Try a Bernadette Mayer experiment
/Here are a few topics that are mentioned in the “Experiments” mentioned below:
* light * daily changes, e.g., a journal of one's desk, table, etc. * the body and its parts * clocks/time-keeping * tenant-landlord situations * telephone calls (taped?) * skies * dangers * mail * sounds * coincidences & connections * times of solitude . . .
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/mayer/
She suggests keeping several journals. I think I am going to go right out and get some notebooks – maybe in several colors – and I will have a dream journal and a weather journal, a pleasure journal, pain journal, food journal . . .
Take my desk for example – it has multiple layers – and it thinks it's a bookshelf when its only a cluttered surface. I could bitch about its state of disarray, the messiness of it – but it’s sort-of an archive:
A black stapler / a copy of the April 2015 The Atlantic / bills to pay / a 1936 first edition copy of The French Quarter by Herbert Asbury – “Hargraves, a slim, dapper man with suave and polished manners had an extraordinary career, He came to New Orleans from England about 1840, when he was sixteen, and became a bartender, but turned to gambling with a sugar-planter named Dupuy.
A copy of Fred W, Bassett’s The Song of Songs – a treasure of a book:
He:
How beautiful you are, my love.
Oh, you are beautiful.
How fair and pleasant you are.
How beautiful even your feet.
A red flashlight / a black telephone / an accumulation of pens / a dish towel / a glass empty of water / a copy of Barbara Henning’s My Autobiography.
What, pray, is on your desk? Or on the wall above your desk? Write clutter.