10:53 a.m. - December 15, 2002
On writing and the self, or something like that
By definition journals expose that which one would prefer to hide, our self-centerdness, our hurts, our short-comings, the things we think about but don't tell friends, the things we think about but can't tell friends. In my journal I want to have a conversation with myself, to trace and explore themes and recurrent notions in order to better understand where I'm coming from, to glean footing in the unrest.
I think I write apologetically and not in the sense of defending myself, my beliefs, my purview. Instead I write in the halting voice of confessional mendicity, nearing a whisper with one eye on the door and the other on you. Let me be to write about that which I think of at night, when I'm driving on the freeway in the afternoon, in the shower while soaping my hair. I should not be ashamed to write my thoughts as they are, to play the scratched LPs until I've had enough. I have not had enough, I have not filled the gaps and the frame is half-done.
How to bridge this disconnect between person/journal and media-anonymity when cognizance of readers informs writing? I wonder if it is possible at all. There is one journal particularly that engages me because I am struck by the interplay of (deliberate?) shallowness attempting to mask a (profound) depth, a depth this writer shrouds well but like most, cannot obsfuscate wholly. Then why bother? It is this disconnect, I believe, that shames me from writing about my childhood my family my feelings ad nauseum when it is exactly this that I seek to expurgate. It is the act of vomition, a cleansing purge, that happens only after consuming too much of something. I'm looking for my own emotional flaying, to vomit up the things I've disregarded for years, so that I can move on unencumbered, but informed. Maybe this desire or goal is unrealistic but physics illustrates that the same matter is present in a heavy ingot or in the wings of hummingbirds, only organized differently. That's what I seek, to organize.
