I wonder how much of this journalling I should create? Am I to go on and on, putting down my world as it comes by me — as if it were a film and I a critic taking notes — and heedless of the reams of text, the “ocean waste and wide”, that I leave behind? Or am I to endevour towards the brevity of recording only that which I feel will be useful later on? Of course the latter requires I know what will be useful, and I clearly don’t. Thus I feel I must keep on this tack of logging each squall and seagull, each reef of the ocean and reef of the sails, until such a time as I have a clearer idea of what it all tends to. Please bear with me!
When I am reading I am obediently following the author, and thinking on ier [does anyone mind if I sometimes use Spivak pronouns here?] words and this is of itself an enjoyable exercise. It does enable though my mind to be freed on some other level, to go wandering off on fascinating asides (like this paragraph!). With one hand I’m engrossed in “The Poetics of Space”, and this engrossment is percisely what lets me, with the other hand, explore the endless other tangents that come up when I’m reading. There are so many thoughts racing around in my head, rarely caught by me for long, but it is through reading that sufficient of them are quieten’d for the others to be heard.
- I rather suspect that I could write nothing at all if I did not read.
- I know I could not read, not properly, if I did not intersperse times of reading with times of making.
- I should have no chance of making with any integrity if I did not prefix all with periods of still silence.
[By the way: the weird bits in this post, if they’re not mine, are from Coleridge’s Constancy to an Ideal Object.]