Journal #74 & Blog Entry #200

journal #74
Originally uploaded by summerpierre.

This is my third attempt at at blog entry today. I've started them, but then thought better of it, and put them in 'save as draft' folder. Sometimes I think it would be interesting to assemble all the drafted but not published blog entries. It would be an unruly, incoherent, and probably more raw and emotional in some places assemblage.

A friend once asked me what is the difference between my journal and my blog. In a word: PLENTY. They are not the same creatures to me at all. They both serve a purpose, but the journal and I go WAY BACK. We're sort of a marriage that I won't ever break off. I can't quite equate it to any other relationship that goes in human realms, even though journaling is SO HUMAN. It's just that journaling for me is so messy, explicit, intimate, boring, fascinating, and PRIVATE. The blog is just a sort of place where I have an idea and so I let it slip. It's more like a collection of chatty episodes, whereas the journal, as Sylvia Plath called hers, is "My Sargasso." It's a deep sea of ideas and beliefs and messy episodes in paint, pen and pencil. I don't see them as linked at at all.

I was realizing yesterday, perusing all my books--(sometimes I go visit my books and pull out the ones that I have read a million times, or examine ones that I've been meaning to get to)--that I am at the end of a longstanding phase of reading the published personal works of artists. My library is FULL of such books: diaries by Anais Nin, May Sarton, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf; Letters by Vanessa Bell, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Georgia O'keeffe, & Anne Sexton. For awhile, I preferred these works to the original published works by these artists. I loved the life process. I still do, but lately, I have had this exciting feeling of liking the art and appreciating the art, beyond the artist. I think it's because I no longer depend on them to tell me how to live. I wanted a *CLUE* how to have anrtist life, but in reality I just lived vicariously, which is not really living authentically atall. It's a new phase for me, which is also changing how I journal. My journals have always been visual, but lately, because my work is more visual, I want to fill my pages with more art and collage and EVIDENCE of what my days are like. I like collaging for the PHYSICAL things that they are created from, because they are also a little time capsule. They speak of physical gestures, and pieces of living and ideas. Paint strokes speak to me more now than a letter in a book. I think that is one of the reasons I will always love seeing a Van Gogh in person--you stand there looking at the wildness and the thickness of his paint and you see EVERY GESTURE that the man made. You stand before his work, keenly aware that he stood just where you are, jabbing at the color to make what you see now.

I want my journals to express the gestures of my life. I want my journals to be a happy place to turn to, even when I am miserable. The blog is a tap dance I do, even among all the mess that I express--it's still a paragraph that ends neatly. Both serve a wonderful purpose, but there's no confusing the two. With the blog, I might write something that feels too naked and too raw--and not publish it. The journal is not a place to consider such things. It only knows where you are in that moment and it considers nothing but the guts it catches as you sling it on its pages.