I write a lot; I never feel the well has run dry. Occasionally I pretend it has, just to give myself an excuse, but there is always something to write about. I’ve recently started journalling again in purposeful way, and it’s made me think about what draws me to the keyboard and the pen so frequently. The frequency is not slowed by how frustrating and daunting writing can be; this used to be the case, but as I’ve got older I feel I need writing more.
Why journal at all? For me, journalling is the practice of looking at oneself and entering into dialogue with oneself. There is much talk of the benefits of being a ‘reflective’ person, but let us not lose the metaphor in-amongst the cliché. Writing provides a mirror in which to study oneself. A correction: writing allows one to study the selves that comprise one’s daily life. These selves fade in and out of the foreground — to put it in Goffmanesque dramaturgical terms, on and off the stage — some dominant, some passive. Studying these selves via writing is a purposeful practice; for me, a practice is purposeful when it is usefully uncomfortable. Discomfort is part of getting better, but discomfort on its own is just horrid. Discomfort is only useful when it’s acknowledged, meditated upon, weighed up. It’s like running. I have recently started running again, having grown very frustrated with it. I realised that I had started to loathe running — even though I actually like it — because I had no purpose. I was going out and feeling pointlessly uncomfortable. I’ve now started a series of guided runs; each run has a purpose. Sometimes, the purpose is enjoyment. Sometimes it’s endurance, or recovery. There is a reason to run. Now, when I run, I’m thinking about how and why I’m running — I’m not trying to avoid thinking about the run, but I’m thinking about why I’m running, which makes me think about how I’m running. Journalling, for me, is very similar. It helps me turn inward. Like with running, I have to be honest. If it hurts or aches, I must feel it and react. It’s like Seneca wrote about his evening journalling:
“I make use of this opportunity, daily pleading my case at my own court. When the light has been taken away and my wife has fallen silent, aware as she is of my habit, I examine my entire day, going through what I have done and said. I conceal nothing from myself, I pass nothing by. I have nothing to fear from my errors when I can say: ‘See that you do not do this anymore. For the moment, I excuse you.’”
However, the majority of my writing is not private journalling — it’s written in public, published on my blog, just like this piece. Why go public? This is still the writing of the inner life, but now it is turned outward. This writing exists in my mind, but it will also exist in the minds of others. For some writers, public writing gives them immortality — there is a common thread throughout Renaissance literature of poesy giving the writer the power to live on via their works. For some — such as the Romantics — the writer was a genius, a visionary. Genius must needs be shared, so it can benefit others. Both of these ‘modern’ ideas (I use modern here in the philosophical sense, as characterised by rather bullishly optimistic beliefs about science, rationality and human progress) I, as a cynical postmodernist, find hard to identify with. There’s nothing genius about my life, and I do not wish for immortality. I have a little life that will soon end. The littleness of my life and the inconsequence of my being do not trouble me. They catalyse the now. So, what’s in it for me? For a while — especially at university — it was a case of ‘finding my voice’ — much like the aforementioned Renaissance writers, scribbling quotations into their commonplace books, I learned via imitation. I noticed something floating in the spaces between the words (something subatomic, something quantum; I felt that language could defy laws) and I wanted to feel it for myself. I copied and I copied. My tutor would nod, knowingly, spotting the influences straight away. Later, he told me I was starting to write like myself. I do not know what that means.
I cannot write unselfconsciously; this is often why journalism doesn’t stick. Something is peering over my psychic shoulder. I worry now about style above all else. I worry that my writing reads without verve or poise, that it smokes with the grey of idiocy. I over-write, I ornament. But I know that knowledge of this brings me into a dialogue with my own writing, and therefore into dialogue with myself. Public writing is dialogic, within and without. Taken further to Bakhtinian extremes, all language is dialogic — everything is a conversation. I am made up solely of language; language is my being in the world. We are language, reader, right now: these words are yours and mine.
But, of course, the dialogue I present to you is self-fashioned. Writing, like all discourse and action is performative, which is not the same as deceptive. Writing is a part of the social game in which selves are constructed. Stephen Greenblatt writes about self-fashioning as a peculiarly Renaissance phenomenon: via language, ‘new men’ such as Moore, Marlowe and Cromwell could reinvent themselves in a shifting and turbulent world, a world on the cusp of the modern. But self-fashioning is survival in other senses: many autistic people, for example, self-fashion in order to ‘mask’ their autism to, among other things, avoid stigma and blend in. Writing helps us live in the gaps; it helps us to enter the subatomic space. And, once in those gaps, we widen them. We can create space for ourselves. Shakespeare, according to Emma Smith, has ‘gappiness’ as his defining characteristic, because there is so much ‘missing’ from our knowledge of the playwright and his plays. But this gappiness, she argues, is what makes him such a vital writer, because within the gaps new conversations can happen. Language is dialogic. We get into the gaps and widen them. But we must do so purposefully. The conversation never ends.
Writing has taught me new ways of seeing, knowing and being. Writing is thinking. It is as necessary for my humanity, I feel, as breathing. It must be done purposefully; it cannot be detached from purpose. Even so-called automatic writing has a purpose, or one would not decide to do it. The key is to be aware of the purpose of one’s actions, because doing so helps one have better conversations: with oneself, with others, and with all of time and space.