Sometimes I detest the way I’ve crafted this journal into a thing of one dimension. I want to broaden its perspectives. I abandoned the unlined format idea because I couldn’t throw over 3½ years of continuity. I’ve been flirting with the idea of two or more books on the go at once, one for this level-headed sober write of old, the other for a far freer and less inhibited style of expression. What is this endless narrative? Too often it’s clouded by the miseries of fatigue, boredom, lack of inspiration, etc. The very idea of what this journal is is strangling me.
The irony! Defeated by a tradition I’ve created for myself.
I’m striving to achieve some kind of purpose, but even now, as the words form coldly at the tip of my pen, I don’t grasp their depth fully; I can only do this at those times when I’m inspired, and those times come so rarely nowadays. Perhaps I’m thinking too hard. This ritual of writing, writing, writing should be aiding me in my search, but there’s too much mundane particularity. What I’m trying to say in so many words is that the structure of the thing is stagnating the content; it’s too inflexible and chained to the prose logic of chronological description. I can feel the certainty of what I know I’m saying slipping away from me even now.
Example: what happened at Colin Pasmore’s tutorial is immaterial—an idea attracted me for a while, I found something momentarily fascinating, something provoked by Pasmore’s comments and I flirted with the fantasy of constructing prose theories on this foundation of an idea—stories and poems, looping reoccurrences and echoing torrents of adjectiveless prose of everyday life . . . The opening paragraphs of A Farewell To Arms illustrate this perfectly. It took the glib environment of tutorial ‘discussion’ to bring me to the above.
This narrative seems to either be a limited chronologue of life’s moments (lists of names and places and events), or an inward exploratory delve divorced from external context. Can I resolve the two in one form?
How?
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