In the midst of my spring housecleaning last week (okay, I'm a little late), I came across a long shelf of journals. I didn't glance inside them as I dusted around them because I didn't particularly want to revisit days of angst and the dramas of youth. Some of my journals were store-bought, blank-page books. Others were my own hand-bound books, but there was one book I didn't recognize. The cover said, The Bronze Bow, a young adult novel. Curious, I looked inside. By covering the pages with gesso, an artist's medium (whiting in glue) usually used to prepare a wooden surface for painting, I had created the blank pages of a journal.
The first page reads "Journal 1992." I would have been 49 years old. The next page reveals the purpose of this journal: to help fulfill my New Year's resolution "to push my creative self to its utmost."
The next page is a painting.
This is not a journal of "what I did today" or a diary of secrets or a record of the weather. This journal is full of poems, paintings, drawings, pithy meditations, and artistic explorations on abstract qualities: honesty, understanding, thrift, acceptance. On some pages I play with handwriting or with the words on a page of the novel. Another page has a drawing of Table Rock and four haiku written on a hike there.
I play with the placement of my poems on a page, sideways and otherwise. I make a drawing of lines and patterns with colored pencils, all in greens and blues. I paste a folded picture on a page and write a dedication on the front side: "Sweet Denise, Thanks for the green love beads." Unfold the paper to see the picture. I draw a mandala with colored pencils and on the facing page write a poem:
North hunkers down in winter
Till: ecstatic lift of birdsong.
How sad to live in southern climes.
On another page I ink out most of the words to create an erasure poem with the words left on the page. On another I use the colored pencils feely in writing poems:
Caged-in dog [in red]
Barking, howling, turning [in brown]
What difference to him that the plum tree blooms? [in blue]"
On another page the wide circle of a face swirls into more loops down the page. In every loop is a poem.
It doesn't matter how good, or not, the art is, or the poetry, or how deep the thinking, All that is irrelevant. The journal exults in an imagination free to ramble. Rereading this journal, I can see the limitations on creativity imposed by the computer. There is no play with calligraphy in a Word document, no freedom on the page. I do no drawings when I write poetry now that I write on the computer. I have no interaction with line and color and medium, placement on the page, small bursts of poetry. Glitter on some pages,
pasted-on pictures, erasure poems, wise quotes cut from another text and pasted onto a page, with my glosses. "Be silent and your heart will sing," says the text, and I add "How can you hear the singing of your heart if you are not silent? How can your heart sing if you are not still?" A contemplation on the Tarot card of the Fool, with a drawing to go with it. A dream I wrote down. I could write down a dream with the computer, of course, but I couldn't accompany it with a drawing.
"The medium is the message," Marshall McLuhan said. The message here is that the medium makes a difference. If I want to push my creative self to the utmost, I see now, I must take up a pen, some drawing pencils, and a blank book and let my imagination, unhampered by the computer, run free again.
(And then, as serendipity would have it, just after writing this, I received in the mail a birthday present from my sister: a beautiful hand-made journal, blank pages ready to receive the freed-from-the-computer expression of my imagination in 2021.)
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| Note the beautiful binding |
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