Keeping a Journal

When I was small I would be given a diary and for a few days or weeks I would write in it everything I did ; that is until I got bored with it and it became a chore. When I was fit and active (before this mysterious extra four stones appeared around my body like a cellulite rings of Saturn [Faturn]) I religiously kept a running log. And I mean religiously. Times were recorded to the minute, second, tenths, hundredths. What shoes were worn was recorded with the distance run for each pair (so if a pair dropped to bits you could compare performance). A subjective measuring of effort was noted as was the weather or any other data which might prove useful in gauging training for an event or analysing an injury.

Even when the running began to slacken off - I haven't given up - the running log has subtly changed its style and its relevance. It is a blending of what has been called in the past a "Commonplace" book - collecting quotations and reviews of books or television, a journal - where intimate thoughts (or not) are expressed, and an artist's ideas book. Postcards and images are kept. Random thoughts are preserved. It functions as a confidant, as an audience, as a trigger, as a resource for future writing, as a listing, as a repository for useless (and useful) information. It is an aid in understanding how I think and feel and act and make decisions and solve problems.

It is a form of presentation that is becoming far more widely used - from my daughters' school giving her a homework logbook to a Project Management tool to the online versions of the same. The Blogging generation with all the new found flexibility that technology can give are but an offshoot of this desire. Although I use this blog for many of the same purposes I do so in reference to my Journal. However the Journal is also Art in the sense of its objectival value. As a construct with aesthetic meaning that book form fits into a tradition that so far technology has not dimmed. As in the predictions that have been made saying that the Book is dead - the Screen Supreme - it has not happened. Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" has not happened. For many of us the book is an object to be treasured and touched. Indeed, even the smell of a new book (especially a glossy coffee table book)- the opening of a crisp new notebook to write in with its promising potential; these conjure up an image that encapsulates newness and freshness and the hint of a knowledge somehow sensually to be possessed and enjoyed. Imagine those Venn diagrams from early mathematics classes - the circles that overlapped creating sets and subsets. If the circles are "Me" , "Us" , "Them" , that section which contains all of those is the Journal. That is a position I try to keep it in.