journal

I love the journal precisely because of its audacious claim to truth. Words emit truth like radioactivity the minute they take form, but unless the writing is purely cathartic (ie: it takes no published form, or the pages are burned when complete, or the post is deleted rather than published, or perhaps the draft is kept locked in a tin box, stuffed under the bed, hidden deep in the inaccessible depths, or set sail majestically amid the myriad stars of the firmament, where perhaps it remains true to its author… ) writing resonates to the style of its telling, emits the reader’s needs, and what is truth for me is that which I need at the moment I read. When I read your journal aloud, it tells a different story, it’s suddenly all about me.

I don’t know how to respond to the tremulous narrative of ‘truth’ because I don’t know you, I don’t know what part of yourself you think you’ve knitted into the text, I have to ‘make you up’ as I go along, I make a kind of identikit ‘you’ and this is the truth for me, this is how my reading becomes writing. I measure and sample the scenes in your text, taste the narrative for what it can offer me, what texture, what frisson, what jouissance, and it is for the love of this tension that I adore the journal (I said that before somewhere). Because of its precocious obsession with self, the ‘I’, the ‘me’, the ‘my’ (and therefore the truth) and because of this contradiction: it never really knows who it is, and partly, as Barthes has said, because the ego only discourses when it is grieved, the journal is a kind of masochist's journey.

Everything I write here is my journal, but I tend not to borrow the form: today I thought, today I hate, today I love, today I reflect, today I cry (well, actually I do, but it’s deeply stitched). I link to your journal because the writing I find there gives birth to all this, and that for me is what it’s about, that’s the truth for me.