On the eve of our long-awaited family trip to Switzerland to celebrate my fiftieth birthday, my mum gave me a beautiful embossed notebook. It was intended as a journal for our trip and, if I had not already had another on the go, I would have readily poured words onto its creamy pages: of sunlight shafting down through the highest rock tips of the Wetterhorn, of swifts jet black against the soft grey mountain, of the luminescent morning air.
Instead, I put the new notebook aside hoping to find another purpose for it. That purpose has now revealed itself. It will be my saijiki.
I discovered the concept of the saijiki from Diane Ackerman in her glorious book Dawn Light: Dancing with cranes and other ways to start the day, who in turn had taken it from the Japanese. A saijiki is a book of words divided into categories: the seasons, the heavens, the earth, and life on earth. Words and phrases (kigo) describe things within categories such as sky, clouds, rivers, and rock - and are used to build haiku poems that honour nature. The saijiki is the instrument of the writer’s craft, then - a receptacle of its smallest component, the word.
I’ll own up, I don’t find writing easy. One of my recurrent problems is that my mind goes blank as I try to locate the right word that evokes the thing. I try to climb inside the feeling or the thing but it’s as if I can’t quite touch the essence and, instead, cliched words elbow their way into my first drafts. A fog descends and time slows as I try to wade my way through language. Perhaps this is just simply a part of the writing process that writers don’t talk about or perhaps it is just me.
Words themselves are not the problem. I love words. When I’m reading, I’ll spot a word and relish its form and tone and imagine the perfect moment to pop it into a sentence. I’ve always appreciated words, but using them carries a danger too. I recall harsh laughter in my teenage years when I used the word ‘phenomenal’. I can’t remember why now - it was a word I liked the shape and sound of, and it seemed to resonate in some small way with the extraordinary world I was beginning to encounter. Maybe a small part of me thought it made me sound clever. When I went to university, my friend used to call me Miss Malaprop, like the humorous character from Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals who would often use incorrect words that sounded like others - the central reservoir, for example, not the central reservation. My exuberant use of words, then, could be a source of amusement for others.
Like many others, I have struggled to have confidence in my own written words. Hitting Publish and presenting my words for the world to see feels uncomfortable. How do I know if they’re good enough? If they hit the sweet spot, that point of acceptance, the ah-yes of acknowledgement? Do they sound like I’m trying too hard to be clever, or am I being too verbose? How on earth do I record that punctum of perfection, that kernel of universal recognition that the poet achieves? I have no ready answers, but I know it has a bit to do with courage and a lot to do with honing my craft right down at the word level.
I have a history of collecting other people’s words, like other people collect stamps or fridge-magnets (actually, I collect the latter too). My first ‘word-book’ was a small jazzy notebook, gifted by a friend back in 1987: I was studying for my English Literature ‘A’ Level and was beginning to grasp the power of words. When I came across inspiring phrases in any medium (book, play, poem, song…), I would copy them neatly into my notebook. I kept up the practice throughout my twenties and it felt important that if someone were to read it, they would think I was interesting, clever even.
After a hiatus of a few decades, I started another notebook. I’d returned to university at thirty-eight to study first for a master’s degree and then a doctorate, and words had become everything to me once more. Anything I encountered that resonated with my research, went into the journal. It was a space for working with big ideas and making connections. It became a book of ethnographic observations during my fieldwork, and a place where I recorded thoughts that occurred to me on the train home.
When I completed my doctorate, my notebooks once more fizzled out. I still kept notes from time to time, but without the anchor of a notebook, my thoughts became chaotic: nothing settled, ideas came and went, and were never accounted for, or revisited. Then, a few months before the pandemic hit, I started another notebook, a new collection of words and ideas for my sixth decade. This time, it started to blend into a morning journal, a space for fragments of dreams, future possibilities, brief observations of the elements and the more-than-human world around me. I’ve filled three books since then and I love reading back to see where a thread first started to make its presence known. The notebooks have become both my sanctuary where I keep the wolf of insignificance from my door and a source of content for my writing.
There’s a theme here. A desire to appear to be someone of substance in the world, someone with something interesting to say, a clever person. It sounds vain and slightly pitiful but now, in my fifties, I see this urgent collection of other people’s words from a different perspective. Keeping these notebooks was never about making me seem interesting, or well-read or intellectual, it was about living an examined life, one in which I could unleash my curiosity whilst alive on this extraordinary planet. It was also about finding a resonance with words and poetry and language that simply made my heart sing. Put simply, I love words. Words are my thing. Always have been, it seems.
I didn’t know my word-collecting activities had a name until just recently: what I had been keeping all those years ago was a commonplace book. A small writer’s book full of foraged phrases, scavenged words, and scurried away sentences, like squirrels hiding nuts for later. But how does this relate to the saijiki? The saijiki is more specific than a commonplace book. It is a dictionary, an ordered compilation of phrases, a lexicon of nature-words that encompasses the entire cosmology. It is the jewelled dagger in the writer’s armoury.
The inspiration for my saijiki was Diane Ackerman’s lively prose, but what can I learn from other wordsmiths? From Annie Dillard’s exquisite language? From Rob Macfarlane’s careful juxtaposition of words, or Seamus Heaney’s visceral poetry? How about David Abram’s book full of sensuous more-than-human nomenclature? Each book I read, if the words call to me, demanding my attention and reverence, they will go in my saijiki.
I fear it is cheating, but then I remember what every writer knows - you have to read, read, read to be a good writer. I am just taking it one step further and taking note of those words that stir me. Words cannot be owned or possessed, they are temporary gifts to pluck and use how we please. Language belongs to us all.
I have been gathering the tools of my trade these past few years: my study, my pens, my notebooks, and now my words. I will catalogue words in my saijiki so that, in time, I might learn how to find the exact word that makes the sentence soar. The saijiki will be my companion, a compendium of words to savour and build over time.
Now I sit in the October sunshine, Diane Ackerman’s book in one hand and my new glistening saijiki in the other, and with my fountain pen I carefully begin to write down words into categories: Birds (Actions), Birds (Sounds), Moonlight, Summer, Clouds. Her writing shines from the page. My fingers tingle as I write the words and I make a pledge. I want to learn my craft so deeply in the coming years that I might learn to wield words as deftly and joyously as Ackerman does. The sun warms my neck whilst a chiller breeze brushes my face and a buzzard circles overhead, one acute eye watching me closely. I am happy with these words.
I loved reading this, thank you for sharing it. I'm sorry you were shamed for your love of words - their collection, their voicing. I often think of my word choices too - though I must say they seem to arrive, melt-in to my existing lexicon, and evolve - without much of a conscious process. Words of others just seep in - some get tried on and stay, some get rejected. But all of it without me realising, as I reflect on it. I love the way you make an intention of this though. It feels like the practice of gathering words is very honouring of the words themselves, the preciousness of language, and the speakers themselves. It feels very respectful, and this seems to chime with the Japanese spirit of reverence too. I am reflecting as I write this on the way that different interest groups evolve a sort of language together and it becomes identifiable - I think of the language of my thread of therapy, or of nature writing. It develops in conjunction with others and you see trends arising. A way of turning a phrase that becomes popular. I see this in eco circles. I see it in myself. And then I suppose the natural evolution is that these patterns change again. And so we find ourselves in each other's words, and they in ours. We find a place to belong, and then grow confidence into our own voices. I'm excited for you and your new notebook. I hope it's where you will welcome your own voice once and for all.... xx