Saturday Essay: On Keeping a Diary
I'm Currently Editing 35 Years of Diaries - And Finding Out About Myself.
I have been keeping a diary - or at least a journal of sorts - on and off since around 1985. These black-and-red journals have accumulated dust in a cupboard, unlooked at and unloved since I gave up the habit, maybe ten years ago. I had the strong urge recently to throw them all in the bin, but I decided to go through them one last time before I consigned them to oblivion , and perhaps fillet out anything in there that stood the test of time.
I am only at the beginning - there are a lot of them - but for the most part, I am only mildly surprised at how uninteresting they are. Not exactly ‘today I went to the supermarket and got a special deal on cheddar’ but more my interminable personal internal dialogue, transcribed onto the page. Often complaining - usually about the state of my relationships, most particularly my relationship with myself - but also simply going through the process of trying to understand myself and the world, which for a writer is a crucial part of introspection.
Was I a very different person thirty years ago? I like to think I have evolved significantly during those years, but reading back on my diaries, I begin to wonder. I was certainly haunted much more by depression in those days - sometimes the entries are very dark - but otherwise the writing is characterised by a sense of bewilderment by the onrushing input of everyday life, a bewilderment I still feel ( although which I hope I have come to terms with). ‘Overwhelm’ I have learned to call it since I have been diagnosed with ADHD, but at the time I simply thought the world was too big and complex for me to grasp. I still think that, but then I thought it was because I was stupid. Now I realise that that is the way the world really is - I just don’t have the blocking mechanisms that help other people to cope.
The diaries are very self-absorbed. Which is not to say they don’t frequently show concern for other people - they do. But they are primarily internal and reflective. Very little in the way of practical solutions to the problems I felt I was faced with ever features. Neither do world events, although I was greatly tormented by the events of the first Gulf War, which I believed could lead to apocalypse. My loathing of successive Conservative governments is also apparent. That much, at least, hasn’t changed.
Was it therapeutic keeping a diary? It felt more like a necessity. I felt so isolated as a writer and a person - certainly before I had children - that my diary felt like my only friend. As for the physical act of writing itself, it was clearly completed at great speed, because the script is virtually unreadable since it was dashed off so quickly, often in some form of emotional panic. Interestingly the only exception came when I was severely depressed, at which time my terrible handwriting because hauntingly perfect. So desperate was I to find a means of control over my life, that my words on the page became one of the few arenas that I could corral into shape.
As I say, I am only partway through the reading - only two or three diaries in the bin so far - but as yet, apart from the emotional gyrations, of which there were a great deal, there are also reflections, some of which are interesting if only because they represent the seeds of a personal philosophy that is now more fully developed. In fact I think the whole reason I was writing a diary was to try and come up with some philosophy of life, and this, you might say, was a work in progress, taking in a wide variety of reading, often involving Eastern Religion, Carl Jung, Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, Rollo May and many others.
The diaries helped me develop that philosophy so I finally felt I had something underpinning my life, which then seemed to be spinning in a void. Now I am 67, I can say I finally do have a philosophy of life - but unfortunately, it is almost impossible to articulate. As the Taoists say, ‘The Tao that is the real Tao cannot be spoken’. Not that I am Taoist… But at some level, I know where I am in the universe and what the shape of life is. This was not the case when I was starting my diaries. In 1991, I wrote a brief scrap of prose in the third person that I think represented well the person I was at the time:
“It wasn’t that he didn’t have any thoughts, intensely, all the time. But they were scrambled, diffuse. They tailed off before they were finished, nudged out of the way a new thought which in its turn would trail off before completion. Even many of these thoughts were not part of the thinking process; they were prejudices, animal instinct and primal reaction converted into words and images. His thinking was a too-fast slide show at Mickey Mouse speed in a Donald Duck voice…his inner world was a cheap clutter of bric a brac from a tawdry giftshop - second-hand, hastily constructed, disposable and more or less useless. But he valued them like jewels.”
I was obsessed by the words in the head, since I spent so much time alone. In 1992 I wrote this:
“Words are spells, and charms, good spells and wicked ones, evil charms and blessed ones. Words have the power to get people to do what you want them to do. They can conjure feelings of so many colours. They are weapons and salves. If you can find the secret of words, you are a truly powerful person. Words also clarify meaning - and disguise it. Words are windows to meaning.
“The words people speak are not what they are. They are only clues, because people are striking poses, lying to themselves and others, trying on words for effect, acting. What people are is buried deep beneath.”
This is one of the more coherent reflections from the time which was otherwise full of fairly inconsequential chit-chat, but these moments of clarity seem worth preserving and I am filleting the diaries and gradually transcribing them onto my computer (Although i am not sure why. Will anyone ever read them?).
Here’s another one that made the cut of the digital transfer, also from 1992, this time a reflection on love:
“People are not really one thing. They are more like a flickering light, always changing colours within the spectrum of their personalities. When two people live together they are really many people together..the colours do not flicker independently, they interreact, one colour in one partner sparking another colour in the other. ‘Do I love you’ is a wrong question. ‘Do I love you today’ or ‘do you love this part of me’ is more sensible.”
And so on. But the main part of the diaries that I treasure are really nuggets from other minds tremendously more profound than my own. Here’s a quote I copied down in 1993 from an interview withTed Hughes, shortly after an entry of my own which read - not untypically - ‘been feeling quite badly depressed’.
“Ted Hughes ‘holds an almost mystic belief in the trancelike ‘poetic self’, which, as he puts it, lives its life ‘separate and for the most part hidden from the poet’s ordinary personality’ For any poet, he writes, the ‘necessary trance is the most fragile piece of the poetry equipment and the loss of it brings acute distress.’
‘What’s writing about? It’s trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life. Unless you can do that you’re tiptoeing round the edges of yourself
‘Where does it come from, the idea of the impersonality of art? Finally all works of art are just confessions of the central thing. It’s an illusion to think otherwise, to suppose it’s good manners not to talk about yourself.’
How I identified with that as I sought to find my writer’s voice, tormented as I was by guilt about my self absorption!
Then I went through my fatalistic phase and started quoting Mark Tully: - ‘There is not enough fatalism in Western Society. We must accept that much of our life is determined by fate’.
And then, possibly quoted in relation to one of the relationships I was in ( or going thorough):
‘The dragon who hoards, money, whatever, there is no life in them, no giving. They just glue themselves to you and try and suck out of you their life’ - Joseph Campbell.
There is of corse no conclusion to the diaries, and I think when I was writing them I felt I was actually always moving towards one, when I could finally say ‘well that’s the way things are’. But there is no way things are. The diaries - even though I haven’t finished editing them - are open ended. They wander from subject to subject and obsession to obsession. They remind me above all that the shape of life, if not exactly chaos, is indeterminate and always will be.
Did you know I also give indidividual writing lessons? If you are interested, check my website here:
Or you can just have a single meeting with me to chat about your work:
Worth also noting that this Tuesday May 9 at 6pm I will continuing my series of Zoom lectures on writing for my paying subscribers based around my new book, out in Jun
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Love this post Tim. It’s a big failing of mine that even when I did keep diaries they were very much ‘Went to a bar. I wish X fancied me. Got a kebab on the way home.’ Almost like I was trying to leave evidence that would prove to a future me that I was living, and having fun (some of the time). Now I am that future me, and I wish I’d written about how I felt, and the bigger picture.
It’s kind of merciful that my handwriting is so bad no one will ever be able to read the diaries anyway. Including, I’ve no doubt, me.
Such a great post, Tim. It is only now (pushing fifty; deep in the 'if only I had...' stage of life) that I'm looking back and wishing I'd kept a diary ever since I'd first picked up a pencil as a child. I've been journalling for a few years now, and I love that I have an archive-of-self that's slowly growing across my bookshelf. How interesting that you have ended this habit - to chuck in my two-pennorth here, I feel it would be such a shame to dispose of your diaries once you've finished your editing of them!
Other people's diaries are fascinating - I'm an avid reader of 'Noted' by Jillian Hess here on Substack for this exact reason. Thank you for sharing yours.