The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (16 page)

…Haunted by a sense of something disharmonious. I suppose it lies in a dream or in a half-conscious thought of yesterday…or the night….

A universe of raw singing voices. Competing. Occasionally in harmony. (But is this harmony accidental?—No.) We flow through one another’s lives & disappear. Memories are totally unreliable. (Perhaps I am thinking vaguely of the Capote work. People will remember as vaguely & dimly & w/comic modifications just as Capote “remembers” his acquaintances.)
Events occur. It is their interpretations that baffle. Living so close to another person as I live with Ray I can compare notes with him re. “events” constantly. Those who live alone or who keep their contemplative lives secret from others must be constantly deluded…biased…in various stages of ignorance. Ray & I experience something together and then afterward while talking about it we discover that I interpreted it one way, he another. A friend still another. And the universe opens up dizzyingly….

(Am I absurd to wish to know the truth? Of the people in
The Assassins
those who seek the truth perish. Only Stephen is willing to live with mystery, with the frustration of not-knowing. As we must all live. But….

But….

I fear the consequences of an emotional (as well as an intellectual) acceptance of this life-condition. I don’t want to drift into that not-caring state of mind I was in some years ago as a result of Zen meditation. (“Not-caring” is perhaps a poor term. But there is no term. Experiencing each moment of one’s life under the aspect of eternity, in a sense. As if one were dead. Living, dead. Dead, living, awake. Eternally awake. Such is the blessing & also the curse of “Enlightenment.”)

What is
the
truth about any relationship?—any human life?—any event? There is none. There are many. They compete, cancel one another out, one sometimes triumphs, but it is an empty triumph…. It may be I am really thinking about Nathan now. I don’t know. I feel a sense of loss, of grief, the necessity of eating appalls me, as it did some years ago…I mean the fact that one must eat…that in a few hours the results of not-eating are evident. The brain is so intimately bound up with…. The spirit with…. Like a fire, a wood-fire. The fire burns, the flames spring up, the wood is consumed, the fire dies down, dies. Calories. The dance of life. You must eat, must consume, your body floods w/nourishment & heat, if you don’t continue the process you die down, die. The grim frightening aspect of this predicament is hidden from us, of course, by the fact that food has become ceremonial & symbolic. As soon as one loses his sense of taste, however, the oddity of the situation is
clear. Eating is no longer a pleasure but a duty. One must eat. And there’s an end to it.

Food-filters: those creatures of the sea who eat constantly w/out tasting anything. People filter one another through their lives, their fantasies. Yet we don’t want to be merely “filtered through”…! We want to stay, to be held fast, to be valued, cherished, loved. At least not dismissed as an anecdote. Unfortunately that will be the fate of many of us in our personal lives. (And books too can be “filtered through” uncaring minds. And dismissed.)

…In pursuit of an image, a half-thought, a side-glance. Why do my less happy moods interest me so much more than the others…? They are rare; they are deep; and promising. Out of turbulence there invariably comes something
interesting
.

Out of apparent disharmony a sudden breathtaking harmony.

Is it the rising of Nathan’s moon? Nathan whom I see as a child of Poe, of Hawthorne, of Melville, of Thoreau in his darker being. Therefore he insists upon image & metaphor, not direct statement.

The child of Merlin. Banished, and now returning. (But not to triumph; to ordinary mortality, instead.)

…Wrote the poem “Enigma” today.
*
“Food-filtered.” Fascinating, horrifying. However, one must remember the Buddha’s admonition: Not to attempt to think the unthinkable.

My happiness has always been:
those others
think the unthinkable in my place. I think only—of them. Great lovely tapestries in which St. George & his dragon are equally comely. (My characters are those others whom I give birth to, and who in turn give birth to me perpetually. My fate is perhaps theirs but theirs certainly isn’t mine. I outlive them.)

They outlive me.

[…]

May 29, 1976.
…Worked on the poem “Last Harvest.”
*
Over & over again the lines, written in pen first and then typed & retyped & typed again. One must have infinite patience. A ceremonial sense to composition once one gets beyond a certain point…but until one reaches that point it’s sometimes frustrating.

(The value of this journal for me: a transcribing of my experiences in writing. Otherwise the process is lost, swallowed up in the final product. I have only the dimmest memories of emotions experienced while writing books years ago. A sense of euphoria with the style of
Expensive People
^†
…a sense of deep emotional involvement with Jules and Maureen
^‡
…a sense of despair in terms of
Wonderland
, like a person caught in a maze, unable to get free. In more recent years many of the pleasures of
Do With Me What You Will
…are still with me; the tangle of Hugh’s mind in
The Assassins;
the close identification with Stephen…. I would like to know now what I felt while writing my first published novel, but it’s forgotten. And some of the early stories which were so groping, so experimental in their own way—in terms of my own way of seeing and ordering things.)

A reluctance, though, to save my various drafts. For one reason they are unintelligible: the first drafts are in pen. Scribbled over, doodled upon, X’d out as I transfer passages from notes to another, more formal draft. The leap between notes and first draft is so considerable that it would appear something was lost anyway. And the leap between first draft and final draft is also immense. What takes place on paper is so trivial compared to what takes place in one’s head that the accumulation of working drafts would only confuse anyone who studied them…. Working with a writer’s transcribed notes would be misleading; much is masquerade.

What is the compulsion to disguise oneself…?

Perhaps it is true, as Jung says or seems to say, that the establishing of a “mask” is a built-in instinct in man, an archetype. Not one mask but many. Therefore it is not hypocritical but wise, natural, and valuable—and moral—to create a persona for various contexts. Certainly my own experience leads me to confirm this hypothesis. It is the presentation of an utterly frank, open, trusting, naïve, genuine self that strikes me as being in a way perverse and hypocritical. Far too late in our species’ history to pretend to be an infant…. The value, then, of knowing a number of people who are substantially different from oneself and from one another: in each context one is forced to create a different persona. One comes to like people as they differ from oneself. Even to love. (Does love spring out of a magical awakening of an opposition of intellect or temperament…? There is always the sense of an adventure, the sense of things being thrown up into the air to fall in a new, unanticipated pattern. The “love” I refer to is ideally romantic love, which I haven’t experienced for years, in the sense of its being new, a surprise, etc., but one can have the same general experience in terms of friendship, a milder form—the same “newness,” the thrill of discovering someone very different from oneself. In contrast to this is the marvelous stability of comradely love, marital love, a long-drawn-out lifetime of friendly love.)

…Immersed in poetry, seeing the world (perhaps) in a slightly different way. Images, language, incantation. These new poems are like incantations. I hear the sounds and must match them with the meanings implicit in the poem. The meanings come first…but are in a later sense incidental…the sounds, incantations, overwhelm.

Style supplanting “meaning.”

What is art? All that we can’t be? Can’t control?

“Everything speaking in its own voice.” Yes: and subordinated somehow to our voice, our structure.

Poe is disappointing because nothing speaks in its own voice. All is Poe. Poe Poe Poe Poe. (Must read Dan Hoffman’s book on Poe.)
*
The rhetorical frenzy which I suspect is the result of hurried composition…translated into emotions of an extreme, hardly human sort; comic book drama. In reading Poe I am struck not by similarities between us (which critics have suggested) but the essential difference between us: in my writing everything is human, in his nothing is human. One comes to see the man arranging and rearranging stereotypes (castles, haunted manors, crypts, lovely pale women, etc.) rather than creating character or making the slightest attempt to realize the “character” of a place. He is finally concerned only with the bare idea of a fiction: with theme. With me the reverse is usually true. “Theme” is important, one supposes, but far more important is the livingness of the narrative. There must be life, there must be lives, some conscious and some unconscious…there must be opposition, reconciliation, defeat or victory or…a curious unity….

[…]

May 30, 1976.
…Working on poems. “Holy Saturday.”
^†
Innumerable drafts.

(Last night at the Grahams’—elegant lovely spacious house.
^‡
Elegant lovely people. Kind & generous. The persona I am in their presence evidently deserves their friendship.)

Thinking of the invention, spontaneous & otherwise, of personality. Persona: mask. Personality: mask. Might it be a fact that not even my husband knows me since in his particular presence I am…that which his presence evokes? Without him I am someone else, I would soon be someone else. This is a fact. Neither sorrowful nor joyful, simply an is.

Rereading my interview with Joe David Bellamy after many years.
*
Struck by the hypothetical nature of the persona—experimental—leg-pulling. Even as I typed out those responses I must not have meant them, not even in a hypothetical way. I invented a persona that would seem impressionistic, uncalculating, naïve, “inspired”: but why?

(That one of the most calculating, un-naïve, cerebral, & organized of writers should present to the world a persona that is flighty & unknowing & maddeningly innocent: surely this is an achievement of a kind?)

Why, I think….
Why
I wrote to Bellamy in that manner: might be that I am embarrassed at taking credit for whatever I do. If it’s good, I am embarrassed; if considered bad, embarrassed. By attributing my work to forces beyond my control I am distanced from it. I think that, briefly, explains the falsifications I have loved so dearly.

Innocence masking experience. Spontaneity masking a methodical, precise process. Emotion where there is none; or very little. Girlishness where there is neutrality, if not womanliness of a peculiar sort.

All these and more.

Does one invent a personality in the depths of one’s soul, or does the personality spring up, uncalled, in response to certain people…? I keep hearing a certain girlishness in my voice when I am with certain people. But this is not the voice, certainly, of my classroom personality. Nor is it the voice of my writing…. I must have wanted, all along, to dissociate myself from the writing, to appear to be not the person who wrote the books. A certain necessary dissembling. For we are not obliged, are we, to be “sincere” in a promiscuous manner…?

Gradual change in attitude. From romanticism to a kind of classicism. Acknowledgment & celebration of limits, ends, boundaries. The romantic
soul will not be, in my fiction, dashed to death but merely brought to earth. Mortal all along but now convinced of his or her mortality: hence human.

Love love love love love. The only response the trembling soul can make to the vast indifferent world.

[…]

June 5, 1976.
…Ray was at the University library most of the day; I was alone here. The sober graciousness of solitude. The sense of freedom in being not present in another’s consciousness, not registered in another’s thoughts. Strange sensation. Like having no shadow.

I am so rarely alone here in the house, it’s a novelty, an escapade.

[…]

Worked on “The Insomniac” but didn’t quite finish it.
*
A queer story.

Remembered my years of insomnia. The bedside radio I turned to innumerable stations. Country & western music. All-night shows. Strange sense of…of what?…loneliness, melancholy, romance. I would get up and walk outside, at two or three in the morning, and watch the cars go by on Transit Road, wondering who was in them. Never very many. And trucks; buses. An almost overwhelming sense of—of curiosity, exhilaration. Loneliness. Wonder.

Regarding aloneness: a wild animal raised in captivity will die if it isn’t loved sufficiently; a young beaver, befriended by a couple in Ontario, had to be petted at least every two hours day and night or it would have died. Is this anything so wispy as an “emotion”? Impossible. Evidently we must be touched and we must touch others. We must, or die. I am deluded in my sense of freedom…I am trying to argue myself into something contrary to my instinctive belief.

June 6, 1976.
…Another quiet day of solitude. Lovely weather. Working on “The Insomniac”: trying to fashion an appropriate ending. Writing & rewriting. Reading
Felix Krull
once again but finding parts of it awfully light, insubstantial.
*
Mann’s exhaustiveness in other works had the advantage of being worthwhile; his occasional ironic or comic sequences are, in such contexts, delightful. But strung out one after the other they are less delightful…. Rereading Kierkegaard’s
Journals
after many years. My past self or selves are also evoked as I read and come upon marginal notations. “Life must be lived forward, but understood backward.” But, Kierkegaard—! How vain, how naïve, to imagine one ever understands. I am far less taken by S.K. than I was at the age of twenty. His exciting passages are rare. His “ideas” of course have been assimilated into the very air we breathe—if not made more vital, more dramatic, more frightening by Nietzsche himself. He lacks psychological depth in terms of his own being. He simply does not see—as one must, alas—how his romantic drama with God (i.e., his father’s “curse”) is an inflated projection of his own psyche, requiring the whole cosmos as compensation for the narrowness of private, personal, sensual life. An unnerving egoism in every line.