perform the march for thirty seconds, your streams gradually losing force until they stop altogether. A magical, fluttering sensation rises in you, the kind that comes from finding a soulmate.

You zip up, step out toward the sinks to rinse your hands and dry them with stiff sheets of paper. You wait, patiently and thoroughly, for your fellow whistler to appear beside you. But they don’t. You crouch to check if you need to wait longer, but there are no feet visible in the stalls. Apparently, you’re alone.

A quartet of heavily tattooed firm members crash in through the sliding door and occupy the urinals along the short end. They shout in unison about their intent to burn down Linköping, rhythmically, sure, but with questionable pitch, and you start to wonder how anyone could get so worked up over something as harmless as Linköping, with its sleepy streets and mild-mannered bourgeois charm. Surely, there must be more deserving targets for destruction.

Still, the whistler doesn’t appear. The mild surrealism of the situation makes you laugh. Was the whistling a delusion, a hallucination brought on by a slightly elevated blood alcohol level? Honestly now, who among these bellowing dudes who’ve been flinging beer on each other and waving flags could even identify that piece, let alone find the correct harmony? At best, they might guess Rossini lifted the World Cup in 1982.

Relieved of several pints of surplus liquid, you tiptoe past the snack line and burger grill, step on plastic forks and smoldering cigarette butts. There’s an autumn chill in the air, damp and raw, but your hair has gained some volume at least, and stays put when you run your fingers through it.

As you climb back up the stands, you start whistling Rossini again and recall the opening scene in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. That was the same whistle and the same melody, though then it was accompanied by pasta water and an unexpected phone call. A powerful storytelling chord, you thought when you read it, and maybe your fellow whistler under the away stand in Uppsala shares that very association?

If they even exist. You pan your gaze across the faces on this chilly October evening: the cocky boys and the juvenile old men, the overly disappointed and the overly ecstatic, the puffy, red-cheeked ones and the creepily bony ones. One of these creatures knows something more, you think, just before the referee blows the whistle for the second half and your attention returns to the match, which now begins to pour into you like morphine.

I hope that some of this has resonated with you,

– Jörgen Löwenfeldt

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