Collaging Entries from the Past Two Weeks

Exactly that: cutting, pasting, layering, and reorganizing sentences and paragraphs of recent journal entries. Self-indulgent? Perhaps. I wanted to know how it felt to collage reflections, not images.

I do believe, and I could be wrong, that it is the kind of longing that excites because it does not sabotage. 

—

I avoid the word, but you used it. The word which this feeling cowers from, the word that embodies but refuses multiplicity. The word that is locked behind a gate that one must open but is forever unsure if the keys in their pocket will match. The word that scares one away from lifting the key out of their pocket to at least get an answer. The word I cower to possess, to claim. The word I wonder and worry about every second of every day, the word that barks at me like a puppy at the cheese section of the grocery store, in my car on the 405 while exiting Sunset and Church Lane, over the public bathroom sink while water drips down my forearms into my silk blouse, on a 15-year-old blanket in the park with the 13-year-old girl I babysit who is asking me about catcalling and if there is really any such thing as “truth,” in the cold metal chair in the classroom in the company of at least two people who I’m too afraid to say changed my life. The word, in its continuous streams, announces extreme finality, definition. It is a word whose job is to translate. It is a word of conclusion.

—

I exist always, I think, in extremity. Perhaps all my experiences are dominated by anticipatory mourning. Every moment doesn’t just hold the possibility of loss but the inevitability of it, preventing any vision, recognition, connection or intimacy to even be realized or considered.

—

I’m so hung up on that. I’m brooding, I realize, with my eyes half-closed as if personally offended by the gray blanket that swaddles the familiar blue I know. The pellets of water – darts, magnetic ones, ones that don’t threaten but annoy; adhere; puny ones that only imitate a threat. Is my mood today a result of this weather? I do not know. What are you doing today? Where are you?

—

What impressed Prof. G was how the scholar “never used an abstraction without an example.” 

—

You asked us to think about what we see. These leaves, when I focus on the sky, the leaves and their branches subside into vague, blurry shapes, wedges of black and brown persisting to be the center of my vision that pursues beyond them. I allow them to struggle, my focus fixed on the distant enveloping vortex that sweeps up all the rubs against it, plastering all it has gleaned onto its surface. The leaves look like that thing from My Neighbor Totoro. Is that what you meant?

—

And what might be the benefit of targeted observation – observation concerned not with conclusion, or knowledge, but with familiarity of the physical and exterior? Looking but not listening, watching but not assuming nor anticipating?

—

Her lips are clenched over her teeth with such pronounced precision, it seems almost exaggerated, as if in a constant attempt to hold the teeth within the barrier of her mouth, creating creases on her upper lip with gaps between the lines like the spaces between her fingers; or even more specifically, like the space between the knotted knuckles of her fingers. Everything about her – aside from her hair – curls. Everything is in the process of curling over, protecting, almost cowering. Not quite always in motion, but also not yet settled at a destination. Her being, outwardly, is concerned with comfortable containment. Not to say that she spills over and permeates through her surroundings – one is not concerned about that when looking at her. One is not concerned with anticipation, with the possibility of surprise. No. “Comfortably contained” is how one thinks of her. Her stature, too. The elegance of it is only really understood when you glimpse at the parts that extend out, that protrude. It’s here – her lips and teeth, her hands – that the mystery of that elegance is exposed as mere containment. These cracks like quirks are the signals of her individuality, the signs of identification for those who are her acquaintances. Does she know that? 

She talks out of the side of her mouth sort of like Holly Hunter. The “s” sound isn’t made with a pucker, like you or I do it, but with a vague gesture towards rounding, which gives her a harshness that dominates her passivity, even when she tries to be soft. 

She is a sweet old lady. 

But what have I learned about her? Nothing, absolutely nothing. This is not interesting to me. 

—

I remember the professor asking, “Do I always dream in the dreams of others?” 

—

Transcribe and majorly edit this (make it make actual sense) and put it in that one story you were considering scrapping: 

“It’s not a gesture to release anxiety, it’s not shaky. It even has intention. She decided she would get to the other side of it, peeling layers, warmly welcoming a sense of accomplishment as it grew rawer and rawer. Will her whole thumb whither away and disappear? She would get to the other side of it before dinner would be over, and she would do it with the avoidance of blood.

Raw. Pink. Soft.

Why is it that the thumbs – and toes, sometimes – with this fungible kind of skin, shapeable without pain… Could she separate the nail from the thumb? She did this with directness, with precision, intention, as a doctor announces his moves during surgery. She considered the motivation of each tactic, its possible consequences. She wanted to get through this uninterrupted. She could feel Lainey and Laura’s wants without even looking up at them. How could they ask of her what they refuse of themselves? The emptiness, that vague dark mass inside her that hung from and clung to her ribs like clothes drying on a wire, drove her to resist them at dinner. (this part especially!!!!! Not sure whats going on here… def cleaaaaaaan up). She hoped that resistance would, if she picked and prodded between her ribs at this darkness, at the ambiguous, heavy laundry inside of her, just as she did her thumb, attempting to discern its shape, question its purpose, to know – to know its attachment – to decide if it resembles a pacemaker or a parasite, she hoped that this resistance would give her that kingly faculty of easily being able to ignore.”

—

Scrap that one story you were considering finishing. 

—

Katherine Mansfield’s Letters, June 16th, 1918: “But do not worry. I’ll be better tomorrow. It’s only body, not heart, not head. Those are all I’ve got in tact” (180). 

Susan Sontag’s Journal, 12/31/57: “Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts – like a confidante who is dead, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal, I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person, I create myself.” 

—

Reframe the way you approach “nostalgia” in art. Think about what Prof. N. said about “projection of a lost world, as if somehow you can have it again. Projection of a lost world of unavailable and fantastical.” The romanticization of the image, act, etc is not the point and shouldn’t be – instead, the romanticization of this relentless forward movement and how in the face of it we offer a projection. 

—

Sometimes I wonder if this is my true voice? It does not necessarily feel as though I’m putting something on for mere diary purposes — a falsely “elegant” anachronism, if lifted from the context of the confines (and the confines of the context) of the diary,  if spoken. If spoken, it’s made to become forever ceasing, as “their existence is no more lasting than that of their sound,” as St. Augustine of Hippo sort of wrote. So, does something that only lasts for almost no time at all have a true voice, sound, delivery at which it is born and in the same moment killed? Certainly, the signs that attempt, so precisely, to reject temporality, break and surpass it – letters themselves – must acquire a true voice upon their birth and possible life. This makes me wonder if I am routinely in the blind habit of translating myself. I do not know the answer to that. But I do know, ever since I started journaling last month, about the time when it became not a task to complete, not an act of restraint, not a narrative nor report – when I stopped writing with the goal of being understood – when it became that, I felt I had come into contact with myself in a new way, without reserve. So if I go back and I don’t understand what I was writing, that’s okay. That’s the point. Narrating wouldn’t have served me then. Would it even serve me in the future, looking back? It could satisfy, but only in a false way. Only in a way that is close to lying.