on the journal, travel, plagiarism, burroughs, and the three steps.

Since that notorious trial in Constantine, I have felt a strong literary urge coming to the fore. My gift for writing is really coming to life these days. I used to have to wait, sometimes for months, for the right moods to write in. Now, I can write more or less whenever I want. I think I have reached a point where the potential I had been aware of all along has now begun to blossom.
- Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad, p. 133

Journals and their purposes have been increasingly on my mind the past few months. I decided to take a class in the Fall focusing on the journaling practice and its consequences on artistic and thoughtful living. I read three works that had affinities and connections to journaling and approached them as a student, that which seeks knowledge and wisdom.

In late August I read Rory Stewart's The Places in Between. It detailed the author's walk across Afghanistan two months after the U.S. invasion in 2001. He walked across Asia, starting in the Middle East and ending in Nepal. He had to skip Afghanistan because the Taliban did not give him permission to cross. After the fall of the Taliban, Rory was given permission to walk across Afghanistan. He is a historian, humanitarian, and diplomat. His journey is detailed in a precise, chronological way, with each day of the hike receiving one or two chapters. On his way he is accompanied by two Iranian soldiers, befriends a dog, meets a prince, gets dysentery, and meets with numerous tribal leaders in the mountains of Afghanistan. His narrative's matter-of-factness and his clear eye in understanding social relations provides an informative and compelling vision of Afghan life. This book reminded me that a story is still one of the best ways to share an experience and moment. Video, sound recording, and photography can only do so much. It is through language that we connect to the world around us through communication.

I also read sections of Isabelle Eberhardt's The Nomad and William S. Burroughs' Last Words. These two books roughly speaking represent the beginning and end of a writer's life. At the time of the writings in The Nomad, Isabelle is twenty years old and ambitious. She wants to become a nomadic traveler, an Islamic mystic, and a prolific writer. A born Russian and later Frenchwoman and Algerian, Isabelle lead a very dynamic and chaotic life. Reading her journal entries immediately made me understand her humanity. She is full of self-doubt and is constantly in search of her higher being. She is very brave and capable, and is remarkably free-spirited. In order to be able to travel freely in the Islamic world, she had to dress and disguise herself as a man. She did not have the same moral basis as the society around her, yet through her faith and her inner convictions she became a person to admire and in some senses imitate.

"I must free myself to create an inner world of thoughts and feelings which will console me in my solitude and poverty, and in the absence of aesthetic pleasures, which are too much of a luxury in my position,"i and "I must also learn to live in the present moment. I must learn to feel more deeply, to see better, and above all, to think."ii She wrote these words when she was the same age I was, and I can relate to them a great deal. I included them in an assignment amongst selections of my own writing without citing her. This gave the 'illusion' that all the writing was mine.

Outside the context of a 'journal' this is plagiarism. Yet I have many objections to plagiarism. The concept of plagiarism is a relatively new phenomenon. Before the universality of libraries writers often took passages and pages from other writers. Herman Melville is a famous example.iii Second, I do not place much importance on the individual in the creation of a piece of art. Much more is going on than 'a writer sitting down and writing.' All sorts of ideas, events, ways of thinking and ideologies permeate any piece of writing. To become conscious of it and to play around with it, to 'see who writes through you' is a valuable exercise. Also I felt that footnoting or otherwise showing the origin of those quotes would detract from its aesthetic value. In a certain way I see footnotes and citations as crippling and encasing words into a certain framework. Of course, a straight word-for-word copying of another's work, or an artless stealing of ideas or material from a primary source should and is looked down upon. What I'm trying to say is that I thank you for allowing me the freedom to play around with my sources.

Reading Burroughs' Last Words was a bit depressing. At the time of writing Burroughs is in retirement from serious writing, and writes a journal in order to sate a decades-long habit of writing his dreams and ideas down. He writes his dreams down diligently, is very upset at a cat's death and is very fond of his cats, and writes often about the evils of the drug war. I felt my own sense of mortality creep up on me on reading these passages. Though much of the wit and charm from his novels comes through in his journal entries, I saw some of the idealistic lustre that Burroughs had in my mind slip away. I found that an easy way to unidealize someone is to read their journals. In journals we are human, more or less. In a novel or a piece of art, we transcend that, we create an illusion of ourselves as better than we are.

In a journaling context, the artist has three primary phases by which a piece of work is created. The first is input. This is life, each second in a day. Input can be a book, a movie, a song, a conversation, a leaf on the ground, anything. The second is recording, creating, writing and drawing and interacting. The third is the selective process. In examining journals we see more closely the first two steps in the process. There is more there, and only later through editing will the writer extract the necessary material to craft a complete and unified piece of art. This is why journals are often boring, disjointed, fragmentary, and mundane. Burroughs mentions in an interview that he wrote six hundred pages of Naked Lunch and only two hundred and fifty made it into the final product.

Burroughs also didn't keep a journal, per se, but saw all his writing as potentially included in a book. I admire this and will move in this direction. The more words I create that go toward a book the closer I get to one. I see my journaling process as moving in the direction of the mini-journal. Fictionalized and fragmentary accounts of life, blown up in a picaresque fashion to entertain and distort the reader's imagination.

In short, Stewart's book is an absolute gem and will be the model for any sort of ethnographic, historic, or socio-economic travels I may have. Eberhardt's struggles and ambitions made me realize I'm not alone despite my reluctance to desire what the mass culture I am a part of desires. I'm not alone in wanting to travel, to write, and to be a more complete and beautiful person. Burroughs taught me that the artist draws everything from life, and that the journaling process can be structured toward art. His vision of life and the world comes through much more clearly in his interviews and shows that an individual and unique conception of the world and how it works can be crafted and built, and is very very possible!

Bibliography:
Burroughs, William S., and Grauerholz, James, ed. Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs. New York: Grove Press, 2000.
Eberhardt, Isabelle and Kershaw, Elizabeth. The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt. Northampton: Interlink, 2003.
Hibbard, Allen. Conversations with William S. Burroughs. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
Stewart, Rory. The Places In Between. Orlando: Harcourt, 2006.