“One year was enough to sear [the landscape] on the lens of memory…so that, in the studio alone with my dream I would record it like a diary entry, just like that.” -Dorothea Tanning on her time in Arizona, and on her 1944 painting Self-Portrait

                Tanning has me thinking about modes of diary-keeping as modes of memory, modes of thinking.
                For example, I spend a lot of time thinking about phrasing. Over the course of several days I toyed with the sentence above, rearranging words, wondering, forgetting and coming back. When I sat down to write, I habitually reworked the wording another four or five times. Wondering about clarity, sentence rhythm, sound. Wondering what it was that had so struck me as I stood in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, looking at Tanning’s Self-Portait—a tiny figure at the edge of an immense landscape, a bit like I was standing, now, before the largeness of her portrait. What’s the idea-seed here, I wonder as I write and rewrite, and more, how does it grow as I water it with words? 
                Spendings lots of time thinking about phrasing changes the way I interact with lots of things. Take song lyrics— phrases stick in my head, and the melodies usually slip through my fingers. Though now I’m thinking about it, a musician friend and I wrote a song together in the last few months, and since then I’ve been noticing melodies more. If diarying is a process of stitching words or shapes or images into the cloth of memories, does that process change what kind of thread my memory is ready for? And how I hold on—make real, for myself, what has happened?
                I have a friend whose sketched “diary” tends to include patterns from people’s shirts. Another friend whose “diary” includes movements, the way they’ve seen people walking. And I wonder, what am I “searing” into my dream?