If you know, you know. If you don’t know, zettelkasten is a note-taking system. I found a good introductory article to help ease things along, How to Use Obsidian as a Zettelkasten: The Ultimate Tutorial by Matt Giaro.
In the article, the author gives a tip o’ the hat to How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. I’m conflicted. I’ve got it. It’s not great. Given the ratings, I’m the odd one out, but that’s okay. To me it felt like far too much of the book, like so many others, was a sales pitch for the book itself. Hi! Zettelkasten! You want to know more about zettelkasten, so you got this book. Know why you should know more? Here’s reasons. How about more reasons? I know you want to learn the method, but wouldn’t you like to learn more reasons first? How about now, more reasons? Right, let’s get on with the method, but first, here’s some more reasons.
Note: that’s an Amazon link to How to Take Smart Notes, but not an affiliate link. I’m saving that for when I can wear my big boy blogging pants.
Anyhoo, Ahrens does provide good reasons, and a great many of them, but when I get a how-to book I don’t want to get to the end of the book to get to the content any more than I want to know Aunt Margie’s life story and victory over toenail cancer before I can see the recipe for cherry pie already. Gah!
That said, Giaro’s article is a fine start. With it, you won’t need to buy How to Take Smart Notes, which, incidentally, doesn’t go into using Obsidian at all. I love Obsidian so far, for all the reasons Giaro gives in their article.
Now that that is out of the way, I can dig in a bit more. My driving force, the One Big Project to Subsume All Other Projects, is my multi-saga epic fantasy saga bajillogy, which is quite the hoot really considering I’ve got zilch to my credit this late in the game. Really, what I’ve got is concept galore, deluxe even, low concept on steroids and meth.
What I don’t have is a world. Yet. I’ve been at the drawing board several times and probably have at least two more trips in me. That, at least, I’m confident I can pull off. We’ll see that grow here over time.
What I don’t have is a cosmology, but after years of scratching at that itch, it’s raw and kinda nasty but it’s taking on the semblance of something. Rather than being the stuff of godawful braindumps in a story, it really is the underpinning for what the arch-villain(?) goes through, and without him, there’s no anvil to beat the swords of character against. It’s clicking.
Theme? I’ve got theme aplenty. I’ve got more theme than I know what to do with.
But characters? I’ve got the broad brush strokes of two or three. They’re hardly fleshed out and certainly not relatable. Yet.
In my chaotic scrambling between low concept, worldbuilding and um, squirrel! I’ve come to realize some things about myself. If I get nothing else from this endeavor, I’ve got that? That’s nice.
I mean, for one thing, for all my love of horror films and novels and the dark and creepy and things that go bump in the night, much of working with my arch-villain(?) [Samael Wakefield, who will feature heavily in these environs] involves looking into to unsavory things, some of which turn out to be internal. Who knew? I…detect a need for some good ol’ fashioned Jungian shadow work and…quite honestly…it’s intimidating.
I can handle a great deal of being unsettled. That’s kind of a recurring theme for me. But every once in a while some cthonic cyst of shadows erupts and the shock can set me back on my heels for a bit. A day. A week. Longer than I even realize, perhaps. The problem is that I’m running out of heels to rock on. At this stage of things, it’s just me, two cats, the house, the bills, the checkbook, and the job. To the extent I have a safety net, it’s the job. I love my job. My boss is quite the indulgent friend and has put up with a great deal of shit from me. Everything has a limit, however, and those are limits I do not want to test. “Boss, I need time for a percolating freakout while I digest what I just did to my brain” doesn’t really work in the kind of client service we’re in.
Apart from that, it also turns out that I really just don’t know enough to even begin writing said bajillogy, much less die before I can finish it.
And that’s where zettelkasten comes in. I might not have much in the world, but I have time aplenty. And books. And a love of learning. Put ’em all together and you have a note-taking bonanza and the tools to do something with it all. And boy howdy do I have a reading list to pump into that second brain. Lucky you, if you stick around long enough, you’ll get to see that second brain take shape in a way rather like Uncle Frank coming up out of the floorboards in Hellraiser.
It’ll be a slow burn the way I’m going about things, but I hope it at least fosters plenty of good reasons for posting items of interest on a regular basis. As I gather momentum, expect to see who knows what stemming from topics like yoga, law, music, art, tabletop gaming, literature, writing, linguistics, philosophy, math, science, anthropology, history, worldbuilding, and my fictional world, Iaon.
At the heart of it all will be my Obsidian vault wherein I store all the notes and scry for meaningful connections. My method is a bit different from Giaro’s, but not by much. I agree with not using folders to organize the notes, with one exception. Giaro would have the note-taker use another app, perhaps Evernote, for collecting fleeting notes then migrating them over to Obsidian as they’re fleshed out. I prefer one folder. Fleeting Notes. Rather than store them elsewhere, they’re at least in Obsidian. They’re not the most usable things, but that’s the very nature of the beast. They’re loose little unruly disconnected thoughts that aren’t terribly amenable to being organized as-is. But at least they’re searchable.
I also like Maps of Content (MOCs) quite well. The way I use them, they’re tables of contents embedded in tables of contents embedded in tables of contents. Here’s one of my weirdnesses: I love tables of contents. If ideas are candy, tables of contents are the candy store and I’m the kid. There’s all the ideas, in shiny glass jars, not much rhyme or reason, and just the glimmering of them, mere hints of ideas that could be had, hints with exotic names beyond immediate comprehension because they haven’t been eaten yet. But there they are, tantalizing, jostling for favor.
Obsidian is a great help to me in this regard, as it’s helped me develop something like a systematic approach to this vast body of knowledge I want to squeeze into my cranium while I can still do something with it.
As an aside, when you use Obsidian, you create a folder called a “vault” into which all those notes will go. You can name it what you want. Mine? Brain in a Vat. I’ve got mine organized with a top-level MOC, cleverly called Brain in a Vat MOC because I’m all about the sexy branding.
Honestly, one of the hardest parts of this project has been prioritizing the broad topics. So far what I’ve got is:
- 01 Spirit MOC
- 02 Law MOC
- 03 Music MOC
- 04 Art MOC
- 05 Gaming MOC
- 06 Writing MOC
- 07 Linguistics MOC
- 08 Philosophy MOC
- 09 Math MOC
- 10 Science MOC
- 11 Social Sciences MOC
- 12 History MOC
- 13 Worldbuilding MOC
- 14 Iaon MOC
- Bibliography
In due time, this will all be linkable right here at Xian Says. For now, hit the imaginary link to 01 Spirit MOC and you can see in your minds eye another list of links to subtopics I want to delve into, e.g., yoga. Hit that imaginary link and right now there’s just one book, Fundamentals of Yoga. Click that and there’s the table of contents from that book. Any link in that list, in turn, goes to a page of notes taken from that section, but they’re notes in very raw form. That page gets tagged out the wazzoo. Each separate concept on that page, in turn, links to a note page containing only that solitary note, which then links to a more fleshed out version of that same note. And that whole hot mess is intricately linked together, books to the bibliography, notes to each other, tags to notes, and so on. It’s not far different from a wiki except in presentation.
I’m sure there’s apps and a workflow that would just do that, but I really have no interest. It’s one of the few things in which I have no interest. Tech is special like that. As a wild-eyed youngun, I dreamed of futuristic gadgets and gizmos. Now I’ve plateaued. I’ve got my fill. I need to know how to use latest, greatest, bleeding edge, state of the art killer app and the coding that goes with it like I need to know how to split a tractor or replace the framistat on a combobulator.
No, I think I’ll stick with ye olde 1990s manual linking. It’s actually a fundamental part of my process. I want the granular control because it’s not actually the connections on the computer or on the web that I care about. It’s the connections between my neurons.
There’s probably a great many caveats I should throw about. If you stick around, you’re bound to see content that’ll make you think “what’s wrong with that boy? He ain’t right.” The thing to keep in mind is that much of it is in aid of worldbuilding. The aforementioned Samael Wakefield is a vile, contemptible person who does as they do, but takes it too far. He wants to become a god. He succeeds, achieves apotheosis. And the next several billion years are one heck of a redemption arc, if such it is. The action, once there’s characters to have any, will usually(?) take place on the fantasy world Iaon, but there’s planes and heavens and hells to explore as well. Some characters are good, some not. Some decidedly not, being infernal by nature. Some are manifestly pragmatic and materialist without an iota of magic. Others are imbued with it, immersed in it. On the one hand, I’m sure I’m inspired by plenty of fantasy magic a la Dungeons & Dragons. There will be fireballs. But for the rest? I want verisimilitude. Or better.
So we come back full circle. If Iaon is my priority, how is spirit at the top of the list? I’m sure I’ll have more to say about that over time as well, but for now it’s my priority #1 for pragmatic reasons. Being a Pyrrhonian skeptic leaves a lot of room for hope and faith with a healthy mix of skepticism even there. Do I “believe” in magic? God? Angels? Devils? Spirits? The efficacy of astrology? Not in any conventional way, no more than I believe in material reality. I just don’t know. The only thing I lack is certainty. Everything else is open to me.
I like the feeling of being near to the sublime, a sense of awe with its roots in tranquil receptiveness, whether it be to the violence of a storm to the patterns on a butterfly’s wing or some thought, perhaps even repellent, of the nature of some, shall we say, speculative entity, be it god or devil or something in between. I find it’s easiest to achieve that feeling by thinking on things given to sublimity. Given that my overarching mission is worldbuilding for Iaon, I also don’t want to draw from just one cultural pool. I’ve got thousands of years of civilization around the world to draw from, and I intend to do so.
I can’t remember who gave me the idea, but to intentionally think about something is to intentionally think of nothing else. This can be handy when you have unwanted thoughts you want to squeeze out because there are only so many waking minutes in a day. If you populate those minutes with the thoughts you intend to have, those rotten little bastards that haunt the modern mind run out of places to run amok. They’ll still be there, lurking, haunting, waiting to spring and attack our anxieties, but they won’t have the run of the place anymore.
Honestly, there’s times I’m content to just block them out by self-medicating on Netflix. It’s not time lost when I’m absorbed in the work of other creators. There’s plenty of sublimity to be found. It just doesn’t advance any of my other goals. It does more than occasionally make me feel utterly unworthy. And I plod along anyway. I’ve got to do something to get me to the grave, right? Why not try? Let my grasp exceed my reach.
But I digress more than usual. 01 Spirit MOC is where it is because the subject matter informs so much more of what I’m pursuing. It’ll just go in what some might consider some bizarre directions. None of it will be to attest to the certainty of anything whatsoever.
Anyway, that image at the top is what’s called a graph view in Obsidian, a visual representation of the notes and their connections. As of now, mine is only just beginning. I think it’ll be an interesting measure of progress over time to see how that evolves.
With that out of the way, I think I’m ready to dive in. Until next time.
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