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TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER

an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations
& other curiosities :: profile


11.09.15

Why journal? To remember, of course. To jot down an event or insight, so that it may turn into compost. To articulate in writing what can't be discovered in conversation or painting or music. What resists any other method. What resists writing, but gets written nevertheless.

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While looking for a journal from last year, I found one from my terrible years with the Axe, the one I wrote in when I was desperate. This journal is unlike the other notebooks from that time, which, in sunnier moments, I would inscribe with story ideas, descriptions, optimistic lists, arcane phrases, etc. Those notebooks are sunrooms, with tables set for tea parties, burgeoning with roses and thriving plants. These notebooks I kept by the bedside, in the field, at breakfast, in plain sight.

This journal I squirrelled away in my underwear drawer and took out in secret, at night, when the house would rattle from the storms that frequent our part of the world. It is a room with no windows. Turn the bloody key and you'll find tear-stained passages, indecipherable text, gaps where I tore out pages or parts of them, pages on which I had glued newspaper cuttings or covered in stickers of sea creatures, to conceal what I had written. I open this Bluebeard's room, fascinated by the memory of despair, the horror of a disintegrating marriage, all those uncontrollable feelings. Years later, the gore is dry, only a deep, indelible stain.




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