"I Kept A Journal For Years..."(Part Three)

Writing destroys the compulsion within the soul to repeat the past. What is the point of writing? To avoid a living death. Pascal Quignard The screaming silence of no's knife in yes's wound. Samuel Beckett (4) for Paul,2018 I kept a journal for years, a trove of memories of my circle of friends in the 1970s, into the 1980, all dissolved by 2000. But tonight I only summon you, Paul, my friend of fifty plus years. Back in college days, I told you of being assigned to read Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON, all 1100 plus pages. I read half of it, then cleverly used the Index to complete a paper on the while of it. Then you abruptly said, "Write my biography." What a startling request! But it made perfect sense then and still does now. I scribbled pages and pages you saw and approved overtime. And we agreed: we did not want to forget our youths, we had an obscure awareness - this is the time of wonders, wonders and miracles. What I recorded, what you read was the chronicle of a friendship that took root in the fertile soil of the 1960s, a time of hurt and heal, when we sang anthems of freedom and assumed this liberation would grow even more splendid. Instead it crashed, all around us. And then the journal was a refuge, an asylum, a place where waking dreams were planted and reaped. Sometime in the 1980s Anais Nin rescued the journal from mediocrity and humdrum, and the journal flourished once more as "a secret history, " an interior account, a celebration of a vexed but persistent friendship. We might reach inside its bulk and find our trek to find the birch forest with Richard and Rosemary, or your account of meeting Amos Owens, who admitted you to the Sweat Lodge ceremonies, or your bold meeting with John Lily, when his wife intervened for your sake, or the many encounters with Robert Bly in wilderness and city. "Write my biography, " you had said, knowing it would be the biography of our visionary lives. The journal will ever be the high ground of our lives, the heights from which we take in the vista of our age. And if you thank me for writing this journal, I will shake my head and affirm, "All of us wrote this journal. We are all of us both actors and chroniclers."