Journals

For most of my adult life I have kept a journal. In the archives at the University of Wisconsin-Stout I have placed almost 50 years of day and reading/study journals and I have sworn Elizabeth that when I die she must deliver to the archives the latest four to six volumes that I have written over the past several years. The longer I live, of course, the more journals there will be for her to deposit, but I prepare for all contingencies. Even before I became an official scholar, by which of course I mean publishing articles in scholarly journals, I had begun to keep day/reading journals that accompanied me everywhere and into which I recorded my progress through any number of days, books and thoughts. My journals have taken various iterations: news reporters’ stenographic pads, soft covered bright colored notebooks, tiny clothbound lined books. I recall an assortment of large heavy blue accounting volumes that I think I kept in a variety of suitably sized Manbags. I was younger then and I never traveled light. I have in the past dozen (or more) years taken to writing in black moleskin books with pages lined in graph style. I learned this manner when I was in France in the late 1970s. 
            Why do I keep them? What are journals meant to record? Tucked away in several boxes in the archives and inaccessible until 2035 no one will be able to read them. And why should they? In my unreadable handwriting much of them will be indecipherable and besides, I am but a poor wayfaring stranger wandering on academic footpaths; I am not, to be honest, truly worthy of much further study. Few read my books now, so why should they then? Nonetheless, I remain horrified that someone will actually read the preserved journals after I die. Nonetheless, I am horrified that no one will read the preserved journals after I die.
            I suppose writers maintain journals as a means of keeping open the floodgates of the imagination, and into these volumes they put observations and ideas that occur to them as they move through their days. I read once that James Joyce as he walked through the streets of Paris would stop frequently and place notes on pieces of paper (this before the era of post-it notes) that he then shoved into some type of notebook. I think Philip Roth had file cabinets filled with his notebooks from which he drew for the materials of his novels. Other people’s published journals appear regularly in the book reviews. Did their authors know that this would be the ultimate destiny of their work? Is this for what they had hoped when they began in earnest to keep them? 
            Journals have had impact on my reading practices: without a journal near to hand and my pens ever ready to record an interesting quote from the book or an idea from my mind, reading seems a distraction from serious work, like television reading becomes a means to engage in inactivity. Reading must be strenuous and worthy of journal writing. An active reading demands at ready hand the notebook and journal. I do not travel lightly, and I have walked miles retrieving the contemporary journal from a different room than the one in which I am about to transform a careless reading into an active one. I write in the journal.
             But in fact, in the absence of a system to catalogue my entries I don’t have any organized means to find anything in any one journal. Of the journals still in my possession and not in the archives I occasionally read in them. Often, I am surprised by what I have written and recorded; often I am even impressed by the insights I have placed there, but unless these entries have immediate purpose in what I am writing or intend to write immediately, I am certain I would rarely find them again. Sometimes the blog is where I can immortalize a thought, but those postings remain a contingent enterprise: I have to find an idea at the right moment that the soil is ready to seed.
            People write in their journals materials from their personal lives. I do. These entries serve as exorcism, as explanation and sometimes as expletive. These entries serve private, personal motives, but placed in the journal I wonder for whom are they ultimately preserved? Doesn’t this preservation already determine the vocabulary, the style, the intent?  In Russell Banks’s novel, Foregone, legendary documentary film-maker, Leonard Fife, demands absolute darkness as he narrates the lies by which he has constructed his life and enabled the mythology that has developed around him to grow. He is talking to his wife, Emma, who doesn’t really want to hear the truth and begs Fife to stop talking in the darkened room before the camera and let her leave the room, but Fife needs absolution and insists that she sit, Freud-like, where she cannot be seen because were he to see her he would be unable to tell the truth. This comment from my journal: “Fife can only tell the truth in the dark: if he sees anyone’s face, if he answers the documentary maker’s questions, he will lie and maintain the mythology that has built up around him. He says, ‘I can’t see with all the light’”. He demands darkness so that he see! Perhaps, then, one can imagine that writing in the journal is speaking in the darkness but then it would be necessary to destroy the volumes when they are filled; preserved, the journals remain to be read by others and that preservation colors the writing and distorts the truth into something else: into lies.

 

No time

Time moves slowly down here in the tropics. But no, in fact time doesn’t pass slowly down here in the tropics. Rather, down here I experience time as unmoving and almost insensate. It doesn’t weigh upon me, seem as if has stopped, race forward . . .  Down here I become immersed in the quotidian and I do not notice time. In a sense, time is irrelevant. I move to my rhythms . . . no, in the freedom I discover my rhythms or perhaps I invent them here in the tropics. I know that returning to the North and snow and cold all will change, but perhaps I will have changed and also my experience of time. The other night the wind had blown down a power line and for 24 hours we had no electricity. Whereas in Minneapolis/Saint Paul I would have grumbled, down here I really remained totally unconcerned, read while I could and slept when it became dark. Of course the internet wouldn’t function but then, down here there was nothing I needed to use it for. Or even had need to do: I was content for the most part to maintain some isolation and distance. I certainly didn’t want to follow the news—I was content not to know. In the mornings we have coffee on our porch/deck and then walk to and on the beach. E. brings her phone so she can take pictures of things like crabs and me, but I leave my appliances home: I am not concerned with how many steps I have walked. I just want to walk until I decide to stop and when I do so I just hope I am in some near proximity to our chairs. I have not for years worn a watch and so I do things as I want and not when it is time for anything to be done. What doesn’t get done today might still not get done again tomorrow. Showering is occasional, optional and somewhat irrelevant.  In the mornings we sit at the beach for an hour or more enjoying the sounds of the waves crash on the sands. I say an hour or more but in fact, I don’t know the extent of time passed. In those moments at the beach I think of Walt Whitman’s poem, “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking;” the poet’s lines seem to me to echo the cadences of the eternal waves. And from the lonely bird mourning his mate the solitary singer learns that the word he has sought is death and from that moment of recognition all his song arose! The awareness of mortality enriches daily life. I know mortality.
            After out morning outing on the beach we return home to breakfast, such as it may be. Out on the deck we write and read and Elizabeth maintains her lists. I am keeping a Costa Rica journal and posting some of it on the blog which is where you might be reading this piece. We nap, of course, and then pick up our beach things and return to it for another visit. Returning to our Airbnb, we read a bit more, enjoy a cocktail hour and decide what to eat for dinner and where to do it. Half the time we eat out and the other half we eat in: I cook and E. cleans. After dinner we might return to the beach to watch the sunset (the beautiful sun sets slowly and then all at once), and then we return to our books and bed. As far as we can tell there is no night life here which doesn’t disturb us at all.
            The days are thus very ordinary: there is nothing that has to be done and there is nowhere to which we have to go. I recall in the film “Into Great Silence” the image of the monk walking slowly in the cloistered walls of the monastery and I remember wondering why he just didn’t walk faster to get where he is going, but I realized that, in fact, he wasn’t going anywhere and he had therefore, no need to hurry along. When he got where he was going it would be time enough. Down here in Costa Rica I appreciate his unhurried pace: I don’t have anywhere I must be and no reason to move except according to my leisure.      

            The days are indeed ordinary. Vladimir and Estragon despair: they complain nothing happens! That nothing contents me. I discovered in my journal this comment from Marilyn Robinson’s Homecoming: “That most moments were substantially the same did not detract from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.” I do not attend unblinking attention to the ordinary: I immerse myself in it and do not feel the time but
            
      

 

Mourning and . . .

I dreamed again last evening (again and still) about death. Over the past month or so I have experienced several dreams in which someone close to me had died. In last night’s dream my friend was going to a hospital where she planned to die by assisted suicide. Exact circumstances of the illness, etc. remained unclear. In the same dream the wife of another friend had recently died, and I asked how he was managing his grief. He said, “As Thoreau and [another author] had said . . .” and I interrupted him and shouted, “Everyone has the right to mourn.” Not certain what I might have meant by that exclamation. But of course, if everyone has the right to mourn, they also have the right to mourn in their own way. And therefore, my response was totally inappropriate and somewhat rude. I don’t know quite what might have provoked my response, but I was adamant in it. Perhaps it was another measure of my developing self. Later in the dream another friend who earlier in another dream had passed out of existence (at least to me) appeared and then disappeared again. As I said above, over the past month I have had several similar dreams and I have lost not a few close friends.
            I have wondered to what these dreams refer. Death has been on my mind because in the news lately several people with whom I matured have died: Ian Tyson, John Prine, Bill Staines, David Crosby, Scott Alarik (for me a more recent relationship). There have4 been others in the recent and less recent past. Who am I fooling? Both Spinoza and Montaigne argue that a free man thinks least of all of death because he is too busy living. Montaigne says that he hopes death finds him planting his cabbages. I am very fond of cabbage. But alas, I am not so free, and I fret constantly about death. Hypochondriacs are never wrong; they are just early.
            I place great interest in dreams. Freud said that they were the route to the unconscious, and Barbara believed that in the dream aspects of myself are distributed amongst all of the characters who occupy my dream. I have learned to trust both Freud and Barbara, and Barbara’s insight suggests to me why in any dream the only voice I hear is my own. Other people’s mouths move but they aways speak in my voice. I am, indeed, everyone in my dream.
            I am thus intrigued by my death dreams and have come to interpret them thus: Each of the friends who in the dream had died I have held as venerated objects. Marvin might call them ideal objects. Each of them represented traits that I wanted for myself. And so, when they die in the dream, I think it has meant that I no longer need them as ideal objects: I have acquired the traits that they represent and now I no longer need to retain their images as part of myself. I am me. Once those traits were external to me and now they have become me.
            But I do not mourn their deaths. Freud suggests that mourning concerns the recognition of the loss of an object. After some time, the energy that was once directed toward that object is now directed toward another object. In melancholia, Freud’s term for depression, there is no new object at which to direct the energy and so the energy that ha been directed toward that object is drawn into the ego. That energy not finding an object to which it might attach then identifies the ego with the abandoned/lost object: the libido sees loss in the ego, sees only shadows of objects, and then the superego criticizes the ego as if it were an object. The ego has become an emptiness and that emptiness is what we even now we have come to know as depression, or in Freud’s terms, as melancholia. So, returning to that first dream above, to mourn in one’s own way is to discover an object on which energy can be directed. And that is certainly an individual affair and none of my business.   

 

A Clean Well-lighted Place

She wondered why the bars around here were called “cafés.” After all, these establishments were full-serve bars and offered much more than coffee. I (again) recalled (for me and for her) Hemingway’s short story “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.” There, too, the place was referred to as a café, though in fact the bartender served drinks from what was apparently a full bar. Somehow, café connotes something different than bar: I think that for me the former offers respite and latter eschews solitude. In Hemingway’s story an old man sits alone at a table with saucers before him representing the brandies he has drunk and for which he has not yet paid. It is two thirty in the morning and as the old man sits quietly and peacefully alone, the two waiters talk about him. The old man is already a familiar; he is wealthy and deaf and 80 years old and it would seem he comes nightly to the café. But perhaps the old man is not at peace. The older waiter reports that the previous week the old man had tried to commit suicide to get away from the darkness, but his niece had cut him down. When the younger waiter who wanted only to return home to his young wife and bed asks why with all his money the old man tried to kill himself, the older waiter answers that he was in despair. Well, the younger waiter complains, there are other bars where the man can sit through the night, but the older man responds, that this café serves as a refuge. He says, "Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the café. You do not understand. This is a clean and pleasant café. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves." The older waiter recognizes the importance of such a place. Here the old man feels safe: in this clean well-lighted place there will be no music nor the indignity that attends to having to stand at a bar. No, what the old wants is a café with just quiet and light. The older waiter understands the old man’s need for a clean well-lighted place. And that is why the story is placed in a café rather than a bar!
            But the younger waiter is angry that the old man remains seated and refuses to leave and that he even now asks for another brandy and then still another. Exasperated, finally the younger waiter refuses the old man’s request and orders him to leave. But the old man has nobody awaiting him, only the darkness and despair of the world that had led him to attempt suicide. The older waiter, however, recognizes the old man’s need: the clean well-lighted place serves as sanctuary from the emptiness and dark. “What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order.” The older waiter recites mockingly a parody of the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Nada Who art in Nada, Nada be thy name . . . Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada.” The older waiter knows the nothingness of existence and the importance of a clean well-lighted place. He acknowledges, "I am of those who like to stay late at the café," the older waiter said. "With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night." It is not the bottle he desires but the space well-lit and clean. He is loath to leave.
            I have sought the refuge of a clean well-lighted place. I remember once walking about with Steven Schaeffer around 57th Street in NYC stepping in and out of bars until we found the café that was clean and well-lighted. Steven was dying of AIDS. Today it is almost impossible to find a bar that is not filled with loud music blaring out of speakers and displaying at least one single wide-screen television behind the bar overloud and sense-battering. Often there are four or five screens each displaying a different sporting event. Sometimes there are even more hanging throughout the bar. In such places I feel assaulted and can find no peace. 
            Here I have found Café Mar Azul. I do not seek sanctuary because I know the world is too much with me, late and soon. But there I can be alone and no one bothers me. It is quiet and there are no televisions; though on some nights there is music, I do not go there. It is not the old man’s clean well-lighted place, but it is a quiet respite from the world. There, there is a certain cleanness and order. I order another brandy and the waiter brings it with cheer.