Why should I
write a diary anyway? What's so good about it? It's too prosaic and banal and
functional an exercise, surely? It's like asking people to watch me brush my
teeth. Do I include that stuff? "Had Porridge and apricots for breakfast,
cleaned teeth vigorously afterwards, utilizing an oak-leaf
based toothpaste. Fed the cat, chose a demure pair of socks to match
comfortable linen trousers and so on and so forth..."
Where's the metaphysical
ennui in matching socks? Where's the 'unbearable lightness of being' in a
broiled apricot? Where's the content? What's the paradigm even?
Have I ever even read a
diary as a literary form. Pepys? Well, I can't recall actually reading anything
of his other than attributed quotes: "Fed the cat, chose a demure pair of
socks to match comfortable linen trousers and so on and so forth... called the
fire brigade as London was burning to a cinder, shall take tiffin with Walpole
this afternoon." Samuel Pepys is like the godfather of diarists but who
the fuck has read him apart from some poor suckers on a Norwich City College,
"colonialist literature" course? It's like my mate said about
Tristram Shandy; "Nobody has ever read Tristram Shandy!"
So who reads diaries?
Does "the Kenneth Williams diaries" count? I read that one, skipped
over most of it: "Monday, did some acting with some actors."
"Tuesday, ditto; Joe Orton, bubbly Barbara Windsor. Blah blah blah." "Wednesday.
Something at the beeb. Twots."
Is that all there is to
it? Well, journaling is a pastime I could spend journeying on the metro, (other
modes of transport are available); it's also something I could do in the bath
or in-between cricket matches during the summer. It would fill my time in many
a dull moment and null that void with something banal and inoffensive. But what
would I be foregoing? Some nuanced intercourse with actuality, which my pop art
drenched brain would miss out on as it plundered doom jazz riffs from the terra-cotta
sarcophagus of dull and fragile memory. Can I find out if "love knows no
death" by writing down every day what I had for dinner and whether or not
I have had the urge to masturbate recently?
The positive effect of
writing a diary is metaphysical in the sense that it is uniquely, a literary
form which is designed to come to fruition after the author's death. There is a
fearlessness in this choice. A diary can not be a diary if it is read within
the authors lifetime. There can be no authenticity in a written diary if it is
possible to read it during the author's lifetime. Even if it is a history of
the stupidity of the writer then it will have noble value upon being examined
after their death. There's some consolation and hopeful prospects in such a realization.
So yeah, you talked me
into it. I'll do this diary thing. But my ego has one rider which I wish to
request. I need one reader to write for. I don't believe I have the absolute
faith required to write anything intended only to be read in the event of my
death. So I want you to be my reader. Will you? Maybe I'll write about beauty
and love and matching socks, maybe I'll make confessions and howls and blurt
out and express indefensibly hateful lusts and contemptible, narcissistic
opinions. Maybe I'll say unsayable, gruesome, squalid things. Maybe I'll give
birth to a poem. Maybe there'll be no because. Let that be the pretext. No
cause. No because. No explanation, no apology, no provocation, no end to the conjurations of expostulation at the tepid throb of my thumb.
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