If I published my private journal from the past 30 years, would there be any interest among my readers? I’m asking for a reason and seeking honest feedback.
I journaled obsessively from age 18 to around 33, with an especially prolific period occurring in the first decade after I graduated from college, and currently I still keep an intermittent journal-cum-commonplace book. Early on, my journal turned into the place where I discovered and articulated the personal griefs, insights, and obsessions, and also developed the sense of a writer’s voice, that later channeled themselves into my stories and essays. Initial drafts of my earliest stories actually appear in the same pages; they flowed right out of me into the journal, and only afterward did I type them up as something separate. Back in 2006, short selections from this journal were published in the anthology In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing, edited by Olivia Dresher for her Impassio Press.
I entered another semi-prolific period of journaling in the past handful of years, including after the start of the pandemic, when the enforced solitude of a homebound existence called forth a flow of thoughts from a journaling mind that had been semi-dormant for a time.
Much (most) of my journal focuses on philosophical, spiritual, and emotional reflections and struggles, as enriched by a host of books and authors. The majority of entries feature no references to external daily events, though a few such things do appear in there. The journal is more a record of my inner life than my outer one. Along with the record of my ongoing philosophical/spiritual quest and self-conversation, my journal contains a number of descriptions, some of them detailed, of ideas for stories that I never wrote, plus a few dream transcriptions that were implicated in the fiction I went on to write.
The suggestion and opportunity to publish a generous selection from this journal — which is spread out over 30-odd notebooks and a dozen or more word processing documents extending back to 1992 — recently came up. In truth, I already said yes, after some serious consideration, but I also wanted to check here with my Teeming Brain readers, as I recently did with my Twitter followers, to gauge the level of general interest, if any, in reading such a thing. The project will require significant time and effort. After all, I’ve got three decades’ worth of notebooks and documents to sort through, and it’s a task made even more time-consuming by the fact that sometimes in the 1990s and early aughts I rather ridiculously wrote in more than one notebook, resulting in a tangled trail of overlapping dates in multiple documents. At the same time, having already started a preliminary process of scanning through all this material, I’ve found myself surprisingly absorbed by this textual record of how my former selves thought, felt, experienced, and tried to make sense of their inner and outer worlds. I just wonder if anybody else would find it interesting as well.
I welcome all thoughts and reactions.
I would be very interested in reading that. After reading Idea Of the Holy and a work of criticism on him that didn’t help much I’ve thought a lot about what it means and I have attributed the word numinous to the ring in lord of the rings (which also brings madness and despair another subject I am interested in, seems to fit) and just recently I watched Halloween Kills which has a lot of talk about the idea of Michael Myers as a boogeyman, also numinous. This seems really wrong to me. Maybe you have read it but Junji Ito opens up a similar conversation in his new manga Sensor about the numinous as either good or evil. I feel like I must be seeing Otto’s ideas totally wrong and would be very interested to read your honest thinking about spiritual topics.
Midnight Mass is another bewildering one, and has a similar conflict as Sensor does. Priest encounters an angel who is really a vampire and has a mystical experience then returns with new powers and reinvigorates a church community in a small town that was disenchanted. Brilliant monologues on the nature of the holy. The vampire/angel is clearly numinous but the priest is not a hero.
Thank you, Daniel,
I found Midnight Mass to be really interesting. It may not have lived up to its full promise or potential in the end, but it certainly was original (despite the fact that it borrowed a host of elements from familiar horror texts). And I can honestly say that when I started watching it, I never expected to be presented with a detailed description and depiction of a nondual spiritual awakening. That scene in the final episode is pure dynamite.
This is a great idea, I’d certainly buy and read it.
Thank you for the feedback, Christian.