At home, 8:05 a.m. — As I saw a car drive past me and my dog on our morning walk, I thought that the method and rate of one’s travel shapes or reveals one’s goal or purpose. The car’s driver is getting quickly to a certain place, while my dog and I were walking for the sake of walking.
Idea: In interpreting a text, we assume that if the text has been published (unlike a journal or a private correspondence), what’s there was meant to be there. And that assumption may be worth questioning.
Three neighbor kids came over to our house as my wife and I sat on our front lawn last night. They asked if we’d bring our cat outside, and after we set the cat down, five-year-old Dustin commanded, “Kitty, play!”
Our dog was out front of the house, too, attached to his cable as I did lawn work. He was lying, sphinx-style, and panting, and looking at nothing in particular. I told him he looked like he was just groovin’ on the evening.
How good I thought my Grinch and Frosty the Snowman posts were until I reread them last January for possible use in my English 2 classes. The posts weren’t terrible, but were too complex for my sophomore students to appreciate, and overall not as funny as I remember.
I don’t want my blog to turn political. I don’t want to drive away readers who disagree with my positions, and also politics tends to be either relentlessly of the moment — meaningless — or it’s based in values that are inarguable.
An author can’t wake up people who aren’t interested in waking up, who aren’t seeking or who aren’t at least open to new ideas. I don’t want to praise complete openness — I’m not interested in trying anything, any drug, any experience, just for the sake of experience. There is value in the orientation I have to the world, which is based on all my years of experience and reacting to, thinking about, that experience. Maybe if I took peyote or did a sweat lodge session, I would have an experience that would change — broaden, in a good way — my perspective. On the other hand, not all experience is good. Some experiences are things I’ve wanted to retreat from, and these haven’t taught me much except that there are things I don’t want to experience. Other times, I’ve had experiences that I just couldn’t make sense of, and so I couldn’t assimilate them into my worldview. Some people have really bad experiences, like PTSD, that sorta break them, at least for a while, or send their lives in new directions, which aren’t always bad, but can be. Anyway, I’m not sure having an idea that certain experiences can break a person helps me to live a calm, fear-free life.
I could edit down my journals into single-idea paragraphs, but that seems safe. What’s interesting, what’s the challenge now, is expanding my ideas of what’s permissible, what new forms can be found, or familiar forms exploded. In other words, not editing a text down to a single topic or story seems to go against what I’ve learned, what I’ve internalized, about editing for publication, what’s best or acceptable to publish. And I want to be willing to challenge my own beliefs about what a piece intended for others needs to be.
How much can I push readers, how difficult can I make texts for them? No, actually, that’s not the question, since, as I said not long ago, I’m not writing for others. I could just post what I like. It’s easy for readers to say no to reading my stuff. I don’t want to do the performance, where I publish only a few perfected (whatever that would mean) things — I’m choosing to look messy, to post things that aren’t perfect, because process matters more than product. But with what I was doing with that post last night, editing my journal, I’m not even sure what the product is, and I’m telling myself that it’s OK to accept the uncertainty. Don’t close off this attempt. Go through with it, even if it isn’t, if you’re not sure that it’s, good.
Sure, it might be self-indulgent to post material from a day’s journal — exactly none of it was written for an audience. Yet I persist in thinking that there’s value there. In one sense, this might be a frontier — I mean, I’m not sure there’s value here, but I don’t want to go back to the known forms of nonfiction writing. That would feel like a retreat from exploring, and it would feel unsatisfying. It’d be easy to maintain the distinction between writing-for-oneself (private writing like journals) and writing-for-others (public writing like an essay). The private writing I do because I like to write, and it doesn’t matter much what I say. I can babble joyfully like a baby; I don’t have to try to seem special. Writing for the public, though, that’s a performance, and I feel like I gotta have a topic and a reason for why my topic matters to readers.
I don’t write about my experiences in a novelistic, scene-setting, moment-by-moment way because I don’t want to make certain moments of my day or of my life stand out.
3:30 p.m. — As I edit this (Monday’s) journal, I’m thinking that there may not be a reason for anybody to read this. I mean, there’s no introductory/enticing reason. But also, is there even a reward to reading it? Or is the reward just the chance to be amused and/or challenged by my mind’s words, by an aspect of my mental presence?
What is it that makes people want to read? Or, rather, what is it that we get out of reading? I like getting new ideas. I sometimes like to be merely distracted/minimally entertained, as when I read before bedtime. Sometimes I want to see others agree with me (as when I read political commentary).
I wrote an email to my friend Doug an hour ago in which I said I want there to be a way for the writing I most-love doing to also be interesting to others (at least to some others), worth their time to read. There are certain writers whose every work I’d want to read — I, for a while, would read anything David Foster Wallace wrote (well, his nonfiction). But the writing that I do that seems most-valuable to me, why wouldn’t that also be valuable to others? (In other words, I don’t want to have to write stuff I don’t feel eager to write just for the purpose of being read).
MonkeyMoonMachine 