Comments on: Glorious Impersonality

By: Deborah Barlow

Deborah Barlow — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:54:56 +0000

E, great line–making oneself visible the better to hide–which is much like my favorite line from Winnicott about artists in general: “Continually torn between the urgent need to communicate, and the still more urgent need not to be found.”

Maybe Kathryn can see the seeds since the journals she’s researching are about life and people who have long since passed. Knowing Coleridge as well as she does, his son’s writings would be full of insights for her scholar’s eyes. As for the stacks of studio logs I’ve been keeping for years, I think they are primarily for me.

By: Elatia Harris

Elatia Harris — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 02:22:24 +0000

I don’t journal, and never have, but I’ve always wondered — do people who do write in the expectation of no reader or in the hope of a reader? Depends on the one doing the journaling, I know, but to write intending not to be read seems like making oneself visible the better to hide.

I once encouraged a woman not to dispose of her journals — decades and decades of them — as she was preparing to do. “Here, you read them, then,” she said. Oh.

My mother wanted her notebooks never to be read, or so she said. But she never threw them out. There is no mystery, finally, like your mother. Reading what she left would not have cleared anything up.

By: Deborah Barlow

Deborah Barlow — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 01:12:43 +0000

G, I know the elemental plane from which you speak. The sheer survival of our children should be foremost in our minds as this mad world spins out of control. But like Kathryn I have a strong mystical vein in me that pulls me into a detached optimism that informs my creative and expressive life. I dont’ know if those two energies will ever be aligned; it may be that they cannot be, ever. But I keep wanting to hold both, in a kind of perfect paradox.

D, In your usual humble way you have said that it is the “ossification of age” that keeps you writing. Not my experience of what I have read by you–words so well placed and so full of wisdom–but I do acknowledge living far from its inception and what that feels like to you. I’m just glad you are there, sharing a strain of seeds I can’t find anywhere else.

By: joefelso

joefelso — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 23:48:49 +0000

Maybe it’s the seemingly inevitable ossification of age is that’s keeping me writing now, but the creation that happens again and again can also be exhausting. I prefer my protean life to the static (and stagnant) lives of some people I know, but its price is high too. I can’t help longing for a story sometimes, a sense that life isn’t made unpredictably, moment to moment, in words, but follows some sense from somewhere.

By: Writer not Reading

Writer not Reading — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:29:52 +0000

I have thought about this a great deal over the years and feel very ambivalent to this day. I’m not sure it’s so terrible to merely have visited this world. All my life I have felt compelled to be a living memorial to many relatives who were burned to ash in the Holocaust, never getting to nourish the soil and simply polluting the air. And now, after all these years, I am feeling it doesn’t really matter. They are gone. I’ll be gone. The only thing that matters to me is that my children are not prematurely gone in a war. For me, it’s not about journaling, as much as I have compulsively blogged in the last year. It’s not about planting seeds. It’s about remaining alert to imminent destruction of my childrens’ future world and be ready to take action, literally and absolutely whatever it takes, to keep them safe.