Scrapbooks for Cynics 2 comments

By Bradford Winters

I’m sure there was a time when the very thought would have met the same response in me as it does, no doubt, in some of you.

Scrapbooks? No, thanks, but have fun with that.

Then at a certain point—June of 1997 to be exact, according to the ticket stub from U2’s Popmart tour on the first page of my first volume—I found myself looking at the small corkboard in my office tacked with various clippings and memorabilia: that ticket stub, a postcard from an outsider art exhibit in New York, a resonant letter to the editor in the New York Times on “Poetry’s Sorry State” during National Poetry Month, among others.

But with room on the corkboard running out, and a palimpsest of double-tackings beginning to take shape, I realized it would not only be more efficient, but more protective and meaningful as well, to archive the gatherings with glue and construction paper in a three-ring binder.

Scrapbooks? I thought. Well, look at me.

I had never been all that good at keeping a diary, much as I had tried in fitful starts of greater or lesser duration. Besides, with my tripartite division of labors between poetry, prose, and screenwriting, the thought of devoting any more time in the day to yet another form of writing was somewhat anathema. I had the greatest respect for those prolific writers who managed to keep such thorough diaries on the side, but I did not understand their madness or method. Inevitably, they wouldn’t understand mine.

Soon, though, I noticed with no forethought on my part that something along the lines of a graphic diary was beginning to take shape. Not a daily record of experience and reflection in prose, but an assembly of those tokens and timepieces both from my world and the world at large that seemed to insist on a form of preservation:

• excerpts or images from any number of newspapers, magazines, or journals whose impact would otherwise be washed away forever in the ceaseless tidal wave of media;
• tickets, programs, and the like from this or that memorable event, be it a reading or Broadway play, a funeral or a wedding, the boarding pass from a hair-raising plane ride or the receipt from a jaw-dropping anniversary meal;
• obituaries of friends or figureheads, some in the latter category whom I had long revered and others I had never even heard of;
• Sunday readings from Scripture whose timing seemed more than coincidental with an item in that week’s news;
• copies of my children’s footprints from the day each was born;
• the cover page of my first (and first published) script for the HBO prison drama, Oz, in ironic proximity to my i.d. card from a round of jury duty....

You get the picture, as it were.

At first there was no design or plan one volume to the next, until I noticed after two years or so that a single binder was good for roughly a year’s worth of material. The annual scrapbook made for a more sensible (as well as traceable) system of composition, one that also lent a greater sense of ritual to the process and provided that added touch of closure to any given year.

Eleven binders later, there is no going back—that is, forward—without scrapbooks.

Far from being just a repository for nostalgia (though this is surely part of the equation), scrapbooking has taken on a quality of witness to it—not in the evangelistic sense, of course, and perhaps not even in the Christian sense, as Jesus himself warned against retrospect when one’s hands are on the plow set to go forward.

But in my scrapbooks I find a sacred form of witness nevertheless, to a world and a life within it, whose wake of phenomena great or small, personal or corporate and tragic or beautiful or merely incidental, is nothing short of ineffable.

For, looking back on the 2009 volume as I did this past New Year’s Eve—a capstone ritual I look forward to year after year—I saw call sheets for production on the NBC series Kings (a modern version of the King David story) in, again, ironic proximity to horrific clippings from the New York Times after Israeli shelling in Gaza City. (This “irony” is one of the striking effects of scrapbooking, as one is more likely to see hidden correspondences between his or her own world and the larger world beyond.)

I saw the pamphlet from a Chagall exhibit, and the program from my grandmother’s funeral; images from the inauguration of Barack Obama, and images from a nighttime baptism in a muddy pit at an underground church in China; news of a capsized boat full of immigrants from Libya, and the receipt from a tow pound the day my wife and I learned she had a miscarriage; the remarks I gave at the funeral for a friend killed in a freak accident, and then a copy of the sonogram when my wife and I learned she was pregnant again; Post-its, playbills, the list goes on....

So valuable have these repositories become that cries of “Grab the photographs!” in a fire would be followed at once by, “And the scrapbooks!”

I won’t be surprised if the hobby turns out to be one of the better legacies that I leave my children. I have already started collecting tokens of their own earliest experiences should they take to the idea when they come of age, and having started again in my mid-twenties, I can only imagine the greater treasure had I started in early youth with memorabilia from infancy onward kept by a parent.

At the outset of 2010, I already sense the bewildering juxtapositions of the year ahead, as the invitation to a traditional wedding in Chinatown will share the same page with clippings of the aftermath in Haiti.

As much as the undertaking resembles a graphic diary, so, too, does it a silent psalmody.