Raw! Unfiltered! Journalling!
Id, Take the Wheel
Everything in bold is a direct quote from my recent journal, not necessarily in chronological order.1
David Shields, Reality Hunger: “Literary intensity is inseparable from self-indulgence and self-exposure.”
Leonard Cohen:
“Everybody knows that the dice are loaded,
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
Everybody knows the war is over,
Everybody knows the good guys lost.
Everybody knows the fight was fixed,
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich,
That’s how it goes, everybody knows.”
FRIENDSELF
Black hardcover Hahnemühle sketchbook, A5.2 Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen. Noodler’s Ink, Gruene Cactus. These are my bread and butter. My book is my constant companion. I’ve written in my journal consistently, compulsively, every day for 21 years. To make a record, to pass time, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, I move my hand. I do it out of necessity; if I don’t, my brain gets snarled up. Maybe it’s something like stitching or knitting— the soothing rhythm of repetitive small actions, the way the letters form a fabric, add up to a garment of thought.
Writing is grappling with one’s own nature & that’s terrifying for a damaged person, but a lot of writers are deeply damaged, & the counterweight is this: writing offers both temporary relief from suffering & a method of deep processing.
I started journal-writing in my early twenties. At first I was so scared of marking the page that I wrote in pencil. Theoretically, I told myself, I could erase. I didn’t, though, because my urge to completism was stronger than my reticence.3 I remember, too, how the block of blank pages ahead felt massive: how could I hope to fill it? Opening that first volume now feels like opening a box of hibernating snakes. For your sake, I put my hand down into the snakes and rummage around for a few quotes.
September 2003: “I can’t believe how old I am now. Really old.”
[I was 24.]
“[Charles] Babbage said he would gladly give up the rest of his life if he could come back in 500 years and have a 3-day guided tour of the new age. & the organ-grinders used to hassle him all the time.”
I try to calculate the number of hours I’ve spent writing by hand. Twenty-one years at an average of two hours a day comes out to 15,330 hours; a more conservative estimate of an hour a day gives a figure of 7,665 hours. The Ten Thousand Hours theory that non-artists love to quote4 would suggest I’m approaching mastery; but specifically, what I’m a master of is filling a page with script, the steady pouring of thought onto the page.
Annie Dillard: “Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.
The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write.”
When I hear other people’s poems it’s good for me. It’s the traps and pitfalls, all the ways in which it can go amiss, clichéd language, obviousness; to make something truly original, simple, & specific is the work of a lifetime. It’s good for me to remember that not everyone can do what I can do, not at all… I know what good writing is— specific, idiosyncratic.
DOWN THE INTERNET MINES
When I say I write on Substack, people ask, Is that, like, a blog?
And I’m like, More or less.
Blogging is an antique word, though, a word from a simpler, less ideologically munted time, a time when we felt safe to spill to the Internet, as if it were a confidante, a friend to talk to on the phone for hours. Now it feels more like being on the open savannah at night, strange rustling, feral stink, eyes glinting in the darkness.
Writing on Substack sometimes reminds me of how it felt when I started journalling: the momentous weight of the act of putting words on a page. I came here a year ago with a pure heart, intending to use this platform as a tool, a conduit, then I got sucked into Notes, which didn’t exist when I joined. Lately I’ve found myself compulsively thinking thoughts like THIS IS PERMANENT and DO YOU REALLY WANT TO SAY THAT and BUT ANYONE CAN READ IT and SHOULDN’T I BE WRITING A BOOK? but conversely WOULDN’T IT BE A BETTER IDEA TO RUN DEEP INTO THE BUSH AND CRAWL INTO A HOLLOW LOG FOREVER?
Also, lately, as I’ve been getting more subscribers who are strangers to me, I’ve had the strong urge to self-censor or to try to guess the things people want to hear.5 I’m used to toiling in obscurity, so these are novel problems for me. Is it wise to be real in public? Is it possible to stay clean inside the machine?
I dreamed I was in Antarctica, standing on the snow, getting dressed, boots last, I am bare-footed, where are my socks and boots?
I intend, always, to address meaningful things on my Substack. I want to say what’s real, I want to tell the truth. What am I undertaking here but an attempt to strip away artifice and shame? The problem is that the sentries of the mind are not under my conscious control. I often revert to descriptivism, which can be a kind of hiding. It’s the equivalent of a drawing: there’s plausible deniability— it’s just a picture of a thing. (Yeah, there IS a part of me that wanders in presence, Zenfully… That’s because I have to try to keep life chill to survive the rolling boil of my traumatised brain-architecture, my skinlessness.) At worst, fear shuts the whole factory down.
Stephen Nachmanovitch says that procrastination is the same mechanism as addiction— the other side of the coin of disordered self-regulation. Addiction is a compulsive ‘Yes, yes, yes’ and procrastination is a compulsive ‘No, no, no’; either way one is enslaved by the mechanism. I mention this because of my wasted day. Discipline, says Nachmanovitch, is not the answer: the worst possible outcome, according to him, is getting in a showdown with yourself. ‘Do it.’ ‘No.’ ‘DO IT.’ ‘NO.’
I should remember that I’m unwell6 & not be too hard on myself, but a full day of procrastination is agonising. It does the same thing to time as insomnia does: stretches the hours out unbearably.
Anyway, after a long spell of emotional-creative constipation— I mean way worse than the usual fallow days that come between the publication of one essay and the arising of the next idea— I took up my book and pen, desperate to unblock the pipes. It worked: writing by hand unlocked my tongue and my mind, and I spilled ink onto the page in a frenzy, for two days straight. It felt good to purge, to rant, not to weigh my words.
I-LAND
A defining characteristic of the modern moment: it is not possible to opt out or escape. To be isolated is to go mad, or at least to suffer mentally… Good things can be traps. A cheap house, a break from the relentless grind of flatmates. So many of us alone… It’s not healthy for human beings.
Being alone does melt your brain, that’s for sure. Human contact keeps us in the human realm.
What seemed like freedom— what I could spin as freedom while my robust constitution betrayed me only in manageable ways (really, though? Manageable only by extreme internal contortions)— What seemed like freedom now looks bare, empty, & terrifying. The vivifying, magic force, the animating principle—
But magic is flowing, actually, despite that I’m down in the pit.
Winter Solstice morning. The late-rising sun casts a bar of light onto the beach stones, and I think that if there were a way to permanently mark something as shifting as shingle, that could be our local henge. You’d have to dig down to bedrock and plant a pole. I suppose, these days, one could mark the exact spot with GPS, a digitally precise location that could be re-marked with something impermanent like driftwood, just to see the sun turn and begin its slow swing Westward.
On the pavement at my feet, someone has marked, with spraypaint and stencil, the words ISRAEL IS COMMITTING GENOCIDE. Then FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA. I step over them, thinking about the permanence of spraypaint: how long it will take for feet to wear these words away. Yesterday two people sprayed Stonehenge with orange ‘powder paint’ in order— somehow, by what logic I don’t understand— to Just Stop Oil. In the video, a bystander runs in and wrestles the nozzle away from the stones, so that it sprays an orange cloud into the air. The person intervening is slight, female: the ‘activist’ she grapples with, who wears a t-shirt with a stylised skull on the back, has white hair, and looks to be a man. People are yelling No, Don’t!
I know this feeling, the feeling of breaking invisible cultural prohibitions. I remember being inside a bank, protesting. TPPA? Weapons expo? Anyway, I was inside a large group of people in the lobby, chanting, moving in unpredictable ways: breaking the rules of behaviour that govern customer conduct in a bank. I felt them then, the rules— I physically felt them, like a dense spiderweb, like an electric fence. If one never strayed from the prescribed path, one might never have cause to feel the bodily sensations of disobedience. I think of the book that made the greatest impression on me as a tiny child. Little Red Riding Hood, it was, and it had a double-page, wordless spread of the wolf in profile, filling the page, half-hidden behind dark tree-trunks. It terrified me, haunted my dreams. The consequence of straying off the path.
I am both obedient and disobedient. I find it hard to know what is right because I was raised under an authoritarian regime. Disobedience can feel reactive— over-reactive. Obedience can feel like submission against my will. Under such conditions, either choice feels unfree.
I check my privilege regularly. I am in a position of freedom compared to a great many people. I am free of ties— childless, solitary, a time-millionaire; and yet, I feel the force of control. The policeman is inside my own head; also, the modern world is a Panopticon, the walls have eyes and ears, the penalties for disobedience are severe.
I’m really chafing, everything feels too tight, too small.
I’ve been apart from the world
The world’s been apart from the world
Mass cognitive breakdown
Chaucer via Jane Shilling (The Wife of Bath / The Stranger in the Mirror):
“But age, allas! That al wol envenyme,
Hath me biraft my beautee & my pith;
Let go, fare-wel, the devel go therwith!
The floor is goon, there is no-more to telle,
The bren, as I best can, now moste I selle.”
[Envenom, bereft, flour, bran]
Perimenopause is [like] coming to the edge of the map. Shame, more shame, unearned shame, am I destined always to have this rain fall on me, new colours of shame for every phase of womanhood from cradle to grave, new gradations of tone, weapons of shaming, & what is needed as an antidote is not the soft-petal moon circle type of witchery, but the terrifying Goddesses, Kali, Hecate, Hine Nui te Pō, those dark ladies, the rending Kindly Ones.7
They call it a midlife crisis. You die or the fever breaks.
Last night trying to explain to James about middle age, I said You don’t understand, you jumped sideways, & he said that it’s not the same, but he does understand, it happened all at once for him, not gradually. He said “I’m not pretty any more. Heads don’t turn when I walk in a room. I didn’t understand how important that was to me until it stopped happening.”8
Well. Let me begin again. Under the Panopticon’s glare every action is turned inside-out: any opposition can be captured, co-opted. So it is with the defanging of feminism & I think people fall on these interfights with a kind of gratitude, as a fight they can theoretically win, a complex drama to fill up their whole brain, to push the existential demons to the margins. Give me the chance to feel powerful.
There is an animal self clawing its way from the pit it’s been trapped in, spitting dirt, mad as hell, burning for rending revenge.
How to defang the imagination, which of its nature is unruly, anarchic? Give it toys, puzzles to play with, give it puzzles that can’t be solved.
I dreamed of a deserted botanical garden. Walking behind two seated men— curving stonework covered with deep moss. I was worried I’d slip into the pool. The moss was deep, nobody had climbed there. The man sat contemplating the huge still pool, with red & yellow leaves fallen on the shoulders of his t-shirt. I was behind him and tried to frame my photo perfectly symmetrically. The derelict pleasure garden.
People open the door of the café and the cold rushes in like an animal, twines itself around my legs.
Bare-breasted female rider [on a rearing red horse]
Rough sticks, [red flags,] banner with coins
Riding in the dark
(Ekphrasis: I’m describing the Six of Wands from the Spolia Tarot. Reading by
I wish I was one of those people who do and say whatever they want without even thinking about it. Those people exist, right? You see them all over the Internet. Why do I always need to wrap the present up in layers and layers of paper?
Writing by hand like this feels like a lot’s coming out but at the end of a purgative bout it’s a handful of pages, I notice that because I’m in uncharted water I’m striking out words, I don’t usually cross out so much: I’m remaking my sentences as they pour out, at speed, taking out vagueness, trying to boldly say what I mean—
Writing this in Black Coffee and the guy sitting next to me plays videos on his phone, the torrent of shit, American voices, the warping of everything, the pressure everyone’s under & things deform, the nightmare inversion of a bad trip, the [café] music a remix: People are strange when you’re a stranger, faces look ugly when you’re alone.
On the other side of phone-guy, who wears full moko kanohi,9 a boujee Boomer Mum and her teenage son, & she picks up her phone & slowly scans it across the room, the beautiful art— paintings that made me cry— but as soon as she holds it up I’ve turned my face to the window, I don’t want to be caught in her thoughtless net and funneled back into the insatiable mouth of the beast, but of course I hate them because I’m trapped too, this morning I made a Note about how I’m never a fan of sand but the worst sand is the sand that falls into your bed from the pages of a library book held open over your face; even as I wrote it I could see it was very White Woman’s Instagram, & my other one, harmonious hedgehogs… what the fuck am I doing… the way people like what other people have liked, how can you enter the machine and not be co-opted? It’s like Parliament, it’s not possible, everything you do becomes fuel for the relentless churn—
Worse, I feel like a fraud, spinning tales when my heart is a black hole, not safe, but when is ever anything safe? Work is the only salvation, so what when that’s interfered with? When the spring runs dry? I was thinking this morning about the phenomenon whereby anything— essay, book, documentary— has this obligatory BUT or BECAUSE, a counter-clause, no matter how dark, how despairing, like THIS is the thing that can still save us, if everyone would only just (do what I tell them to), tweak the stories in their minds or whatever.. It’s not too late, it’s not too late, when are we allowed to say it was too late two decades ago? Nevertheless it’s shocking to watch the disintegration of the world, the grinding, the destruction of the fragile beautiful ideals, & I can’t say with a straight face that if we just do X or Y we’ll all be saved, because that’s not what I see.
The most-read story on the Guardian today was about a new documentary from the director of Blackfish called The Grab: an exposé about how countries are buying up food and water resources globally, on the sly. It was genuinely terrifying. It’s dark, so dark.
Everyone is struggling, drowning, but nobody is on dry land, & the details of the disintegration are horrifyingly specific, that’s the nightmare quality, like, right, you’re getting world fascism, dead babies, food wars next, how do you like them apples?
The days are long, empty, silent. Terrifyingly empty of other humans, voice, warmth, presence. Just a human to remind a human they’re human.
Maybe what Gaza’s about— as well as the horror of it— is the other kind of horror of being disillusioned (I mean for the onlookers— the rest of the world—) being, I don’t know, I want to say deflowered, losing innocence, & it’s offensive, isn’t it, to centre the experience of the observer over that of the victim, but I think of the trauma of the [‘good’] sibling made to watch violence rather than to suffer it, how that fucks a person up big time.
No other parent intervenes when a bigger kid is bashing in a toddler’s head with a brick, they go, well, the smaller kid pushed the big kid first.
I don’t know, I guess I thought it would take longer. The disintegration, the Hellscape.
That feeling that beauty doesn’t matter any more, that’s control too, that disempowerment.
I think about the difference between high literary non-fiction— the ivory tower Man / Woman of Letters kind10— and poetry (the emotionally naked kind, meant to make you feel). Further: I think about pop music, a love-song form. (Punk or metal, expression of rage.) Is this an age thing, too? Emo-spillage for the young, icy formality for the old. But then I think of those who still spill their hearts. I think of
, whose whole stack is journal-extracts. Poets and pop singers can be from the gutter. They don’t cite sources, they just sing.A grey boat on the horizon, not a ferry, not a fishing boat, as its silhouette leaves the flat sea & moves in front of the headland it disappears against the dark rock monolith. Police, Navy.. A foreboding. These days safety seems illusory, ideas of live and let live childish.
I used to believe I was writing my journal to a future audience. Two hundred years in the future was my mental shorthand. Now I don't believe that. Now I believe we must speak now.
SUBSTACK IS A BABY BIRD WITH AN OPEN BEAK
The thing that’s happening is that Substack’s opening up to me, after a year (& only the determined survive in that ecosystem, only the intrinsically motivated)— I’ve crossed some sort of event horizon of algorithmic visibility & people are liking & commenting— it was a year of graft. There are folks who hit with a bang if what they’re offering is something palatable to the masses, but again that has its pitfalls— addiction to approval, audience capture. More & more I’m realising that the simple, artful telling of a story is the heart of writing— much like how in folksinging, a masterful, deceptively simple rendition is a life’s work.
The thing about Substack— why it’s a safe place to play out this experiment (& all the chattering monkeys11 love to dissect that question) is twofold: firstly, the self-controlled aspect, which is almost custom-made for me— at this point, I’m everything, writer, editor, illustrator. Intertwined with this first reason is the second: Substack’s free-speech affirmation— rare these days. One has to contend with algorithmic fuckery,12 but not with the threat of censorship or shutdown. This above all I admire about the platform.
Most people who write have nowhere near my level of freedom, but conversely, they have networks of support. I’m an acrobat without a net, or that argonaut in the open sea— internally, that is, the sea being the inside of my own self— like Flaubert says, regular and orderly like a bourgeois in order to be wild & original [in one’s work]13—But a bourgeois is a stolid bourgeois because of funds—
The thing is, I can’t afford to be alienated from my instincts. Orwell on Jura, coughing his lungs up. That’s what I mean by no safety net. I’m not like the other white literary ladies.14 I want to do something else.
The Doll’s House guy [
] wrote the other day that when he was homeless himself (secretly) while working with homeless people, he learned that storytelling was very important, was, in fact, clinically recognised as a method of knitting the self back together: that structuring a narrative was a reclamation of the ground of the self.In the face of what’s happening to me— the mundane, boring transformations of midlife, ageing parents etc., as well as the emotional blitzkrieg of living through the disintegration of life as we knew it— I’ve turned to story-telling, to the medicine of placing myself at the centre of my own experience by means of naming it. The medicine of subjectivity. It’s a playing field where cleverness, idiosyncracy, a big mouth— all the things that people don’t much appreciate in the outside world— are magically transformed into assets. The price of entry is bravery: the ongoing toll is a tribute of labour. There’s a dynamism, a magic exchange rate at play. There are rules, sometimes non-intuitive.
A few years back I read David Shields’ Reality Hunger; A Manifesto,15 and my mind opened like a flower. It was the right book at the right time. Basically, Shields argues that he finds fiction boring: pure fiction, in his opinion, is done. He reckons that people just saying what they mean is always the most interesting and real writing to read. Also, the boundary between fiction and non-fiction is not as clear-cut as people think. (Reality Hunger is a collage of quotes, his own and other people’s— sometimes modified— collaged together without attribution.)
Shields: “I’m really interested in searing, soaring work that constructs a bridge across the existential abyss between author and reader. Without exception, such works are those that risk everything on a personal level.”
And: “What I want is to gain access to how you think. That will assuage my loneliness. I want work that foregrounds that to an extraordinary degree.”
This is what I want to talk about, the real, how I really feel. It’s the lying that I hate.
Around the same time I also read Derek Jarman’s journals, in the Penguin edition: Modern Nature.16 Jarman is entirely fearless, free of shame. He writes with fire and absolute honesty about the realities of his life, dying of AIDS, and about the beauty of his garden. It seemed to me, reading in awe, that it was BECAUSE he was dying that he wrote that way, but also that the Jarman of the late journals was a kind of distillation or purification of his essential nature: anything superfluous had been burnt away. Another interesting thing: it was clear that, to him, his films and paintings were his life’s work— but to me, this journal was the best, truest thing he made.
Pretend I’m dead. Would you come to my funeral? What story would you tell?
Both of these books made me feel that journalling is an exciting, lively form. Maybe I don’t always have to be funny or inspiring or nice; maybe it’s more important to keep it real. The older I get, the more I think that— as artists— we can’t choose our skeleton. What you’re into, the core of your subject matter, is built-in, and for me, that’s personal record-keeping. Keeping a record is what I’ve always done; the deeply personal is the bones of my art. I can fight that, be embarrassed about it, try to make it palatable; or I can lean into it, tell the truth, show the raw bones. The word has a will, a mind of its own.
Rebecca Solnit: “Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.”
Whatever inspires.
I read back over my work, my year’s work, & I don’t hate it.
I recently read Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries and I was genuinely like, Well, fuck, that’s a genius idea.
Though never without the understanding that committing words to paper means that they can / will be read by others. This may read as paranoid, but it’s just a property of the medium.
Malcolm Gladwell came up with this theory in his book Outliers. People picked up the idea and ran with it, dumbing it down to the idea that anyone could do anything if they just practiced enough, and Gladwell had to be like ‘That’s not actually what I said.’
This phenomenon is called audience capture, and I don’t see that there’s a way around it. Fame, fame, fatal fame, it can play hideous tricks on the brain…
I had a cold
A follow-up yarn. It’s not that simple, as we know. James: "It’s complicated. Being subject to the gazes of others felt like a hazard, a burden, and a curse. So to lose that is both a loss and a gain.”
Traditional facial tattoo
A school of writing heavily influenced by academic scholarship, its practitioners often Professors
Including me, here
For instance, the Substack algorithm is inexplicably convinced that I am a Chr1st1@n. I’m not, I’m a fucking Wizard, man
Gustave Flaubert: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.“
Sarcasm
Last year I tried my hand at manifesto-writing, in a very small way— Free Shit: A Rubbish Manifesto— and the nakedness and precision of that language-form (as opposed to my usual sprawling and meandering) was exacting and ultimately exhilarating. I liked how it felt, up there in the clear air of saying what you mean.
Here’s Olivia Laing talking about her love of Jarman’s journals: Olivia Laing: 'There's no book I love more than Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature'
Once again a feeling of being plunged into an ocean of words. The Wizard is out there documenting relatable experiences and the quantum clockwork goes bleep and squelch in a satisfying way. Crunchy. I had a mental response to almost every sentence, even though a lot of it simply amounted to vigorous nodding.
SubStack looks like ordered LiveJournal. At some point the transition to Farcebook happened and the hardcore writers were bound to go somewhere.
I so agree with you on the effect of losing innocence via Gaza! It has definitely made those “but” and “because” and “and yet” upticks in all the essays feel so hollow — my own included!