Maybe it’s writers who are conscious of writing to an audience who seem to try too hard—but my texts wouldn’t be—but can I really be innocent if I’m consciously publishing the work to others?
Cohering—texts cohering through persona—maybe—or how else could they hang together? Or is “hang together” a useless concept? It feels like there’s something there, perhaps.
Lately I’ve been filling about 14 journals/year. So, if I wrote another 40 years * 14/yr = 560 journals—plus 140 now = 700. Not even a thousand. But that’s a lot.
And Jim Morrison—how I’ve been bothered for years by his quote that he had to burn his journals to become an artist. Maybe that burning was an epiphany for him. And yet, I just thought, I didn’t even start my daily journals ’til I was 30, ’til I was older than he was when he died. So, clearly, we’re different people, different artists—I don’t have to do what he did! It’s freeing for me.
[From journal of Mon. 28 March 2011, Journal 139, page 40]
MonkeyMoonMachine 