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.