January 18, 2015
Park Hill
The difficult task is to own the morning: to set aside the calendar, the to-do’s, family matters, the husband lying in bed, the films you watched last night – all of it, inclusive and particularly your personal woes – and open the channel to the flow.
It’s easier to get up and write about writing. Or more accurately, to write about not writing, while committing the act of writing. But it isn’t really writing, not in the formal sense, i.e. journaling isn’t fiction. Journaling is the same old story told in slightly different shades of the same; it is your essence, dragged out across the years. So, while technically you are putting words to press, they’re easy words. Top of mind. Literally. In contrast, real writing is scraping off that layer and tearing up the floor.
I suppose I could make the argument that journaling is the typewritten equivalent of a singer’s vocal chord exercises. She isn’t really singing while she’s warming up, she’s simply readying the instrument. The same is true of my morning journaling task: it is limbering the fingers and activating the portion of the brain wherein resides the portal. It is the breaking down of the walls that the daily world, and the self-conscious mind, throws up around you on a regular basis.
Noe Street SF, morning