The Blog & the Journal - Writing About You -. Cecilia Jr. Tanner
I merely missed it like an old friend…I treated, and shall continue treating, my diary like an intimate friend who mustn’t know everything. If a man has no constant lover who shares his soul as well as his body he must have a diary–a poor substitute, but better than nothing .”
Reading the Cosmic Waves
There are days when I have captured the essence of an idea, and put the brilliant thought into a journal entry. Later I find that a dozen other people have written exactly the same thing tens or hundreds of years ago, but it still makes me feel good to think I came up with the idea myself.
These ‘cosmic’ thoughts or synchronicity of ideas touch on the mystery of the whole thinking and knowing process and is discussed in the chapter on Imagination. The discussion of these and other subjects is not an attempt at pop psychology (or academic psychology) but is derived from the observations of a journal writer trained to look at the interconnectedness between who we are to what we do, to who we are compared to who we live and associate with, and who we are in the larger natural environment.
Belonging – Your Position in the World
Years ago, I asked one of my neighbours, who was a reformed alcoholic, if he had trouble not drinking. “Never,” said Norm, the horse trainer, “There’s so much to do all the time. I just get high on life.”
And that’s what journal writing can be all about, getting high on life and your position in it. Often when I have a new class of freshmen (freshpeople?) in September who are feeling very alien to the campus and city, (most of the students come from out of town), I try to help them relax by telling them that the people who belong at the University are the people who pay their tuition and want to be there.
“There are lots of beautiful people who laugh in groups and seem to know everyone, and know how to work the system and just seem to belong. But they don’t belong anymore than you do. You are just as important as the suave-looking socialites. If the truth were known, probably half of those people are repeating courses they have failed.”
I tell them I don’t want to see anyone hiding behind their trench coat. I want the students to contribute to the class like the important people that they are.
“No one can contribute what you can contribute because no one will see what you see with your unique upbringing, your genetic inheritance, and your life experience.”
When they realize that I am not going to single them out for ridicule, they relax. So much self-consciousness disappears and they start to learn, and many even enjoy the learning process.
And everyone can do that in their lives not just their school life. You can be proud of who you are when you realize you belong, with all the rights necessary to live in this world, and you have every right to develop your life so that you are proud to be alive. You are in this life, and you do belong.
History of the Journal
The journal has an ancient history, and it has resurfaced in many forms over the centuries up to the current Blog popularity. Some people date the journal writer to the English school girl in her tunic and grey socks confiding her special private thoughts in a locked book. But the Japanese have at least a thousand year national history of diary writing. Diaries of Sei Shonagon, a lady-in-waiting at the Japanese Imperial Court, have survived since the 10th Century and present a fascinating window on the life and times of a long gone society when women had a much stronger position in Japanese society than they have had in more recent history. Another diary of one of Japan’s greatest prose writers, Murasaki Shikibu, has also survived from the late 10th and early 11th Centuries in which she criticizes the shameless promiscuity revealed in Sei Shonagon’s diary.
The Japanese soldier was for many generations issued a diary that he was directed to keep, while the western forces, on the other hand, were forbidden to keep journals. Professor Donald Keene had the job of reading many of the Japanese journal books of captured soldiers during the Second War looking for intelligence-relevant material. He found the content to be largely boring trivia.
Sony Corporation traditionally gave their clients beautiful, tasseled, plain-lined pocket journals at the holiday season. One of my first travel journals was written in a Sony journal.
And the ancient pharaohs in the Egyptian dynasties kept journals that are still being deciphered. We join the flow.
Journals and Diaries
Barnet & Stubbs draw a distinction between a journal and a diary:
“A diary mentions things that have happened. (Concert at 8 with J. and R.’) A journal reflects on the happenings. A diary lists appointments: a journal records events, but gives some sense of why they were meaningful.”
This sounds like a useful differentiation but in practice the two terms, diary and journal, seem to be interchangeable. Charles Darwin called his volumes diaries, and the publication of the volumes written by the ultra-sophisticated Andy Warhol, as well as the former New York Governor, Mario Cuomo’s and former New York Mayor, Ed Koch’s, have all been called diaries. Leonardo da Vinci’s journals are called Notebooks.
Whatever you called the writing, all sources agree that you must feel free in the writing of them.
Brenda Ueland in If You Want to Write says it so well:
“You must disentangle all oughts, You must disconnect all shackles, weights, obligations, all duties. You can write as badly as you want to…Just so that you write it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are… You can never be smarter than you are. You try to be and everybody sees through it like glass, and on top of that knows you are lying and putting on airs…It will not be alive but dead.”
Franz Kafka, the Czechoslovakian novelist, occasionally wrote from the last page backward as well as the first page forward so that the entries met in the middle.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American essayist and journal writer, did the same thing in a number of his journals.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote his Notebooks in a mirror image script (reverse backwards). I have never seen any explanation for this except it may have kept people who did not own a mirror from reading his notes and lifting his inventions.
Daily Entries?
Edward Robb Ellis who wrote a column in the magazine Diarist’s Journal suggests that the writer write every day in the same place, at the same time–morning or afternoon or evening or night.
Barnet & Stubbs in their text, Practical Guide to Writing, suggest that the writer write any time, ten to fifteen minutes a day. Though they recognize that some people find it helpful to establish a regular time, we do not all live such well-regulated lives.
They further suggest that the entry be as long or as short as a few words and that the writer should write free from concerns for vocabulary, spelling, etc.
The joy of the discipline
When I started writing a journal, I had read that if I exercised the left side of my body–the wrong hand, arm, foot, etc.–this would stimulate the right (creative, intuitive) side of my brain. So I started to beat the eggs with the eggbeater in my left hand, and when I dried my hair with the blow-dryer I turned the brush with my left hand.
The next step was to try writing with my left hand This skill, I reasoned with my reasonable left mind, could come in handy if I ever hurt my hand or arm.
For many years I recorded my “Left-handed Thoughts”, and I came to like the appearance of my left