No journals...

There was a moment in recent times when keeping a journal became referred to as journaling. Further, a troubling tendency in the culture began transforming long-time respectable nouns into verb-forms. Giving a gift became gifting, commiting suicide was now suiciding, and for all I know, selling Girl Scout cookies transmogrified into cookieing.

The innocuous journal listing people met on a particular day, the memory a good meal, a description of the garden, or a musing on the seasons vanished. In its place was a gnarly description of internal weathers, and this was labeled journaling. In journaling, resentments were listed, self-castigation was analyzed, preferred outcomes were plotted, and recovery mantra's were quoted. At my most charitable, I sometimes wondered if a particular consciousness had become manifest overnight. After all memory is the only novel everyone writes, largely composed from those emotional recollections of the heart. Perhaps, in an odd evolutionary leap, a literary mind-set had spread to everyone.

As I said in my first post, I was given a fat little daily diary at a young age. Once I quit thinking this was a pre-adolescent drudgery foisted upon me, I finished it and began my next one, and the one after that, and the one after that, and the one after that. I scribbled in in my diaries for a hodge-podge of reasons, the largest one being loneliness. When I lived at home, no adults were particularly interested in talking to me or discovering in what I thought. I put that down to the times--the '50's--when children were viewed in the same fashion as plants. Parents examined you periodically to make sure you looked like the other plants, didn't show any rot on your roots, or exhibit a rebellious tendency to hang out with bad weeds. It was never thought that a kid might have a singular point of view...that most interesting human trait.

But I kept writing everything down in a variety of books...copybooks, accounting books, school theme books...and then I would set them aside, rarely going back to re-read them. Later I enrolled in art school, then became a painting graduate, and finally a professional artist. During this time I kept sketchbooks--always the same type--a black hardbound book. After drawing and sketching in the front of it, I would turn it upside down and write in the back. When the drawings and the writing met in the book's middle, like two opposing armies, I'd put it aside and buy another.

Would it amaze you that I have no idea what I wrote about? I simply wrote. At an early age, I had the good luck to marry a man who rarely talked to me and who, in truth, bored me silly. His indifference and my boredom threw me back on myself. Perhaps I was writing things I wanted to say to someone, perhaps, once again, I was bitterly lonely. I don't know. But in that way, I met that cosmic and patient ear all writers first whisper into.

I became aware I could not help writing. Writing things down was an atmosphere I moved in easily--a bug in the air. It still did not occur to me that I was a writer. I just wrote, and from long habit, I wrote secretly, sensing how much I loved just the act of forming words on paper, the feel of the paper, the whisk of my pen across it. I suppose I had a mild case of graphomania, a condition that impells the practitioner to write down everything, even the most mundane events: Tonight I fried chicken for supper, but ran out of bacon grease and had to go next door etc..... In far-gone cases, such people cover the walls of their houses with moment-moment accountings.

But I quit writing in my journals once I became a professional writer. As a painter friend of mine remarked, doing private art is very different from public art. I know what he means: other forces are in play. Suddenly my journal-keeping seemed embarassingly self-indulgent...internal squawkings that went nowhere. But then, going somewhere is not the point of a journal, and it is very much the point of a short story, a novel, or even an advertisement. Professional writing is aimed like a gun at real people. It is no longer scribbled just for the invisible ear of God although, as I write, in the deepest part of me, I believe He listens.