“… just a means of arriving at a statement”

I’ve been having a reflective few days, thinking about some small but significant shifts in my life and wondering what these mean for journalling. You don’t have to be a close attender to notice that this journal has a strongly ruminative function, as far as the past goes, and a strongly speculative function concerning the future, at the same time as being an exercise in controlling my response to both those temporal abstractions. The fact I live a small-town equivalent of the life of the mind makes shaping what goes on in my head into (semi-)coherent narrative not too difficult a task, and the fact I don’t get out as much as some of my esteemed readers means that there are few ethical worries about whether in writing I’m engaging in post-kiss telling.

Well, very little of that has changed in these few silent days, which will perhaps disappoint any of you who thought the preceding paragraph was a run-up to some sort of lascivious revelation. But what has happened (not unrelatedly) is that I have been feeling that the ratio of things I decide not to write about in relation to the ratio of things I do has shifted.

I won’t deny that this journal has a project-type function in terms of helping me manage my depression, although that was not the purpose in starting it, nor is it really the purpose in writing it. It’s undeniable, however, that converting the few peaks and troughs of my quiet life into best prosaic practice has the effect of containing difficult emotions–and when you’re a depressive, it’s the emotions that are the problem, not the circumstances by which they arise. I still hold tight to a view of writing as craft rather than writing as [shudder] therapy, but one could also argue that there is a therapeutic outcome of exercising that craft.

As this journal’s archives become more full, the need to return imaginatively to various events in my life becomes less. Which, given that I sometimes feel my childhood consisted of a series of tiny but excruciating primal scenes, is no bad thing. Robin Hyde in Nor the Years Condemn wrote a character named Macnamara who was obsessed with Stewart Island and the ambergris to be found offshore, with ambergris and its quality of fixing perfume acting as a metaphor for the ways in which writing fixes, and thus resolves, experience, superseding the fixing of experience in memory. I’m more than pleased no longer to ruminate on the way the rural Christian fundamentalism embedded in my extended family had the habit of slapping the young me upside the head each family holiday, for example.

It’s not surprising, I guess, that, by writing about it, I strip memory of its power to make me miserable, controlling the extent to which my imagination works ruminatively and speculatively. But it’s also not surprising that, if we assume that my inner life is less restive by this process, the need to continue to work that way on what’s happening around me in the day-to-day similarly lessens.

This is by no means a farewell entry. It’s just to say that I might need a new paradigm, eleven months into the writing of this journal.

While I think about what that might be, I’ve got several movies to review, about which I hope you’ll be able to read in the next few days.

And, happily, a call has gone out for abstracts for volume of critical essays on Robin Hyde, and your humble author is one of those to whom the call has gone out. What would it be like to break my publishing drought? Now that’s a thought on which to ruminate.

Should any readers feel the need to boost their own professional confidence in the coming northern hemisphere winter or long hot summer of the south, I leave you with some quotes from Jackson Pollock which you may wish to transpose to your workplace, for your amusement. Perhaps I can use them at my salary review interview tomorrow.

I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

I am nature.

I don’t use the accident. I deny the accident.

Source: Evans, K. (director). (1987). Jackson Pollock. VHS documentary. London, LWT.