reading backward
HE JOURNALS BEGAN in 1986. I was thirty years old. They have continued along their meandering to the present moment – twenty-three years (as we begin here) of pages, sometimes as many as twenty to thirty to a day. An earlier journal existed once, written when I was in high school – freshman, sophomore & junior years. Pages & pages & pages of a young girl cum poet cum philosopher…
I don’t remember why it stopped.
I remember destroying it, as though it were a thing that required destruction. 
I was newly married. My mother, a gifted writer herself, had taught me from when I was very young: never throw away anything you write. Perhaps it is that destruction is the key word there; the distance from a young woman to her words is not always enough.
The distance from a woman to her words is not always enough.
To have those journals now—.
Or the letters I had written and each of my best friends had saved for me, giving them to me because they knew they were important, and knew I would keep them; they would not be lost.
Or the life I wrote in letters to my mother, saved vigilantly by her then lost when a roof collapsed on the shed in which a distant cousin had stored them, that last six months before my mother died…
I BEGAN A THIRD journal (a second, begun when first married and not lasting even the space of a thin notebook, survives) when I was a new mother, a very young twenty-four. Destroyed it as well—. Such anger as it seethed! Who could believe that one day, even that anger would be a memory needed. Some sense in these losses of a thing that dies, and all of hope this side of Heaven cannot hold it in the heart again—it is no more. The hollow of the night, sometimes, a dream might give them once more. But dawn comes and that gnawing in the belly. They cannot be found.
Along the way of it, I determined to destroy these journals, too (pulling from them what might prove of value before doing so). Fortunately (or, perhaps, not), I came upon this sleeping after having destroyed only one notebook. Even if, as Wren mused in her blog, not much waits in the journals but cups of coffee and a house needing clean, banal words reassure those of us who live banal lives. Everyday, ordinary words – security in that, I come to find, for everyday readers. Written during the dark years, when I was not writing, they represent the many years of pages before the poet began to risk peeping out again…
They are an ordinary life told to white pages, lined with blue ink.
RANSPOSING A JOURNAL to the modern medium of a blog is problematic. That small detail of reading backward. Too, where the modern blog (and its counterpart, reality TV) does not necessarily recognize what is the First Necessity of Life by the Pen (protecting those innocent parties who must dart & duck the rapier points of your pensiveness), I do.
But that is covered on another page.
How to condense pages that are too long, and yet still preserve some degree of ability to ‘read forward,’ will be a work in progress. Archives and categories should help in that regard, for new readers. It may be that a separate category will one day allow room for those ‘unmailed notes & letters’ that as yet reside in several folders in a file cabinet drawer, still tempting Destruction. The self that performs for others, after all, is a separate self than the dreamer that writes in dark fury to the one who listens best of all…
For the rest of it, I dived into this life headfirst, picking up the pen as though it had never been put down…
