burning desire

Everything I write is true. But I don't write about everything
These words were written by Dominique Browning in her essay "Burning the Diaries" which appeared in the New York Times on September 30. That sentence refers to her published memoir and her blog. But she wrote about "everything" in 40 years worth of diaries that she burned one day. I was inspired. Browning started keeping diaries when she was 14, I started at 40. Whatever diaries I kept before that time were regularly disposed of, thinking they contained secret thoughts I didn't want anyone else to know. I realize now there were no real secrets in those books, just private thoughts that in retrospect weren't of interest to anyone but me. My books are divided into three categories: early spiral bound notebooks with masked versions of the truth, current journals with stark truths, and so-called "workbooks" which contain fodder and junk and can occasionally be mined for a nugget or two. Whatever. There are a lot of notebooks.

My hero Edward Weston wrote in his Daybooks regularly. It was his photography and honest words that inspired me to start writing my own journals. I bought my first blank notebooks from a Job Lots store in Naragansett Pier, Rhode Island. They cost 25 cents each and had turquoise blue covers. Those worn out notebooks are still around nearly 30 years later - much worse for wear and full of the beginnings of repetitions that haunt today's books. How much do we really change? How does one measure self-growth? Do I really want to keep those notebooks?

Weston's entries were intimate and frank and in 1925 he threw three years' worth into the fire because when he reread them he was "revolted by all the heartaches, headaches, bellyaches".

Many mornings I wonder why I even start to write, 
with nothing worth recording in my humdrum existence. 
If it were not for my pot of coffee I am sure there 
would be no inspiration.
     Edward Weston, 1927