Meditations on 25 Years of Journal Writing

Kimble James Greenwood

I: The Personal Journal: history, genre and defense

I started writing journals in 1967, age 13, at the conjunction of two events: I was given a blank notebook for Christmas by my mother (who wrote journals, primarily for therapeutic reasons), and I read the "half-sexy diary" of my brother, then in the army and on his way to Vietnam. His diary was an awakening for me. Therein I found wit, exuberance, adventure, loneliness, sex and Art. I began in imitation, wanting to cultivate in myself what I saw in him.

Age 13 was also the age that I recognized that my long-standing love of science, and desire to become a scientist, was compromised if not precluded by my disinterest in math. A painful reorienting took place. I began to admit interests and proclivities that my concentration on science had all but adumbrated. From that time on I began calling myself a "poet, writer and philosopher" and set the course of my life accordingly. These are roles, goals and loves I’ve held to since—though, at any given time, favoring one or the other.

My journals, then, became the working notebooks toward these goals—a place to experiment, to write-up my life, to describe the world around me, to honor beauty, to consolidate, play with and augment vocabulary, to work on poems, to think things out or through, to recopy quotes from books I liked and found inspirational, to remember. As I grew older and the process continued, the journals themselves split off and diversified, specialized—so that my main journal, the "personal journal", was now accompanied by adjuncts: poetry journals, dream journals, fiction journals, quote journals, journals to list memories in, to list books read, movies seen, vocabulary lists, curious gleanings from newspapers and magazines, etc.

One more component is necessary to understand how and why I structured and took to journals as I did. From the age of nine onward I have been afflicted with the speech impediment of stuttering and stammering. It comes and goes, severe to negligible, determined by its own rhythms, expressive of its own will. In my youth it was the central psychological pole around which my personality, my sense of self, was constructed. My social self atrophied; to speak was to humiliate myself, to lose power, to misrepresent myself, to invite criticism, mockery or pity from my peers.

As compensation, the journal became my place to speak, to speak with what I felt to be my true voice. It was the place for me to hear my true voice. In my outward life I was inarticulate, introverted, stunted, halted, stymied, frustrated. In my inner life, my journal, I was extroverted, expressive, fluent, prolific, articulate, full to overflowing. My outer life felt characterized by weakness. In my journal I showed my strength. In my outer life I had no voice. In my journal I came to know and trust my own voice, my own voices. In my outer life I stumbled, was often seen as overserious, shy, awkward. In my journal I could dance and show wit, playfulness, gusto and irony. In my outer life I was often a coward; in my inner life—journal and imagination—my courage went unfettered, I dared everything.

In this way the journal became friend. I talked to it as if it were other—the ubiquitous and promised "You" as balance and countermeasure to the "I". It was open and receptive to me, comfort and harbor to me. I felt it to be the place I kept my best self, my identity, my wholeness, love and soul.

I talk in past tense, I state beginnings. Time has modified, changed, even refuted some of these initial causes and intents. Age works its integrations. Fate determines the course, impervious to the ego and its will. The journal has become its own entity now; it has led to nothing else—neither poetry, fiction nor philosophy, per se. It is my major work, perhaps my only work. I think of it, still, as context, as my context. I can take position e now, because I have taken positions a, b, c, and d earlier. I reread the journal constantly, discovering anew themes, patterns, directions, crossroads, intent. It is much more of a psychological testament to me now: the text of the self, of the creation of the self. In this way it holds, shows, renews, and constitutes my sense of wholeness; it gives me consistency.

Rereading it as much as I do has proven to be an exercise in and revelation of time and memory. How I have learned to distrust human memory—my own no less than others’! The journal is where I keep my memory; to reread it is to refresh and renew memoria. It is not memory of myself alone that I find there. Not at all. My journals are full of the voices of others, full of the people in my life. Through my endless rereading of them, the people of my life are still very much a part of me now. I reflect on them, feel them, learn from them; they remain relevant, viable, alive to present concerns. I do not, I can not—as they always warned me not to—forget them.

Anais Nin remains my favorite journal writer. She has taught me much—as have reactions to her by others taught me. When I mentioned memory above, I recognized that I was paraphrasing her. Let me quote directly from Volume V of her published diaries: "The diary gave me a frightening mistrust of memory. Memory is a great betrayer. Whenever I read it, I find it differs from the way I remembered the scenes and the talk. I find scenes I had forgotten, thoughts I had forgotten, and precisions noted at the time have become foggy or vanish altogether."

Writing in a diary developed several habits: a habit of honesty (because no one imagines the diary will ever be read); a habit of writing about what most closely concerns me; a habit of improvisation on any theme one wishes; habits of spontaneity, enthusiasm, naturalness. The emotional reality of the present. A respect for the present mood.

—Anais Nin, Volume III, June 1946

Though I am delighted to concur with the bulk of what Nin has said here, I take exception to one statement. Quite the contrary, I would say that everyone imagines that the diary will be read. The traditional lock on the diary, the obsessive gestures of hiding it, guarding it, disguising it, writing in code—are all manifestations of the anxiety, the fantasy, that the diary will be read. To commit anything to writing is to create physical evidence—an extension of the self that, once committed, exceeds the control, guardianship or restrictions of the self. I have had people tell me (especially adolescents) that they dare not write a diary for fear that someone will find it, particularly the someones who would serve as subject matter, who inspire the negative energies that seek or need expression or melioration in a diary in the first place.

Sixteen pages into my first journal, I allowed myself the freedom to write out a sexual fantasy a page-and-a-half long, seeking to claim the honesty, privacy and freedom I felt a journal promised. Was there not also the pressure, an expectation, to be forthright, honest, and whole? Within a month of writing it, however, I could no longer stand the tension, the anxiety or fear that my mother, siblings or schoolmates would discover it and so know—or assume they knew—who I really was. I went back and crossed the whole thing out, taking my sexual self back into privacy, where no one but myself had access to it.

But anger, sexuality, and bad thoughts aren’t the only secrets we keep in journals. The dark shadow isn’t the only kind of shadow; mention is made of the white shadow as well. I think particularly of our enthusiasms—our infatuations for a loved one, a book, a film, music—enthusiasms that build so ethereal a structure, such overstatement, that time cannot help but ground them. Aren’t we no less embarrassed for the inflated enthusiasms of an earlier age? For rhetoric that proves untrue? For being caught with the mass, found out in our immaturity, shamed by our tastes?

In my second journal, in celebration of July 4th, I did a messy full-page spread, drawing an American flag and a portrait of Uncle Sam:

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA—

192nd BIRTHDAY. CONGRATULATIONS!"

The fact that this is the way our recent presidents still talk does not inhibit my own tendency to roll my eyes.

When man begins to permit himself full expression, when he can express himself without fear of ridicule, ostracism or persecution, the first thing he will do will be to pour out his love.

—Henry Miller, Sexus

I have returned to this quote over and over again. It is another way to regard the enthusiasms which have animated my life. The journal has always been the safe place to record the enthusiasms, to pour out my love.

Very early on I recognized that I was trying to preserve life in the journals; I was trying to hold on to what proved endlessly ephemeral. It was not just life that was ephemeral; I was ephemeral—an unknown, uncalled for, undifferentiated cipher on the earth. Writing of my life gave me substance, a solidity that I could return to and build from. Writing does not only give others access to what would remain unexpressed in the self, it gives access to oneself-as-other. Time and mood will always make one other to oneself. We are legion—endlessly forgetting we are legion, or forgetting the extent to which we are. How many lives we have lived! How endlessly flows the water under the solid bridge of our hardened memories. Are we the bridge, or the water? The journal gives me access to my selves, access to the range of lives I have lived, cherished, and loved. The written documentary proves no less evocative than the photographic documentary.

Several years ago I heard the late French poet and writer Edmond Jabés speak at a seminar at U.S.C. in Los Angeles. A beautifully warm and wrinkled face, a mellifluous voice. My notes have him saying the following:

"Perhaps there is in every writer a mythic book, the book of books, that he attempts to write with every work he composes.

"The writer becomes the text; as long as he is writing he is still recreating himself, the book of books.

"Every creation of a new book is a case of a writer protesting the text he has created, arguing with the text he is becoming."

I find these thoughts beautiful—and as succinct a description of what my journals mean to me, and have meant to be, as anything.

Journals are how we appropriate the story of our lives, reclaiming narrative and drama from the social institutions that otherwise, by default, document our passage from birth to death in the stolid prose and bare facts of bureaucracy. Within the pages of a journal we fight back against case history and business time, filling in the colorless outlines, the machine convenience of standardized forms, with the pavonian quirkiness of our peculiar colors.

The life journal, in fact, documents and constitutes the creation of a self, gives words to the timeless initiations that come to qualify the life as mythology—the old and vital stories, heroic journeys, that undergird human existence, weighting our surface efforts with the depths of archetypal profundity. In the pages of a journal we are invoking the old magic whereby humans approach godhood: we are creating ourselves with words!

My biases are wholly existential. I believe our first, major, real, vital and genuine creation is ourselves. We are, in theory, ontological, protean, unlimited, heir to all that is or has been human. We are, in practice, ontic; limited to physiology, body, gender, heredity, the family, the culture, the society, the times—the accidents, details, and limits that so shape and give us individual form and distinction.

The journal becomes the logbook of the creative journey, the workbook of the character, the text of the individual, the confluence of self and other, and its turbulence.

I wrote in my journal in 1984, "Within this space, this room, the selves expand and separate. A field of exaggerations. Numerous caricatures. Drama takes place. I watch the drama. This is the stage where I watch it: a journal."

The journal is the place to be self-conscious. But the literary impulse I began with allowed and encouraged me to play with self-consciousness, to play with the necessary solipsism of the personal journal. I became self-conscious in the way any actor must become self-conscious. In the very feeling of anger, for example, one preserves the consciousness, the detachment, to note the mechanisms of it, the expressive units (whether words or body signals). To become supra conscious and familiar with something becomes the license, the inclination, to play with it—fascinated with the energy, eager to shape it in interesting ways, urge it down curious byways, follow it to the shadowlands, the boundaries.

The journal was the place I could play with my various selves—introduce them, give them voice, let them speak to each other, overhear each other, fight with each other. First person gives way to second person, to third person—ad infinitum.

Deliteralize with the literal creation of words.

Construct and de-construct.

Modify by addenda, not by destruction.

Write, reread, remember.

One can not talk of journals without bringing up a major polemic: what of the narcissism, the solipsism, the egoism, the claustrophobia, the arrogance of the sovereign Self? The "I, I, I" of the journal. All the attention, care, focus, voice, view, time, pampering and puling rooted in the self?

We have been taught to distrust and recoil from such self-preoccupation. We might allow someone the right or reason to write their self-aggrandizing diaries, but to publish them? to inflict them on others? to presume our interest?

As for ‘Every man his own poet’, the more every man knows about poetry the better. I believe in every one writing poetry who wants to; most do. I believe in every man knowing enough of music to play ‘God bless our home’ on the harmonium, but I do not believe in every man giving concerts and printing his sin.

—Ezra Pound, "A Retrospect", 1918

Details in themselves did not interest her—she disliked Chekhov for having made much of them—but when a person was ‘dear’ to her, as she once wrote to Pasternak, his ‘whole life’ was dear, ‘the most beggarly detail precious.’

—Muchnic reviewing a work on Marina Tsvetayeva, NYTBR, 10/12/80

To these I add two personal anecdotes. A friend of a friend, paid to type up the journal-novel I wrote in the early eighties, once asked me ingenuously, "Who would be interested in the journal of a nobody?"

Again in the early eighties, full of enthusiasm for my life and meditations at the time, I sent a photocopy of a journal to my brother and sister-in-law. My brother wrote back after awhile and honestly told me they found the stuff "tedious, exhausting and embarrassing."

I cannot ignore these charges; I engage them. Let them remain alive, and teach us by the very vitality of their polemic. But here are some obverse perspectives.

The theme of the diary is always personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relation to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.

—Anais Nin, 1946

What manner or presentation of details obscures the universal, and what enhances it? This is a fundamental question of Art, for its successful determination marks the line between high and low Art. The great Artists convey a human relevance, a fundamental aesthetic, within or beneath a surface of individual detail and specificity. At the same time, universality is no guarantee of Art—the non-artistic universal yields the stereotype, the artistic universal yields the archetype. The mechanics of this are subtle.

As in all Art, a mysterious and harmonic balance is sought: a surface with depth, depth with surface. Too much surface, like too much ego, can prove deadening, tedious and untranscendent. But too much depth can sink us into undifferentiated darkness—which is, at base, always and ultimately death itself, death of the individual. The personal, if it is too deep, becomes impersonal.

The succession of generations insures that we all begin as nobodies. The heroic challenge is to rise out of that entropic given, and—as is said—make a name for ourselves, proving, as we hoped all along, that we were somebody. My friend’s friend was simply recognizing and passing on what we all know—that journals, like autobiography, have traditionally been a retrospective art. One qualifies one’s fame or worth in some other genre, some other activity, and only then does the "beggarly detail" of our lives, our incidental writing, gain value by association, so to speak.

If one’s primary genre is the journal, however, and one’s art is both the life that goes into it and the consciousness and care with which it is told, then the journal claims no less than any other literary text—seeking its measure and interest according to the standards of any and all Art. The journal-as-art claims no reflected glory but must stand alone, demonstrating therein a vision, voice and style that grabs and holds us, intrigues and entertains, giving us the rush we recognize as Art—that combination of form and content so apt that, once apprehended, the world becomes incomplete or less interesting without it.

Or is it that the journal writer takes our interest for granted—is this what so irritates us? For is this not the presumption of any ego: my life (in all its beggarly detail) is fascinating, worth writing about, worth insisting that you read and value no less? And all the techniques of social intercourse and Christian manners, where we set aside the self in endless apology to consider the interests of the other, to eschew the ego-speak of "I, I, I"—is it the nakedness of the self without such garments that so disconcerts or repulses us in the personal journal?

What of the selves that don’t abandon the garments of social intercourse in their private writing, but remain apologetic, deferring, self-conscious: I know I’m talking too much of myself here... This is only my opinion... You must think I’m... Gentle reader, perhaps you remember from your own life... And how are you today?

Do we not lose something here—betray the very essence of a journal, where we go to find the self naked, the id in full bloom and bellowing?

Or full bloom and bawling.

Ideally the personal journal is the compensatory private place that serves as balance to the personae and pressure of our public roles. It is not only ego and its aggrandizement that is not allowed in the public sphere. What of all the so-called negative emotions? Not only anger and hatred, but loneliness, sadness, depression, fear, bewilderment, foolishness, triviality, boredom, self-pity. For most of my teens and twenties these comprised the tone scale of my journals. I called it "whining"—my journals were full of whining.

But the whining was real, true, human. It constituted my vulnerability in the world, my honest worries and anxieties over my perennial sense of failure and insufficiency. I knew such tones and perspectives were not a social asset. I knew, at the time, I was not a social asset. All the more to have a place where I could indulge the imperative to question and lament—that essential doubting of my position and meaning in the world. To deny it or cover it over seemed false, dishonest, and counterproductive to me. But to indulge it in public felt unseemly, also counterproductive.

Out of this sense of self, and what I came to learn of the extents of self allowed and disallowed in public, my sense of humanity was developed. Indeed, my concept of humanity is that we are all internally wounded, uncertain, lonely…but that we learn to create the public selves that foster the public illusions: the self as strong, confident, clever, successful, in control, etc. If I am drawn to journals, and to literature, it is because I am drawn to the soul and its wounds—as nakedly, wholly and honestly presented as I can find.

As a journal reader, it is not the ego I seek in journals—it is the soul, the psyche. Preponderance of ego remains distasteful to me wherever it is found. Too much Apollonian light can blind and bore, freeze the obdurate surface into facile form. It is the Dionysian darkness that intrigues me, the depths that shimmer and lap at Apollo’s carefully crafted columns, threatening to de-construct them with a laugh, a leer, or a wail. I enjoy the psyche in all its mess—its emotions, moods, ages, faces, freakishness, eroticism, and theatre.

If the Freudian unconscious is the place where all the repressions reside—driven there by social training, civilization’s need for order, temperance and morality—and dreams the stage upon which these repressed contents play out in code their pressured needs for expression, what then can be said of the personal journal whose raison d’être is the same? The journal is also meant to be the stage where repressed contents can play, where pressures of social personae are relieved, where the subconscious can rise to the surface like magma. Hence the journal’s famed therapeutic value, and the shame and nervousness we feel at the eyes of others apprehending it.

The real shame to me is when the ego and its self-consciousness—its need for control, its need to appear pleasing to others, its absolute terror of mockery—closes off the doorway to the psyche and its profligate shadows, and so hides its most genuine and interesting depths, perpetuating the mass illusions that sustain mass inhumanity.

[Anais Nin’s] relentless self-scrutiny is at first fascinating, then exhausting and, finally, tedious.

—Barbara Fisher Williamson, in a capsule review of Nin’s Early Diary, Vol. III, in NYTBR, 1/29/84

Most did not like Nin’s work, felt the diaries were self-aggrandizing, written for publication, dull, solipsistic.… Miriam Sagan says, ‘I began with Anais Nin but her self-engrossment seemed too massive….’

—Lyn Lifshin, in her introduction to Ariadne’s Thread, 1982

Self-engrossment results in a gross self, a massive self. Or is it a massive self that results in self-engrossment? The focused attention of the journal writer upon the self results, inevitably, in specialized knowledge; one becomes a specialist in oneself. But no, not the self alone, in selves—provided, as Nin indicates, that one goes deep enough, far enough.

I doubt Henry Miller, Otto Rank or Antonin Artaud found Nin too massive a self, her diaries self-aggrandizing. Their own self-engrossment was equal to if not excessive to hers—which is, one could say, the typical imbalance of the sexes. In this regard, it occurs to me that all the criticism I’ve heard of Nin’s ego and self-aggrandizement has come from females. Aren’t women traditionally forbidden by most cultures to have selves, trained instead to set it aside, keep it in embryo, imprisoned? The imprisoned aren’t known for celebrating the presumptions, the exploratory verve, of those, especially of their kind, who are free. The imprisoned aren’t known for taking the complaints and woes of the free seriously.

For fellow specialists, for those on the same or similar path, the journal writings of the serious thinker or Artist are endlessly fascinating and relevant. The language spoken there is a language recognized, a language charged with familiar ironies. There is no threat. Quite the contrary, there is, often enough, sly play, much humor.

And lest we forget, in contrast to the women Lyn Lifshin mentions, there has been no lack of women who have said to Anais Nin, "You have published my diary; you are telling my story." I have passed out the first volume of Nin’s diary to as many women as I could over the years. No other book-as-gift has elicited such positive regard, such liberating energy. But perhaps it should be remembered that these are women who are coming to the book fresh, approaching Nin as if she were another unknown, like themselves. Reputation and canonization continue to destroy the honest individuals who were often pariahs in their time.

"Endlessly fascinating"? An overstatement, an exaggeration. I actually understand and concur, in part, with Williamson’s progression: fascinating, exhausting, tedious. I have felt that progression in rereading my own journals. I consider it a phenomenon of the journal genre itself—the journal-as-life genre—and so attempt to come to terms with it phenomenologically.

What causes tedium? A preponderance of detail? Unnecessary detail? Unnecessary to what? To narrative? But detail is what distinguishes the individual. Detail determines the lived life. And narrative—flow and story, beginnings leading expeditiously to ends—is no less the journal writer’s need, desire and aim than the journal reader’s. But how often is the life characterized by its being stuck, blind, without transcendence, movement or oversight? The journal writer thrashes about, spitting out the vapid details of her or his cage—trusting and hoping that therein clues will be found, the way out, the overlooked will reveal itself.

The bog of detail, the tedium of life, is ideal counterbalance to its transcendence, the grace of flow and plot; the "dry stodge of time" eventually yields learning and enlightenment. "Tedium" is a charge leveled at certain artistic works as well—e.g., Melville’s Moby Dick, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (or even Ulysses), Pound’s Cantos, Lewis’ Babbit. But the tedium, in these cases, is part of the point, the conceit of the art. It is the very dissonance which creates a tension that all the more dulcifies the eventual release into melodic flow. Tedium and boredom are the necessary stuff of life. Artists employ them in their simulacrum of life—but at their own risk.

The real clue to tedium, I feel, is the "exhaustion" which preceded it in Williamson’s progression. For, in fact, details unordered, or details resolutely held to someone else’s order, especially self-consciously so, can be chaos if one doesn’t have the energy to hold, correlate or translate them to one’s own order. Nor is the problem only detail, per se. It is also a matter of attention. The seriously introspective self in the journal bestows a concentration of attention on both self and world. But the attention and concentration are centered within the idiographic self—which cannot help but be at variance with all others, by definition. The extent of that variance determines the extent of energy expenditure needed to encounter or engage the journal writer. Or it may not be "extent" so much as kind of variance. Sometimes the most subtle or hidden variance can prove more annoying, exhausting or benumbing than major and obvious discrepancies.

Then again, it may have something to do with the balance struck between introspection and extrospection. The self commenting on the self, interrogating the self with full attention and bias, can create an airtight chamber—the chamber others are wont to see as solipsism. Others find little air there; they suffocate and recoil. Whereas if the commentary is turned outward, and especially if dialogue—or the voices of others—is allowed or brought into the journal, the effect is to strike windows and doors into the hermetic chamber; energies of light and air ensue.

These are all known mechanisms. Speak long enough in your own voice, in one voice, and you will put others to sleep. You can even put yourself to sleep in that way. But others will awake, regain energy, once they begin speaking—or once you incorporate their voice or their concerns into your monologue. These mechanisms prove especially troublesome to journal writers who would have others read their journals, since one of the main points of the journal is to speak in one’s own voice. It may be, however, that if one goes far enough into the self, or allows the imposed societal impositions of consistent images to fall away (and so becomes more honest with oneself), then one will fracture into one’s natural diversity, becoming two, three, four…and so come to speak in many voices.

One last hypothesis is this: I bring to the journal each day’s highest energy. Or several days’ worth of energy. Or weeks’. Like a capacitor, I store energy, I keep it in, until the tension, volume or intensity compels me to discharge. The journal is where I discharge. It is false that high-energy writing necessarily provokes high energy in the reader. The opposite can occur as well. If not met with equivalent energy in the reader, the effect of such concentrated attention will prove exhausting. I know this, as I’ve said, from rereading my own journals, and have learned that I can reread them only for a limited amount of time.

And here lies a clue and technique. It has always bothered me that journals aren’t read as they are written—with requisite, correlative time and space between each entry. When journal reader meets journal writer two entirely different time systems are meeting and clashing. The journal was written in attenuating time, time attenuated with space and silence. But the journal is read in foreshortened time, compressed time, as if it were a story, a novel, a narrative.

Therein lies the mistake. It is my suggestion that journals-of-the-life be read differently. Rereading my own journals I observe the rule: No more than thirty pages at any one sitting. The trick is to stop whenever one feels one’s attention flagging, interest dropping, irritation growing. It surprises me again and again how bringing fresh energy to the reading invests it with fresh energy. The trouble encountered by Barbara Fisher Williamson, I think, was that she was reading several years of Nin’s journal life as quickly as possible, under deadline for the review—and so learned how quickly enough fascination can turn into exhaustion.

In the breakdown of repression, the artists do their part by first dreaming the forbidden thoughts, assuming the forbidden stances, and struggling to make sense. They cannot do otherwise, for they bring the social conflicts in their souls to public expression.

—Paul Goodman

Those who charge the journal with solipsism inflate the word. How is such purity possible? The journal records the dynamic between self and others. I think of those wonderful lines in the Talmud, "If I am not for myself, who should be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I?" The journal is the place where one is for oneself, but not only for oneself.

We are told that Jung was fond of saying that one could not individuate atop Mt. Everest—the point being that one comes to understand oneself by interactions with others. I do not carry into my chamber, where I must write in solitude, a singular self. I carry the whole history of all my interactions with others, the extent of the history of my times: media-fed, school-fed, thousands of books read, movies seen, magazines and newspapers read, discussions engaged in and overheard with thousands of people. Where is the isolate self, the pure self, amidst such feeding?

For this reason, I’m attracted to the post-structuralist claim that there is no self, per se. The self is a construct, a locus of social intersections, social codes, the way things constellate at any given time. A lecturer I once heard presenting this idea used as example, of all things, writing in a diary. "There I was in 1967, scribbling away in my diary what I thought were my own private concerns and ideas, my own problems. Several years later when I read other women’s diaries, or went back and read mine, I saw how we were all writing the same things. We were trapped in the concerns of the society, the clichés of the times, and couldn’t see it until later."

Solipsism, or ego, seems more clearly demonstrated, to me, by those who have the audacity or the naiveté to assume that they’re the "only one". You know the phrase: "I thought I was the only one.…"

II: The Journal-as-Art

William Saroyan once suggested that good writing was writing done by "a good man". It could be said, no less facetiously, that the journal-as-art is a journal written by an artist. Or—to take it to a level a little less facetious—the journal-as-art is the recording of a life lived as art.

But what is Art: harmony of form and content? Loving attention to detail, to le mot juste? Charm? Magic? Beauty? Mystery? Articulate emotion? Consciousness? Consciousness masking itself (irony)? Intelligence? Sophistication? Play? Passion? Truth? Lies?

There is no need to be ingenuous; Art is all of these things—and more, and less—in proportion.

Art implies standards, quality. Written art implies something well said, well thought out—felicitous insight, aesthetic substance. Art also implies integrity: the personal voice, intelligent voice; implicit morality.

I use morality here as John Gardner used it in his work On Moral Fiction, where he argued that literature is life-affirming, representing an integrity that does not cheat, sneer, trivialize or otherwise cheapen the work and aspirations of the condition humaine and its endless fights against entropy, death, and—to be circular—demoralization.

We well know how humans develop and compose themselves for their public roles, duties and responsibilities. Socialization, if not professionalism, is a matter of preparing a face for the faces that one meets.

The personal journal has long been seen as the place where one can be real—let loose with what one "really thinks": what’s personal, sincere, honest, the truth behind the mask, the unconscious and immediate feeling behind the self-conscious composition of thought.

With this, I think, we finally get to the basic problematic of the journal-as-art: journals are meant to be—valued as being—spontaneous, real, human and true. Whereas literature is known—if not valued—as being conscious, contrived, controlled, created, chosen, care-full, manipulative, etc. Art is meant to be Sunday best; journals are everyday clothes. Art is the golden egg; journals the internal workings that produce the egg.

The problem is that we have been trained to love the golden egg more than the visceral workings. The golden egg remains powerful and mysterious to us. We love to be taken, tricked, overwhelmed or surprised by the magic of Art. But sophistication brings the magic within reach, turns the golden egg into a magician’s trick.

As much as we may thrill with the trick, we simultaneously long for the secret behind it—the technique that humanizes the trick and makes us equal to it, bringing it within range of our own imaginative appropriation.

We go to the journal for the secrets behind the trick.

We’re accustomed to regarding the journal as found art, if we think of it as art at all: a secret cache uncovered, lost voices revealed. Since journals, by definition, claim to get as close as possible to the personal voice, the voice of one’s unguarded thinking, this becomes the particular virtue we, as readers, seek and expect from them: the moral treasures of sincerity and honesty, the immoral treasures of gossip and secrets.

The outside discovery of what ostensibly was meant to be an inside secret, of what could only develop as an inside secret, is thought to insure the integrity and genuineness of the voice. Had the journal writer been preparing a journal manuscript for public consumption, had the journal writer intended her or his art, we would feel that the journal’s secret, mystery and integrity had been somehow tainted or compromised.

Private writing made public is a paradox that cannot and must not be explained away. The literary approach to journal writing is to consider this an essential irony. Essential ironies are not meant to be dissolved; they are to be engaged, they are played with.

John Fowles once described his method of writing novels as a simplified two-step process. The first step entails keeping the internal critic asleep while one writes as volubly, freely and passionately as possible. The second step is to waken the critic and slash, delete, clean up and edit.

Though this idealizes a much more ambiguous and mixed process—as I’m sure Fowles knew—it also epitomizes, I think, the differences that concern us here: the first step constitutes the process and purpose of the journal, the second step exemplifies the process of making art.

Having caricatured and so illustrated the difference, the division, let us now remember the natural ambiguity, the mix.

First of all, who can ever put the critic to sleep? The development of an Artist is also the development of the Artist’s inner critic. Knowledge and experience necessitates comparison and contrast, a greater apprehension of the standards and models whereby one aims and measures oneself. It seems self-evident that the first draft of a master, an Artist, can command greater worth as Art than the first draft of a novice. Mature Artists have so incorporated the basics of Art, of critical standards, into their style, being or craft that even their incidental writing, their throw-away pieces, have comparative value. In this way we can bring together Fowles’ first and second steps into one line, one process, and recognize that editing is coterminous with creation. We edit ourselves before even a word has been put to page. Our spontaneity arises out of and through our critical standards—whether consciously or unconsciously. Absolute eschewal of the internal critic is disingenuous.

Secondly, we must remember that Art alone does not constitute value. There is such a thing as bad art, poor art, or inferior art. The art, in these cases, is mere show and little substance; form without content, content without form. Though we can and do use Art as a measure of value, we must keep in mind that art has its more pedestrian affiliation to craft, skill, process, manufacture, technique. The utilization of the techniques of art may qualify one’s product as art, by definition, but says nothing of the value of the art.

Thus, it is instructive to remember that Art, like any value or definition, transcribes a continuum; in this case, a continuum from Low Art–––––to–––––High Art. The journal-as-art genre may be defined as any private writing that has been edited to facilitate its aesthetics. But the degree to which it has achieved its aim, the degree to which aesthetics serve content, is the degree to which it moves toward High Art. High Art remains the value.

The journal’s art is not for someone who considers unfettered invention more valuable or interesting, as text, than creative adherence to the lived life. The journal’s art is not for someone who finds that self-consciousness disrupts narrative and interferes with pleasure. Nor is the journal’s art for someone who feels that truth is only accessed through objectivity or impersonality.

The journal’s art is one which retains the texture of the lived life. It’s very purpose is to traffic in and subtilize self-consciousness. Its allegiance to truth is to the truth of subjectivity and personality.

The longing for the personal voice, the hunger for unadorned psychological reality, the need to get beyond or inside of all personae, basic curiosity (love of secrets and gossip), and even weariness with the monotheistic gloss of the topical fashions of professionalism and the consequent love of amateurishness (its mix, vulnerability, enthusiasms, even its unconsciousness)—these are all motivations, expectations and hopes we legitimately bring to the reading of journals.

But the journal artist cannot (and must not) claim unconsciousness. The journal artist can no longer be the amateur; a differentiation is taking place.

The writer designs the text. Though the inceptive outflow comes out of mystery, though the outcome means to be magic, the process between is one of design and intention.

Still, too much design and intention can kill the art. Artists become arty if they overreach themselves, or rely too readily on formula, or if their consciousness or self-consciousness becomes too evident, too claustrophobic.

Art—as in artifice—exists whenever consciousness has entered. Art and artifice share the same root. This simple but central fact wreaks havoc with the notion of the journal-as-art because two of the distinctive values claimed by the journal, peculiar to its art, are the values of honesty and sincerity. Like the disturbing paradox of private writing designed for public consumption, so, too, we are faced with the problematic: honesty and sincerity pull one way, Art pulls the other; an existential dilemma.

Irony and the ironic arts are the way one dances with the unsettling paradoxes of public/private, sincerity/artifice, I and Thou. What is irony? The immensity of the unsaid that pressures the said; the tension of two disparate surfaces meeting—often ignorance and knowledge, or complexity masking itself as simplicity, or the many taking on the guise of one—a tension felt as a kind of humor; a distancing and reserve that allows the author to be simultaneously involved and "innocent" while remaining detached and commenting. Done poorly, irony can become coy, cute, posturing, clever; done well, it becomes essential to the sophistication of the journal’s art.

To me, people are art. The human life, each human life, is and becomes an inevitable creation—and creation itself constitutes art, but art as process, not as value per se. The value comes as people mature and so come to appropriate themselves, honoring the choices that define them, body and soul. The value comes when people shuck off the pale imitations, stereotypes, worn roles and clichés of their upbringing and times, and come to know and value what makes them distinct and individual. Out of mature individuality comes voice.

The personal journal is the given place where we learn, practice and prove the method to our madness, the art of our lives, the mature integrity of our voice.

For many years I imagined myself writing journals in the way Keith Jarrett improvised his piano concertos. Each journal was meant to be a jazz novel, so to speak—a spontaneous, impromptu, immediate work of art.

This involved giving each journal a title meant to be reflective and expressive of its contents. It meant beginning and ending the journal with requisite energy and attention; setting mood and theme in the beginning, and resolving or restating theme in the end. It meant finding and following the themes or peculiarities that determined the course and temper of any given phase of my life. It meant pacing myself, attentive to when too much of any given tack or tone had accumulated, and so moving the register to fresh or alternative tacks or tones. One sees the process whereby I was creating my life as I was creating my journal; the two informed each other, played off of and depended upon each other.

Lest we become caught up in our own paradigms and so fail to see the wider picture, I must remind us that we have been approaching the journal-as-art as if the art involved were relevant only to the literary enterprise, as if the journal’s art were only or strictly literary. This is too narrow a view.

Psychology, philosophy, and sociology could each claim the journal as a primary text, if they were so disposed, in the way history has long recognized and valued the personal journal as an invaluable source of the historical record. The art, in these cases, would remain a measure of the quality of the prose, attention to form; but each discipline, with its distinctive content, would also necessitate its own emphases, and so come to demand and construct an art peculiar to itself.

If we’re to imagine the journal as psychological art, for example, I don’t mean something of the nature: Diary of a Breakdown, or Diary of a Pathological Mind—though this kind of writing has been and can be expressive of psychological art. Rather, I have in mind the seriously introspective voice applied to the interrogation of one’s particular feelings, memories, moods, fears, fantasies, dreams, etc. I have in mind journal writing as the inevitable therapeutic process that accompanies individuation—a written travelogue of the long and painful differentiating between self and other, the lifelong appropriation of the Self. Examples of this genre might be Kafka’s diaries or Sylvia Plath’s journals.

As for the journal as philosophical art, I’m drawing on the vital but neglected notion that philosophy comes from and must be applied to the lived life. Academic philosophy, by contrast, has become the perpetual motion whereby ever greater abstraction is generated. To find and use philosophy—the art of thinking—to understand, explore, choose and cherish a life in accordance with one’s values or principles is a worthy activity, an artistic enterprise, and a process aptly serviced by the personal journal. I think, as examples, of Thoreau’s Walden journals, and Sartre’s War Diaries.

Sociological art has a relation to historical art, for it recognizes that the individual is also a subset of any number of social structures—gender, age, race, family, religion, state, etc.—and so illuminates or exemplifies social categories in microcosm. Each individual is or can be (the degree determines the art) an expressive epitome of the locale, the times.

In summary, the journal-as-art describes a mix; it is not for purists. It is informed by a dynamic of tension: the bringing together of public and private, truth and fiction, professional and amateur, conscious and unconscious, sophistication and innocence. These tensions, handled poorly, create only tenseness and irritation; handled well, they can energize and excite. This remains the challenge we place before the journal writer who would be artist.

Copyright © 2002 by Kimble James Greenwood

This essay is from Darkness and Light: Private Writing as Art – An Anthology of Contemporary Journals, Diaries, and Notebooks edited by Olivia Dresher and Victor Muñoz .