writing down my life...
...on endless scraps of paper...
At least that's how the lyric goes. This time, it's not paper, though. I've typed my journal before: in the early 1980s, I started chronicling my days -- on a real typewriter -- for typing practice, then switched to books in 1987. The new book, which has no name yet, is probably book 103, but I've lost count of the actual number on the shelves. Mostly small spiral notebooks, written in with fountain pens in every color of ink from bright yellow to aubergine, pages adorned with rubber stamps and stickers, ticket stubs and photos glued in, fragments of my days....
This is different. This is public, strangely intimidating, and at the same time, freeing. (And with that, the closing of the Marilyn Hacker poem comes to mind:
At least that's how the lyric goes. This time, it's not paper, though. I've typed my journal before: in the early 1980s, I started chronicling my days -- on a real typewriter -- for typing practice, then switched to books in 1987. The new book, which has no name yet, is probably book 103, but I've lost count of the actual number on the shelves. Mostly small spiral notebooks, written in with fountain pens in every color of ink from bright yellow to aubergine, pages adorned with rubber stamps and stickers, ticket stubs and photos glued in, fragments of my days....
This is different. This is public, strangely intimidating, and at the same time, freeing. (And with that, the closing of the Marilyn Hacker poem comes to mind:
... I ask cold air, "What is the word that frees?"I'm frightened. I'm always frightened, but most of the time I go on anyway, because I'm more frightened of not knowing what might happen than I am of getting a "no"/making a fool of myself/being hurt. (...so here I go...)
The wind says, "Change," and the white sun, "Remember.")