This Journal

August 1999

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July 1999

Now we've got this miraculous new month. Everybody was born in August - only some of us know it. But we'll save that for a later entry. This is the place to talk about journal-keeping.

What have I learned about online journaling over this past month? I've learned that Alathea may have something when she requests that people who know her should NOT read her journal. Though I've been guilty of encouraging some friends and acquaintances to read This Journal, it may not be the best thing. I've done this becaue I am currently distant from most of the people who have known me. This Journal had seemed a simple way to keep everyone up-to-date.

But it turns out that This Journal is not equivalent to lived experience; it will always be a reflection upon experience - and it will always suggest the awkward, dopey, abstract, preachy, boring, profound, judgemental, scattershot contents of me.

Some people have said that they read this because it gives them knowledge of me that they could not have otherwise. I suspect that's a prime motive for most journal reading...but is it also true of journal writing? Do I write to be read? Well, of course I do.

I've kept private journals almost all my life. I could and should continue with them because they are radically different from what I've got happening here. On paper in the silence of my room I can practice a level of honesty that is simply not possible here. When I finish writing I close the book and put it in a drawer. But here the book is never closed. So what is this performance all about? Am I so witty or wise that the world must not be deprived of my stuff? I think not. Is this pure egotism, narcissism, or whatever? I also think not (not purely at any rate).

What this seems to be is Writing and Publishing. I'm enjoying this daily task. Sometimes I bore myself; sometimes I surprise myself. But what I tell my students is also true for myself: thinking is writing, writing is thinking. You never know what it's going to be until you do it.

I am of several minds about this public journal, which really stands more as a diary (a record of events and common discourse) than as the unfiltered interior mumbles and yelps that paper journals are.

One side is set down by Wallace Stevens: "A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light." On my shakier days I fear this applies too well.

But then we've got the old Chinese proverb: "The palest ink is better than the best memory." As far as that goes, I'm happy to have been a writer of sorts over time.