Olivia Dresher Interviews Guy Gauthier about Water & Earth and Journal Writing
Guy Gauthier is the author of Water & Earth: A Journal, published by Impassio Press.
 Olivia
Was Water & Earth the first journal you ever kept? If so, why do you think you waited until you were in your 30s to write in this form? And what made you begin to keep a journal?
Guy
I thought I’d try writing a journal, just to see what would happen. I certainly didn’t think this would become my chosen form of writing. You don’t set out to be a journal writer. I mean only a journal writer. It’s something you come to realize about yourself. And until I started writing Water & Earth in 1971, I’d never thought of writing a journal. I had never felt the need to. I thought I was a playwright. Journal writing came as a complete surprise to me.
Olivia
As I understand it, most of Water & Earth was written directly on your typewriter. Have you saved those original typewritten pages, as well as any original handwritten pages that might be part of this journal?
Guy
Water & Earth was written on a typewriter, except for a few passages that were written on the beach at Montauk, or in bars and restaurants. Like I said in my journal, “normally, I write a first draft, working very fast, and then right after, I write it over again, coming out with a second and final draft.” I didn’t keep the first drafts, only the final versions. I still have the handwritten pages I wrote in bars and restaurants, but I’m not quite sure where they are.
Olivia
Do you keep your journal on a computer now? Do you feel that the computer is equal to a typewriter as far as being a creative tool for you?
Guy
I keep my journal in three different forms. When I’m at home, I write on the computer; when I’m walking in the streets, I record my thoughts on tape; and when I’m traveling, I write in a notebook. I like to write travel journals, because when you’re traveling, you exist in the moment, and writing a journal can be that: a way of being in the moment, of living in the present. But whether I’m writing in a notebook, or recording things on tape, it all ends up on the computer. When I’m transcribing my writing into the computer, I try to keep what’s in the notebook. You don’t italicize words in a notebook, you underline them. You don’t delete them, you cross them out. So when I transcribe it into the computer, I use underlining instead of italics, and I keep some of the words that are crossed out. But I love writing directly on the computer, because you make more mistakes that way. A computer keyboard is sensitive to the slightest touch, and if you don’t hit the keys exactly right, you get the most delicious typos. Extra letters or numbers pop up in the middle of a word: I love it!
Olivia
You sent me only a small portion of the original/complete document of Water & Earth. What made you choose the journal entries you sent me? Do the unpublished entries differ much from the published entries?
Guy
The complete manuscript of Water & Earth was about a thousand pages long. During those years, I was searching for a religion, and the journal took that form: it’s a search for mystical and occult experience. But sometime around 1992, I thought I’d try to get some of it published, and I picked out my favorite parts, and gave them the title Water & Earth: a journal. I kept all the sex scenes, and the entries that were “written in the moment,” but left out a lot of the mystical and occult writing.
Olivia
The conventional literary world generally feels that the journal isn’t a valid literary genre. How would you personally defend journal writing as a literary genre?
Guy
What is it they don’t like about journals? That they’re a loose, unstructured, and undisciplined form of writing? So what’s the answer? Should we try to elevate the journal to an art form? Maybe, but I’d rather go in the opposite direction. I’d rather make the journal more loose, more unstructured, more undisciplined. The journal should capitalize on its weaknesses, turning them into strengths. I figure, if you’ve got it, flaunt it. Why should the journal become an art form? Why should it become a valid literary genre? Art is an elitist concept. I mean art as a level of skill and inventiveness that can only be attained by the very few. Art is obsolete. We should just write what we feel like writing, and read what we feel like reading, and forget all about art and literature.
Olivia
In Water & Earth you deliberately use what you’ve called “creative punctuation,” sometimes ending an entry with a comma or no punctuation at all. What significance does unconventional punctuation have for you? And how do you hope your readers will respond to it?
Guy
In Water & Earth, I found myself using a loose, run-on sentence. I was stringing all my sentences together with commas, and that was my first use of creative punctuation: I was using commas where you should use a period. But then I found I was leaving my sentences unfinished. I saw that my sentences were ending on a comma, or sometimes just leaving off, with no punctuation at all, like in this example, from Water & Earth:
and you’re reading this now, Peter, I love you, you’re my friend, and I love you, and that was my dream...this morning, as I sat watching the snow twisting in the wind over 29th Street, I was dreaming of you and the book you’re reading, now
I don’t see why punctuation has to be more conventional than the rest of the text. If you can use words creatively, then you can use punctuation creatively. There are no rules, no standards. To me, writing means being totally, absolutely free. Free to do what you want. Free from any concern as to what a reader or an editor might want. Free from any idea as to what a journal is or should be.
The reader is free to respond to it any way he or she wants. Just as there’s no right way to write, there’s no right way to read, or to respond to what you’re reading. The reader should feel as free as the writer does.
Olivia
Were you conscious of an audience while you were writing Water & Earth, did you write it knowing that you might want to publish it someday? Do you think your journals, in general, would be written differently if you never wanted to publish them?
Guy
I wasn’t conscious of an audience at first. I started by writing down the events of my day, as you would expect a journal writer to do. It never occurred to me that I might want to publish it someday. But in November 1972, I stumbled upon “writing in the moment,” which is a term I owe to you, Olivia.
What do we mean by writing in the moment? There are many ways of writing in the moment, as many as there are writers, but to me, it’s writing down what’s happening while it’s happening, catching it the way a photographer would catch a passing moment. It’s the kind of writing you might do in a crowded restaurant, or on a subway train. So that’s what did it for me. Once I started writing in the moment, my idea of the journal began to change. I realized that for me the journal was not a private form of writing, but a structure that suited my needs, i.e., a chronological structure, where you keep the material in the order in which it was written. To me, the important thing about a dated journal is that it tends to produce an incoherent sequence of thoughts. And that’s what I was after, the incoherence, the disorder of it. Once I saw the journal as a structure that suited my needs, it became my chosen form of writing, and from that point on, I always thought of it as something to be published. The French journal I wrote in the 1990’s is even more private and confessional than Water & Earth, and yet it was clear to me that it was written for publication.
Olivia
If your journal was a painting, what would it look like? If your journal was a piece of music, what would it sound like?
Guy
If it was a painting, it would be an Impressionistic landscape, or maybe a Fauvist one. If it was a piece of music, it would be atonal jazz.
Olivia
Some passages of Water & Earth retain typos. Why did you want them retained in the published version of Water & Earth?
Guy
To me, it’s part of writing in the moment. I like to write about what’s happening while I’m writing, and if the phone rings or somebody asks me a question, that ends up in my journal, along with the rest, and that’s why I keep my typos and mistakes, because they’re something that happens while I’m writing. My mistakes are part of me. They’re an expression of who and what I am. Computers don’t make mistakes. They break down, but they don’t make typing mistakes. Human error is an expression of who we are. Someday computers will take over all our mental functions, and perform them faster and more accurately. The only thing they can’t take away from us is our tendency to make mistakes. They’ll never be better at making mistakes than we are.
Olivia
Do you feel the desire and ability to explore just about any subject in your journal? Are there some subjects or secrets that are hard to write about for you? Are there any subjects you completely avoid?
Guy
A journal can be anything you want it to be. There’s nothing I wouldn’t write down in my journal—if I felt like it. I think of the journal as a place for the toughest kind of self-criticism. A journal is where you show the side of yourself that you’re hiding from the world. But that’s not easy, because under the layers you’ve exposed, there are deeper layers, and maybe even some you don’t know are there.
I’ve been reading Husserl lately, and with the kind of skepticism you find only in a philosopher, he says that consciousness is the only indubitable fact. Nothing is more important than consciousness, nothing more strange and inexplicable: to think that we come out of nothing, that we emerge out of black emptiness, and have conscious sensations, like the taste of a cold beer, or the smell of rain in the woods, how do you explain that? It’s the miracle to end all miracles. And that’s what a journal is: it’s the record of an individual human consciousness. It’s an experience of the world as unique as a fingerprint or a snowflake.
Are there some secrets I’m unwilling to confess? To me, the hardest thing is to say good things about myself, or rather, to lay bare the full extent of my self-love. In my journal, I bring out the worst side of myself. I just can’t bring myself to say, “I’m such a nice guy, everybody loves me,” you know, things like that. But we all have positive thoughts about ourselves, and if you’re going to be really honest, then you should be willing to say what you like about yourself. But those are the thoughts I keep to myself.
Olivia
Do you have any favorite journals or journal writers? Were you reading any journal writers prior to beginning Water & Earth that, perhaps, inspired you to begin a journal of your own?
Guy
I hadn’t read any journals when I started writing Water & Earth. My influences stem from poetry and philosophy, rather than journals. But since then, I’ve made up for lost time. I like the unexpurgated journals of Anaïs Nin, particularly the one where she writes about her incestuous affair with her father. I know some people think she fictionalized her journal, but it doesn’t read like fiction, it doesn’t feel like fiction. It feels like the naked, unvarnished truth.
I like the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, and one of the high points of my recent trip to England was the moment when I found myself standing in her bedroom. I looked around the room, and thought, this is really exciting, I’m standing in the bedroom of Dorothy Wordsworth! Over the years, I’ve enjoyed reading the journals of Ionesco, who is better known as an absurdist playwright. I think his journal is even better than his plays.
I think Darkness and Light is a remarkable book. There’s so much exceptional journal writing in that anthology. Writers like Sandi Sonnenfeld, who has perfect control, and knows how to objectify her emotional experiences. She writes about herself in the most direct and simple way. It’s very engaging, and wins me over completely. And then there’s Ja Luoma, who has obviously thought very seriously about journal writing. I love that part where she’s digging a toilet hole in the ground, and has brought her notebook down into the hole. Her style moves easily and naturally from naked sincerity to wry humor.
I like Victor Munoz’s writing in Darkness and Light and at his web site Aporia.net. I feel very much at home in The Philosophical Notebooks of Bianco Luno. Victor attributes his thoughts to his alter ego, Bianco Luno, and even writes scholarly footnotes about Luno’s life and thought. At Aporia.net, the electronic footnotes are really delightful. Victor Munoz has a quality that is very rare among philosophers: charm. And I mean that in the best sense. Philosophy takes itself too seriously. And that’s why the Notebooks of Bianco Luno are such a welcome relief. He has something that’s sadly lacking in Hegel and Heidegger: a sense of humor. Victor Munoz is one of the most brilliant aphoristic philosophers writing today. His acerbic wit grabs you by the collar, and won’t let you go.
And I have a very strong identification with what you’re doing, Olivia. Your recent aphorisms are simply amazing. You’ve taken the art of the aphorism to places where it’s never been before. I know you have a great admiration for Pessoa and Cioran, but you’re better than they are. You’ve found a way to personalize aphorisms, which tend to be rather abstract.You let us know where you were, and what you were doing at the moment when the aphorism came to you. It’s an important step forward: a quantum leap towards a new kind of aphorism.
Olivia
You’ve said that you aim towards incoherence and chaos in your writing. Can you define “incoherence” and “chaos” and why you find them attractive?
Guy
If someone says “your sentences are incoherent,” they mean that you’re changing the subject in the middle of a sentence. But really, it’s life that’s incoherent, and incoherent writing is just writing that captures the rhythm, the feel of life. If you start writing a sentence, and the phone rings, and you talk on the phone for a minute, and then, right in the middle of the sentence, you mention how the phone rang and you were talking to your friend, the sentence becomes incoherent, but it’s the true record of what happened while you were writing the sentence. If you walk down the street, you’re going to see a series of things that have nothing (or very little) to do with each other, you’re going to see an incoherent sequence of things, store windows, parking meters, and if you put all those things together in a sentence, or a paragraph, you’re going to have incoherent writing, but it will be the incoherence of life itself. Or if you’re watching TV, news coverage of the presidential election will be followed by a Pepsi commercial, and we’re used to this incoherence, it’s everywhere, it’s in newspapers, magazines, and even in my journal!
Usually, when people talk about chaos, they mean the disorder that comes at the end of something, like the chaos at the end of the Roman Empire. But my idea of chaos comes from Mircea Eliade. In his studies of early mythology, Eliade kept coming up against the idea of a return to chaos. But this is a return to the chaos that precedes creation, to the holy chaos out of which everything came. This kind of chaos is an undifferentiated wholeness. In chaos, everything is the same. There are no distinctions and boundaries. It’s kind of like the first stage in the development of an embryo. At first, the cells are undifferentiated. They’re all the same. But then, in the later stages of development, they turn into blood cells, bone cells, nerve cells, etc.
To me, the journal is a chaos of jumbled ideas and experiences, it’s the chaos that precedes creation. My thoughts are chaotic, my sentences are chaotic, my whole life is chaotic. In the 1980’s, I wrote a novel called Léona, and I wrote it in the form of notes for a novel. It’s full of character sketches, plot outlines, and notes of all kinds. I was trying to capture the early, embryonic stage in a novel’s development. I was searching for what I call embryonic form. The first draft, the notes, the unfinished sentences, the chaotic mess that precedes orderly creation.
Olivia
A more recent journal of yours written in French will be released in 2003 by a Canadian publisher. How does this journal differ from Water & Earth?
Guy
It has more of everything. It’s more private. More incoherent. More chaotic. In Water & Earth, I preserved one of my typos:
I could be watching TV, but that’s not fighting, that’s just living somebody else’s fight, pretending you’re fighting somebody els4, hey, els4, somebody els4’s fight...
It was the first time I’d ever done that. But in my French journal, which is called Journal 5.1, I do it all over. In Journal 5.1, I push the element of self-exposure to the limit. It’s a more self-conscious work. I was aware of what I was doing, and why I was doing it. The style is more elegant (which is typical of French as a language) and more deliberate. I couldn’t write as fast in French as in English. The words didn’t come as easily. The language in Water & Earth is more spontaneous, and more colloquial in its rhythms than that of Journal 5.1.
Olivia
What is your journal writing like today? What form does it take, and what themes and confessions find their way into it? How has or hasn’t your journal changed since Water & Earth? What direction are you moving in as a journal writer?
Guy
I’d like to take what I’m doing to the limit. When I wrote Water & Earth, I was still trying to write well. But in my 9/11 journal, which came out in the first issue of The Diarist’s Journal, I say that “mediocrity is my goal, I’m getting closer to it all the time,” and those journal pages are a good example of what I mean by mediocre writing. I don’t mean that we should fake bad writing, in the sense of producing a parody of terrible writing. Mediocre writing should be your own true self. It should happen naturally, spontaneously. Here is my formula for producing bad writing: give in to yourself, give in to your own worst tendencies. Go with the first draft. Don’t censor yourself. And this is the hardest thing to do. If you can write well, then the hardest thing is to write badly, or rather, to let yourself do it. It takes so much will not to revise your work. When you can see how to fix a passage, when you know how to make it better, it’s hard to resist the temptation to do it. It’s like a form of artistic suicide. For an artist, it’s the ultimate form of self-denial. And, you know, the journal is the perfect vehicle for this drive for mediocrity, it’s the perfect instrument, the journal is like a machine for producing mediocre writing, all you have to do is surrender to its natural tendencies. The chronological structure, i.e., leaving your thoughts in the order in which they came to you, is like a machine for producing incoherence, disorder. So I guess what I’m saying is, the journal has a natural tendency to be mediocre, to slip into bad writing, and one way to fulfill its possibilities is to let it be atrociously bad, to cross over into the inexcusable, the indefensible.
It’s like when I keep my typos and mistakes. I let them happen spontaneously, they are genuine mistakes, and once I see them on the screen, then I decide to keep them. And that’s how I’d like to work my way into bad writing. I would let the badness happen naturally, in the process of expressing myself. I would just give in to my worst tendencies. I would write things against my better judgment, or rather, leave them in against my better judgment. What if your bad writing is a more genuine expression of who and what you are than your best writing? I am the mistakes that I make. To me, bad passages are like huge, extended typos. Why should I correct them? I’m going to stop censoring myself, I’m going to stop suppressing my natural mediocrity.
Is it possible to be intentionally mediocre? Perhaps not. Bad writing is something that happens when people are trying to write well. When they’re trying hard to be good. Today, I was trying to explain my idea of bad writing to Stanley Nelson, and he said, Guy, if you set out to produce bad writing, there’s no way it’s going to be bad. Maybe he’s right. But the next time I write something really bad, something I know I could improve upon, I want to be able to say, OK, that’s it! I’m going to leave it exactly like that! You have to sacrifice your own skills. Everything you’ve learned. It has to hurt. It has to be painfully awkward, and you have to leave it like that. That’s when you know it’s really bad, when it hurts to leave it that way.
Copyright © 2002 by Olivia Dresher
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