Susan Sontag: On Keeping a Journal

Windy Day. 1958, oil on canvas, 98 × 173cm. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.

"Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person: I create myself. "  

Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947 - 1963

Diaries to read (again) (for the first time) (to bring over):

1. Sylvia Plath's Unabridged Journal
2. Susan Sontag: Journals & Notebooks 1947 - 1963
3. Anais Nin Volume 2
4. Anais Nin Volume 3
5. Goebbel Diaries 
6. The Diaries: All My Road Before Me  - C.S. Lewis 
7. The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (film)

7 March 2013

(Possible) Aspirations for the near future

1. Work for UNICEF, United Nations
2. Become a journalist or writer reporting on issues that I care about
3. Try to see how I can make a career in drawing, painting and being involved in creative ideas 
4. Become a creative director?
5. Apply for Big Cat Rescue VISA Card as my first credit card*
6. Do not silence the child in me 
7. Learn and strive to love unconditionally 

*It was something I told myself when I was 15/16. Then, I was really affected by the Big Cats trade (animal trade in general) and the inhumanity of animal eugenics (Ligers etc.) but I was helpless and foolishly idealistic. I remember watching tons of videos and crying myself to sleep, wishing for a better world. And like what an introverted fifteen year old would do, I sought the internet for links and help, hoping that in my way I would eventually be able to do something about it. Friends, this was why you saw me bawling my eyes out like a baby during that one GP lesson in JC when we were watching the documentaries on animal cruelty. How I was so horrified after reading an article that justified the inhumane cruelty and killing of animals and how I tried rebutting the arguments idealistically using my own pathetic reasoning and my imprecise logical deductions and analysis.  I was sobbing and crying mainly for my own helplessness; but also for the persistent sickness in our nature which seems to manifest in every thing we do. 

We kill, we fight and we wage war all in the vain pride and philosophy that it is just or right, given our circumstances. What is justice or right? Justice is the value of upholding what is fair and reasonable and what is right? Boundaries between right and wrong changes with circumstances and times, and our understanding of the past (how certain actions have horrible implications and consequences) colours how we view them but I believe there is a moral right - my empathy compels me to believe in the sanctity of all lives (human or animals) and I want to defend it. 

I remember telling Y three years back, "I want to strive to achieve logical clarity in my mind, so that I can justify and reason analytically for the wills and whispers of the heart." So that the heart will never be deemed as the weaker under the criteria set by the mind, so that the heart will no longer take back seat in decision making just because it is seen as the inferior faculty. I think somewhere, along the process, I lost my purpose and forgot why, why I wanted to learn the humanities in an university instead of going to an art school, why I wanted to improve myself as a person....

I think ultimately, I want to improve myself, my mind so that I can love better. 

Feb 15

One day, I will leave. One day, I will grow out of my skin and into a shape more becoming, a shape less pusillanimous and less self-doubting. I was reading about changeling and how a human child was swapped in place of a changeling, an offspring of a faery, pixie and magical creature. They were different; lived and felt acutely differently. They felt unwanted and lost; never belonging. Curiously, it was believed that the concept was conceived because of the high deformity rates for children during the Dark Ages; autism was also seen as a deformity and it hurts me to think about the sad lives of little boys and girls, unloved and forgotten. Never being able to feel tender love because they were a wayward swing between the “magical” and the “human”, belonging to both and none. To belong to both is as equally difficult as belonging to none for when you belong to both, you fail to take a side and eventually, you will be perceived as an outsider by both. Ironically our nature, our frail malleable nature is so sick, so dependent on human intimacy and so avid and desperate to belong. We are after all communal creatures, delirious for attention and understanding from another like-minded soul.

Unfixed. Never Belonging.

I must learn to distinguish from the chimerical and the real. I must learn not to love the chimerical; the conjured hazy days of summer infatuations and efflorescence.

My mind shall learn to adapt to the cold of the weather, of the people and the environment. But I have an undying fatuous heart;

 And I will not love a figment of my imagination.

Diaries and thoughts

I just completed What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murukami. Nothing extraordinary but I guess with thoughts, nothing extraordinary comes. Most or all thoughts are cyclical and spun from banal dust. What is banal dust? I too do not understand, but I visualize bottles of magic fairy dusts popping in and out, and banal dust is just dust; nothing of that magic quality that characterizes fairy dust and unicorn. Nothing of the mysticism that enchants and enthralls  This must sound really weird, I must sound really weird. Speaking of thoughts, I like Murukami though. Clichéd, but he resonates with the clammy hands, panic-stricken existentialist generation of our youth. Trapped in our bubble of thought and cloistered in our monasteries for the mind becomes the prison of our monasteries. We are so out of touch and reality solely because we are the imprudent sparrows and birds of flight stuck in our little Midas cages. Self-absorbed.

Fly. I want to experience life. I want to experience the adventures that come with unfettered flight and the risks of freedom. I want to experience. The world, brimming with her vitality, age, rigour and (im)mortality. What good is all the worldly, temporal, spiritual knowledge of the world when it is unaccompanied by action? I will always be a frog in the well with a tunnel vision, if I stay. I must go. Someday (soon) I shall go.

4:11pm I am not a focused writer. I get distracted very easily – I am not sure if it is my suspected ADHD* or just my nature and lack of will.  I started on C.S. Lewis’ Diaries “All My Road Before Me” *. I have been periodically reading the journals of authors, writers, poets, artists (…) and I suspect my interests for journals belie my inability to forge my future. “What do you want to become?” I get sad when people tell me they have dreams of becoming this and that, of grand dreams and ambition but when the question bounces back to me, I am stumped. I don’t know. The future looks so misty and foggy, not because I have no idea of what I want to do, but because I have too much ideas and lofty dreams. I want to write a book, I want to draw and paint, I want to design, I want to learn, I want to play football, I want to become a detective, I want to travel, interact with people from all walks of life, and I want to discover and read and read… I want to do something that can embody all I can and would become (eventually, as with the vicissitudes of time) . I will always be changing, manipulating and shaping to become another me, another I – the sums of a whole making an unfixed, imperfect whole. And no job, career or vocation seems to be able to fit the demands of my or any changing nature. To choose, I would have to compromise. Question is, am I willing to compromise?

But it helps, reading the journals of giants, of past people and their thoughts make me less lonely in my own thoughts, makes me remember that people under their pieces of masks are all essentially the same, looking, wondering, and contemplating. And in the process of reading, I steal and glean insights of these people for my own, adapt and put them into action, into my own life. Hoping that with these little tips and insights, gradually and tenderly curated, would forge a clearer path even amidst all that fog. 

-----------

* I am still waiting for my report

* I am struck by the poignancy and timing of the book. I like to believe I am in the same spiritual vacuum that he is facing during his undergraduate years. But point is, we know where he is headed but I still can't see. 

Letters of Vincent Van Gogh

Things I learn, wish to remember:

1. Never cease searching, learning and discovering. 
2. There will always be a constant struggle for Happiness. But do not despair, because the struggle itself brings happiness. 
3. You see the blind girl as one robbed from sight, from beauty and yet, she sits in the grassy fields appreciating the beauty she cannot see. Why, How?  -- Be less of the little sister and more of the blind girl; robbed from beauty but still infinitely feeling the beauty that surrounds her. Appreciate what you have. 
4. Remember to love people for the love of people will bring you great wealth; will vanish all imaginary prisons and demarcations in the mind; will bring you home. Maybe at the end of the day, I will find my home in the people I love.  
5. Love yourself because what good is love for others, when you cannot even begin to love yourself. 

Hello my dear companion, it's been rather long where I sought refugee in your emptiness, revel in your voidness and freshness.

I have so much and paradoxically so little to say - Cum tacent, clamant.

&

 Life continues, and some mornings, weary of the noise, discouraged by the prospect of the interminable work to keep after, sickened also by the madness of the world that leaps at you from the newspaper, finally convinced that I will not be equal to it and that I will disappoint everyone—all I want to do is sit down and wait for evening. This is what I feel like, and sometimes I yield to it.

— Albert Camus