When ordinary is a superpower

Daily journalling as a practice of care

Sometimes an idea won’t leave you alone. A thought keeps coming into your head and no matter how much you try to argue it away, it returns when you’re off guard, focusing on some mundane task. Over time I’ve learnt that the relentless pestering of some ideas is a sign that they’re worth following through. Even - perhaps especially - when you don’t know why.

Recently I’ve read writer after writer, on this platform and elsewhere, saying they’re struggling to write in the face of current world events. Me too. I just tried to list some of those events and even that didn’t work. Should Gaza go first because of the unconscionable, escalating suffering there, or should it be the millions of Sudanese facing severe hunger because of a civil war that rarely seems to make the front pages? Where on the list would one put the wildfires in Italy and France, signs of an environmental crisis which, if unchecked, will lead to suffering on an unimaginable scale? Then there’s Putin, Trump … but keep adding to the list and eventually it all descends into verbiage.

So what do we write about? Is there even any point in writing? What can it do in the face of all this evil and suffering?

The German writer WG Sebald wrestled with this problem in his 1999 essay ‘Air War and Literature’¹ about the Allied bombing campaign on Germany in the Second World War. He opens with some barely graspable statistics: 1 million tons of bombs; 7.5 million people left homeless; 42.8 cubic metres of rubble for every inhabitant of Dresden. In detached, dispassionate prose he goes on to describe the physical effects of the bombs on human bodies: the charring, the boiling, the congealing. (I’m deliberately dialling down the horror in Sebald’s writing here.) He writes about rats, maggots and flies. He describes fires reaching 2,000 feet into the sky and water blazing in canals.

Sebald was disturbed by what he felt was a refusal on the part of the German people to acknowledge what had happened in the bombing raids. He pieced together his account by mining a range of archival records and photographs, having never before seen the whole scale of the catastrophe laid out. And while he understood that the immediate human response to trauma is often to carry on as though nothing has happened, he couldn’t excuse what he saw as the failure of post-war German literature to illuminate ‘the real state of affairs’. He writes:

There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described. The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged.

Sebald analyses in some detail how different forms of writing may obscure the truth. This is a serious concern for him because he understands that how we record history - what we include and what we decide to omit - profoundly influences the world that emerges after devastating events.

The best example Sebald can find of how to write in the face of ‘vast catastrophe’ is a diary kept by Dr Michihiko Hachiya from Hiroshima. In clear, unvarnished prose, Hachiya recorded events both before and after the Americans dropped their nuclear bomb on the city. The ‘entirely unpretentious objectivity’ of such an account, writes Sebald, is ‘the only legitimate reason for continuing to produce literature in the face of total destruction’.

The reference to Dr Hachiya’s diary leapt out at me because for some time now I’ve been thinking about the importance of keeping a journal that simply records what happens every day. It feels counter-intuitive to focus on the everyday when so many extraordinary things are unfolding across the world. But I take my lead from the artist and academic Joanne Lee, who, during the Covid-19 pandemic, published a daily journal on her Facebook page.

Called ‘Sheffield in virus time’, Joanne’s journal began as a way of documenting the strangeness of life under lockdown, continued for three years, and eventually ran to more than 800,000 words. I found her noticing of the everyday, her musings on the books she was reading and her references to political events compelling. She herself wrote in an article (£) that the habit had profoundly influenced both her thinking and her creative practice:

I have realized that while describing the way things are – everyday human activities, the changing weather, the animal-vegetable-fungal lives amongst which my human life exists, the political-social-cultural phenomena encountered which shape the way life can currently be lived – the journal has ultimately been having a conversation about alternatives to the status quo. This project has transcended narrowly academic or artistic aims, becoming instead an effort in finding the conditions necessary for writing and thinking as survival in difficult times. It is not writing in creative practice, but writing as a practice of creating life.

I own stacks of notebooks full of thoughts, ideas and rants. I couldn’t cope without that kind of journalling. But I’ve never managed to maintain an account of what I do every day. Frankly, I find it a chore. Yet another thing to do in the evening, along with the cooking, the laundry-folding, the emails.

But what is a chore if not an act of care? Preparing food to nourish bodies; cleaning to keep the home pleasant; mending to make things last. The violence in Gaza, and in so many other places across the world, has robbed millions of people of such everyday expressions of humanity: washing a floor, putting children to bed, inviting a neighbour over for coffee.

Picture by Lucas Law

Perhaps keeping a daily diary is also an act of care. Paying attention to the ordinary and writing it down; honouring the everyday by allowing it to shape the practice rather than planning in advance what we will say.

Recently, despite severe work pressures, Joanne picked up her diary again, renaming it ‘Sheffield in strange times’. On 12 April she wrote:

As the world is shifting again with Trump’s chaos and more, this past few weeks I have been feeling the urge to diarise what I notice about me, both close to home and in the wider world, both the tiny everyday occurrences and the global tectonics. I don’t know if I can make the time and capacity to keep it up as before, but if I don’t start, I’ll never find out.²

The idea of doing the same keeps pestering me: it feels somehow deeply important to keep a daily record of life in these ‘strange times’. I don’t, at all, think this is the only kind of writing worth doing right now, but I do think it’s an important one, even though I can’t be entirely sure why. (And obviously I’m not saying this is a sufficient response in itself to what’s happening around the world - we all need to find our own practices of activism, which may include writing but generally cannot be restricted to it.)

When I’d almost finished drafting this piece, I picked up a copy of Who Will Tell My Story?, the book version of a diary that an anonymous Palestinian writer contributed to the Guardian newspaper about life in Gaza after the events of 7 October 2023 (he has since escaped with his family). Written with the ‘unpretentious objectivity’ that Sebald called for, Who Will Tell My Story? is a tough, essential read. It takes the reader inside the Palestinian experience in a way that no news report ever could.

Just two weeks into the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the author writes:

I think back to a conversation I had earlier today with one of the kids. She asked me: if I could have a superpower, which one would it be? I told her that I would like to be invisible. I have changed my mind – I want the superpower of being normal, living a mundane life and discussing everyday topics.

That was my final nudge, proof that everyday life deserves attention. I plan to start my daily journal today, 11 August. Joanne’s journal is freely available to all on Facebook, but at the moment, that doesn’t feel quite right for me. I do plan to share parts of it, though, with a weekly update here in the Notes about how it’s going, alongside some extracts from the journal. My plan is to keep that going for 100 days (until 18 November), in the hope that by then the practice will have become a habit.

I’d love to read about your journalling habits in the comments. Do you write daily? Do you record events or is your practice more about working through thoughts and ideas? Do you write on a computer or in a notebook? So many questions around this deceptively simple practice.

Threads, knots and tangles

• Literally half an hour before I published this, I found out about Voices of Resistance, the collected diaries of four women living through the genocide in Gaza. It’s published by Comma Press and all proceeds will be divided between the women. Follow the link for more information.

• Dr Hachiya’s diary entry for 6 August 1945, the day the Americans dropped the nuclear bomb, can be read here.

• Daisy Hildyard’s novel Emergency is one of the best things I’ve ever read about the climate crisis. It’s a whole book focused on the everyday: nothing happens and yet it feels as though everything does. Her prose is mesmerising. See also her brilliant story exploring the interconnectedness of human and other-than-human through the lens of the life of Princess Diana.

• One way I know that an idea isn’t going to leave me alone is that it keeps popping up in things I read online. Recently, Amy Liptrot published a fascinating piece about her lifelong daily journal practice. I especially love her descriptions of the different ways she fills the page.

• Also, Josie George writes beautifully here about the challenges of writing in these times. As ever, her conclusion is both simple and profound.

1. ‘Air War and Literature’ appears in the collection On the Natural History of Destruction, translated by Anthea Bell and published by Penguin. I was led to it via this essay by the brilliant Daisy Hildyard (more about Daisy’s work in the Threads, knots and tangles section of this piece).

2. Joanne’s journal can be read at https://www.facebook.com/generalistjo