On Notes: The Practice of Paying Attention

Somewhere between gathering my thoughts for my book and trying to figure out my classroom practice, I began to recognize the quiet, persistent power of the note. It's hard to pinpoint when it happened or what reference showed me the way, but once I noticed the elemental quality of the note, an entire network of ideas and experiences from my own textual life formed a new constellation of understanding. Notes are at once product and process of reading and writing.

But what is the thing for which the word “note” serves as a name?

note (n.)

c. 1300, "a song, music, melody; instrumental music; a bird-song; a musical note of a definite pitch," from Old French note and directly from Latin nota "letter, character, note," originally "a mark, sign, means of recognition," which traditionally has been connected to notus, past participle of noscere "to come to know," but de Vaan reports this is "impossible," and with no attractive alternative explanation, it is of unknown origin.

Meaning "notice, attention" is from early 14c.; that of "reputation, fame" is from late 14c. From late 14c. as "mark, sign, or token by which a thing may be known." From late 14c. as "a sign by which a musical tone is represented to the eye." Meaning "a brief written abstract of facts" is from 1540s; meaning "a short, informal written communication" is from 1590s. From 1550s as "a mark in the margin of a book calling attention to something in the text," hence "a statement subsidiary to the text adding or elucidating something." From 1680s as "a paper acknowledging a debts, etc." In perfumery, "a basic component of a fragrance which gives it its character," by 1905. (Source: Online Etymology Dictionary)

Notes as Practice

Writing a book of any length of any kind is an exercise of collection, organization, and synthesis. My process in writing my first book, Textual Life, was no exception. And so, I sought out ways to do it from people who had done it well. I came across Sönke Ahrens’ wonderful little book How to Take Smart Notes. It tells the remarkable story of the extraordinarily prolific German social theorist Niklas Luhmann, his Zettlekasten or “slip-box” note-taking system, and makes the case for applying it to intellectual labor. Best well-known for his development of systems theory, Luhmann wrote some 70 books and 400 scholarly articles. According to Ahrens, the secret to Luhmann’s productivity was his system of writing that consisted of literature notes that summarized works and smart notes that consisted of ideas he generated from engaging those texts, and a coding system that held it all together. This system allowed for a robust capacity to remember, compose, and re-compose ideas and arguments into novel works.

I confess I have often been seduced by the siren song of building a second brain and of personal knowledge management (even as I retain some skepticism, to which I will return briefly). But what was most beneficial to me was the deep understanding of “notes” as something much more than a record to which you might never return. I started to see notes as the basic unit of thought. In the eight years I’ve practiced Brazillian Jiu Jitsu, I have learned that power is limited; it only gets you so far. The elegant takedown and graceful hip throw rely on the composition of so many small parts, micro-movements. My best teachers breakdown complex techniques into isolatable components. In that way, a note about an argument or an idea is indeed like what the word’s etymology suggests: a single tone with which to make a beautiful score.

The NDQ Method

Around the same time, I began to develop one of my core tactics of close reading in and beyond the classroom that I describe as Notice, Describe, and Question, or NDQ. This process consists of noticing what you notice in a text or work of art or a conversation. Next, you describe in formal terms what has caught your attention. In so doing, you are generating language. And then you formulate an open-ended analytical or critical question. You review the object again with the question in mind to see what you notice anew, and so goes the entire process indefinitely.

I was inspired to develop this approach after listening to a podcast episode of Krista Tippett’s “On Being” with the literary and religious studies scholar Avivah Zornberg. Zornberg specializes in the midrash, the tradition of oral commentary of Jewish scripture. The whole episode is mostly a very close reading of the Book of Exodus. At the time I was thinking through Shaykh Musa Kamara’s literary mode of commentary in his monumental History of the Blacks. And Zornberg discussion gave me a framework.

“…the other very beautiful ritual is the whole seder night ritual, which is — simply, it’s a fiesta of telling stories and asking questions. Or perhaps I should put it the other way around — the central role of asking questions. If you have little children around, then that’s a gift, because they should naturally be full of questions. And we do things to provoke their questions. We put strange things on the table, bitter herbs, so that they will ask, What’s that? And then we can talk about the bitterness of the slavery.”

Zornberg described questions as an inexhaustible generative source of understanding. And I thought to myself that I had long privileged “questions” in my teaching but I struggled to get students to ask them. Zornberg helped me think about prompting questions. I realized that the first thing that had to happen was that people had to notice. From there “note” in my classes became a verb in addition to a noun.

“I have notes”

One of my favorite expressions I’ve taken from the art world is “I have notes,” which expresses feedback that one creative type offers another creative in response to their work. Here “notes” is a noun but is the product of note as a verb. And it is the stuff of a dialogue of perception and insight.

My appreciation of the primacy of the note as a practice and as a form was consolidated with the award-winning publication of Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes in 2023. A collection of 248 notes of varying lengths about Black life and antiblackness, the book theorizes the note and in so doing innovates scholarly and literary form. Sharpe leads with an understanding of the term “note” as a verb: “to notice or observe with care.” I had already come to value note-taking as a practice, but Sharpe helped me resist the urge to turn it into a system. Such a manic drive to manage the mind is but a play to conquer death. “Taking note” is about directing attention and offering time, not about optimizing for efficiency or never losing an idea. As I heard Dhuruba bin Wahad say recently in Dakar on the 100th anniversary of Malcolm X’s birthday, the cost of knowledge is to pay attention. Sharpe and Wahad in their different ways teach us to resist the algorithmic attitude and its reduction of living to content.

Notes are the building blocks of a textual life. But those blocks cannot be made into Borgesian libraries of Babel, driven by an “archive fever” to create endless collections of everything ever thought. Notes are the byproducts of an ethic of care. As that great American poet Allen Iverson once said, “we talkin’ ‘bout practice!”