The Capacious Holds All
5 minute read
I was ten when Anne Frank told me in her diary that paper has patience. Not long after that, I started a journal of my own. How funny it is to read it now. John choked on a crisp today; I think I love him. And sad too. Got 17 out of 20 in a test today. NOT GOOD ENOUGH! In my teenage years, I was glued to my journal, recording in painstaking detail my recovery from a grim period of depression. Then I went to college and didn’t have time to write in journals; I was having too much fun. In those years I came to distrust, even fear, the girl in the journal. I was thirty before I read those journals again. I did not meet the broken girl of my imagination. I met the wisest person I have ever known, a girl more aware of the distance I would have to travel in my life than I have ever been.
Since then I have written in a journal almost every day. They are stacked so high below my desk they act as a footrest. Increasingly I realise they are containers for worry. If I record, for twenty minutes, my grave doubts about whatever I am writing about, I know that when I move on to write that very thing, my inner critic will leave me alone.
In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron’s cult book on creativity, she advises blocked artists to do morning pages: three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream of consciousness. These pages can be streams of worry, moaning, self-pity, “all the petty whiny stuff you write down in the morning,” she writes, “that stands between you and creativity.” She believes this is what it takes to get to the other side of fear and negativity, out of logic brain and into the artist brain. When the writer Elizabeth Gilbert did the morning pages it changed her life. Becoming aware of her deepest desires, she ended up travelling to Italy and learning Italian; going to an Ashram in India and returning to Indonesia to study with a medicine man. “Without The Artist's Way,” she says, “there would have been no Eat, Pray, Love.”
Now we are all allowed to talk about our mental health, I hear people talk about journalling all the time. The word always makes me think of Bunburying, or some other deeply frivolous activity and makes me laugh. But psychology experts believe journalling can help us reduce stress, anxiety and depression; alerting us not only to our fears and concerns but also our triggers, whilst making space for positive encouragement and self-talk.
In the US, there’s even a Center for Journal Therapy, an education and training centre that offers suggestions to journalers: keep it private, meditate beforehand, date each entry, write quickly without censoring yourself, give yourself permission to tell the truth, write naturally in a way that works for you…
And yet how dangerous it can be to commit our thoughts to paper. How subversive.
In the creative writing workshops I give, women tell me how frightened they are to see their own words on the page while others lie awake in night afraid someone will read what they have written. I understand. My own mother, who was a very creative person, always said: A paper never refused ink. Sometimes I wonder if that is why I am a writer, if this long relationship with the page was borne of her defiance and mine too.
The intimacy of a writer’s journal. “What sort of diary should I like mine to be?” asks Virginia Woolf. “Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.” Katherine Mansfield’s journals make me cry. “I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing. (Though I might write about cabmen. That’s no matter.) But warm, eager, living life - to be rooted in life - to learn, to desire, to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.” She died days after she wrote this from TB, at the age of thirty-four.
Before I had my children I wrote in Moleskine journals - the luxury - now I write on whatever I can get my hands on, the back of an envelope, old drafts of typed notes, placing it all in a zip-up folder and tossing it onto the pile of journals the way someone else might toss a sod of turf onto the fire. I have not read a single one. I wonder if I will open them up when I am old and meet myself again, as in Derek Walcott’s poem, Love after Love, (Take down the love letters from the bookshelf/ the photographs, the desperate notes/ peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life) or if I will simply give thanks to paper itself, for sustaining me for so long. If it is the job of a parent to contain a child’s feelings, to meet their anger, rage and grief with an unruffled sort of calm, I understand that paper has done this for me.
Anne Frank was right. It has had, in the end, so much patience.
Nikki Walsh, May 2021
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