Journals

TEST

I’ve resisted keeping a journal for some time. If I don’t think about what those words mean, or what I’ll actually be doing, or how that would pan out for weeks, months, years, then sure, it sounds nice enough. A journal of my own - a blog never to be shared, a diary to be kept hidden - is the sort of thing that self-talkers like me should like, especially when I am this long-winded and an all-around downer. But I’ve resisted doing it because there’s something evil to the idea.

Journal-keeping feels as though it were some sly trick to get me to give up a libidinal part of myself, to let flow that which builds pressure, and ultimately keep me adequately deflated. Perhaps it is a misdirected anxiety, but I do sometimes suspect that keeping a journal will sap me of the time and passion needed for my other works.

I know that is not how it works; after all, a journal is (or at least can be) just more practice with the written word. I suppose what I distrust most is not paper but my own inability to keep a thread straight. I am woefully inconsistent and prone to bouts of distractedness. Exploration often turns out to be self-destruction. The world is full of little thorns like that, ready to be stepped on.

What do I fear about an empty page where I should be? Is it the fear that what is committed to it is entirely mundane, that I will find that I’ve not been exceptional at all? It is the aspiration for exceptionality that I should be more ashamed about. Still, so long as I do not look in the mirror, I can be both ugly and beautiful, whichever suits my mood better. That is one of the perks of being a subject.

I should like to be a floating set of eyes (and other sense organs), with my will extended out into invisible yet effective extremities. To look at a mirror is to see a stranger, to become worried, to fuss, to be quite drunk while I mess with my own self and be entirely dissatisfied at the end.

How is fiction writing different? Simply, a fiction writer has enough artistic distance from what is on the page to disavow selfhood. It is a paradox. Fiction (and all other forms of art) is an objectification of one’s will and potential. And at the same time, because a writer or an artist is concerned primarily with the play of form, or formal play, they can disavow any part of the art they don’t like from what they feel to be themselves by saying that the formal play (sometimes) must takes precedence over authenticity, if such a thing can exist.

Is a journal not also then a contrivance, arbitrary in form, playful in content, like all art is? We understand journals to be reflections of an inner, private self. But is there such a thing? When there is no other audience, does the writer herself not remain the sole onlooker? And this writer is certainly no solitary creature, no indivisible monad. Quite the opposite, she brings with her a throng, like tourists crowding behind the globular panes of her eyes, all those she has ever known. She sees with many eyes, hears with many ears, and judges herself with many heads. A journal keeper’s room is often quite crowded. A journal’s pages are then galleries.

If I look in the mirror, I will not see myself as I am, nor how I would be when I am no longer looking at the mirror. If I must see disappointment, it is only when I look. At other times, I will be living instead. A journal can only record the disappointing way I string words together. At other times, I am living.

Let this be, then, a journal of disappointments. At other times, I am a fairly cheery person, with good humor. I am decent company to my friends. I am joyous when I make art. But here, I must disappoint.


VCV