❧ Notebook Extracts, 2023-24 ❧

The following are excerpts from the pocket notebooks that I keep as journals, roughly over the course of a year from late 2023 to late 2024. Nothing is dated and many entries may be out of order. Sometime in the winter of 2024/25, I made this typescript and then put it away and forgot about it until today. It took about an hour to type it all into the computer.

Most of these excerpts touch on my mental preoccupations with religion, poetry, ethics, and the nature of human suffering. Near the beginning, I was trying to work out a number of things in relationship to my inherited religion, Christianity. The last entries, written around a year later, are the result of a psychedelic experience in which my straggling interest in Christianity was finally swept away, rendered irrelevant through insight.

Of all types of literature, journal entries, especially those written in short fragments, are my favorite genre to read. I do not know if you will enjoy reading this, but my pleasure in creating this collection of fragments is immense.

—October 11, 2025

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"What a monstrosity of an animal, who strikes terror in himself, whose pleasures are a burden to him and thinks himself a curse."
    — Montaigne, "On Some Lines of Virgil"

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Funny how life breaks up into little seasons. I believe in Chinese medicine there are 72 seasons in the year, each lasting around 5 days. I think you could break inner life into such seasons.

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On Gaza: they are 8 hours ahead. As I go to sleep they are seeing first light on their dead.

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Art project: The Thing that Social Media Never Gets to See: box, fully enclosed in black paper, no way in, special objects inside.

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Lord, your existence is not relevant in this matter. Please protect the women in Gaza giving birth by flashlight with crushed limbs and amputations.

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I missed ten years of writing like I missed twenty years of exercise. No matter, the capacity is there to rebuild something.

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I am the person who experiences the dull, daily horror or being a part of many problems and suspects—always has suspected—that I am actually the whole problem. If my modesty would let me believe it.

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I am in a place of transformation. I can't leap into full healing. I have to go through death.

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I am afraid that my anger is bad; that, being on the receiving end of so much misplaced anger as a child, I never want people to experience that from me. I have been protecting people from my anger, or so I think. But I am also protecting myself from the possibility of rejection and other consequences that might follow from expressing my anger.

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I don't know how to express anger without recourse to intellectual justification. Reason always seems to trump anger; I can't feel anger about something if I don't think it's reasonable.

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Because perhaps to feel the right way is equal in my mind with having done the right thing. The notion that my inner state is somehow a reflection of outward reality. Maybe that's how Christians believe in prayer.

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Comparing what I thought prayer was—to sending up a beam of light, coming from a particular place, aimed at a definite, if distant place. But now I see prayer as being like a mucous membrane coming from all over and exuding into not quite sure where. But it comes of necessity from these parts of me where exchange is possible.

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I think it is the act of praying that makes us, not what we pray for or to.

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The sticky vulnerability of prayer, like an uncovered wound.

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In winter, when all color gathers under the edge of the sky.

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Dear Ones, have compassion for me—imperfect and impermanent, flawed and fragile.

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Belief is a flimsy thing to build your religious life one, faith is little better. But it doesn't need to come from the intellect at all. If you feel Jesus's love for you, then you don't need it to solve the problem of hell. Maybe this love is answering a question that doesn't exist.

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Religion exists to fulfill human needs. When it makes itself untenable intellectually or ethically, that's how we know it has gone astray, that human beings are contorted into worship of an idea or institution.

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I am not searching for the content of Christianity, but its form.

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Prayer: I lean toward it being more serious and not colloquial or informal. And for simple, direct language. I want it to be at the crossroads of body, emotion, and intellect.

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Bookbinding project: the accordion book that is a running list of prayers for others as they come up. Make one end detachable so I can add more paper to it.

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At this point in my life, it would be easy or at least tempting to believe that I have mastery of certain things, that I know things about the world. But there is so much that I don't know, that I can't do. I am in apprenticeship to this world until I leave it.

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And it is all hard: success is hard, failure is hard, being perceived is hard, being ignored it hard. The work itself is hard.

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There is only one human thing that works at the speed of the Internet: the fight or flight response.

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I feel that prayer, like poetry, should be useful. What I mean by useful is not that prayer does the trick or gets us what we want. Rather, it lives in the mind like a spoon or mug with a handle--when we reach for it, we can grasp it. In this way, prayer becomes part of us, it is one of our familiar resorts. That's why I think prayers should be broken into pieces for easier carry and memorization. When I am at a death bed or in a job interview or seeing footage of children dying in a far-away war, what are my resorts? What can I grab onto? I believe prayer is of most use when it has structure—assonance, parallelism. Windy, conversational prayer may be a good conversation with God, but it can't be held. Prayer should be a smooth stone you carry in your pocket.

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As long as Christians base their position on a set of intellectual propositions to be believed, they will lose. Not all at once, but slowly in some places and rapidly and catastrophically in others. That is because by framing their religion around truth or falsehood, the Enlightenment has already won. They have accepted the battle on the Enlightenment's terms: that what is objectively true is what matters most.
    But that fallacy is the downfall of both Enlightenment rationality and fundamentalist Christianity. Reason is but one of the human faculties. Others are intuition, emotion, instinct, and somatic perception--and truth can exist in any one of those dimension and be absent from others. It is true somatically that the sun rises and sets, even though that's not what actually happens. It may be true in some dimensions of human experience that God is real or Jesus loves us, even if this is irrational. The mistake we have made as a culture is that we assume that something is untrue if it is rationally false.

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We are tired of being the ones who remember. Remembering as a survival strategy, holding onto a memory so you can watch out and make sure it never happens again. But memory is exhausting. The cherished fantasy of someone who remembers is of someone else who see things and steps in so the rememberer doesn't have to. Or cherished idea that the person who hurt you may forget, but God will remember.

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The right to not pay attention to art seems indefensible nowadays. But I give this up. I write for when you won't pay attention: opaque pages neatly stacked in a closed hard-back on a shelf of a store that you walked by without even looking once. It is the not going, not doing, not reading that is just as important. My mind is a fugitive from culture. Not because it doesn't value culture, but because it cannot stay itself in culture.

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The prayers I had in church growing up where prayers backed by assurance. My prayers come from a place of not knowing, of yearning, failure, desire to do better, of reaching for comfort I know isn't there, feeling powerless, feeling resistant to the things I know I should do but don't want to, unable to stop doing the things I know I shouldn't do.

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Poetry. I have always had the talent but never understood the vocation. Why would I put so much effort into writing and sharing and getting rejected by literary magazines if it were all just for me? But if it's not just for me, but for all of us, the effort feels more appropriate.

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Prayers for the healing of all of my grandmothers.

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Keep looking for things that deepen the relationship, rather than things that threaten it.

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I feel like Lorine Niedecker sometimes, wanting to condense my words into almost nothing.

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There is a man in my head I have been courting for a long time. I fantasize about him crying, apologizing, talking about how he has been hurt, acknowledging how he has hurt others, changing his behaviors, and healing in his own way, of his own accord. He looks different ways, and is responsible for different horrible things, but it always goes the same way: He get shurt, he gets sad, he realizes how he has hurt others, he changes.
    I think I have spent so much of my life courting this man because of men who have owned apologies to me. I will stop looking for him in fantasy, as he never turns up in reality.
    This is a function fanfiction: a man to feeling his feelings, doing the work on his own. But I also think the prevalence of slash/yaoi fanfic among women is that when a man processes his feelings with/for another man, women are freed from the labor that would so often be turned on them. They just get to watch, indulge, feel feelings, and get turned on without having to take care of anyone.

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I am not rich, but I always felt that because I am not rich, I am the victim of circumstance. Now, however, I see that I have consistently made choices in my life that lead away from gaining wealth because wealth isn't part of my values.

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Most of my issues with fatigue are not the fatigue itself, but the mismatch between what my body can do and what I think it should do.

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Emily Dickinson was putting into words things that we often describe in terms. I imagine the way to make her relevant to students nowadays would be to point to her poems and say, "She's describing trauma bonding," or PTSD or bad boundaries or whatever. I have noticed within myself a tendency to reduce my own experiences to terms, which might make them feel more controllable but doesn't actually describe what is happening. Terms are by their nature limited; words have no limits.

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Allow your tenderness in. You feel so finely, so sensitively. It is your strength in a world where it seems to be a weakness. You are always on the verge of being overwhelmed by the pain of the world, past and present. You must let it move through you. Ideas can't be your guide here, feeling must be.

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I have a better understanding now of what I need to do to be a writer. Not a published writer, just one who writes inevitably like birds sing. My goal is not to be published, although I used to think that. It is instead to just write and share.

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What are all the ways I delude myself in service of this illusion, The Good Person? How easy it is to tell lies, how built into the fabric of my days is this need and all of the stories I create to serve it?

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The garden is getting very out of hand. I don't have a good word for the feeling I have when weeding. I am destroying, killing most mercilessly. These beings do not want to die, but they have no choice at my hands. But weeding is what humans need to do to eat. We kill to live, even at the most basic level. That is the paradox. I cannot resolve it. I love life, I think that Life is the most important thing in the universe. But when we live we must kill and maim.

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I have realized that my garden looks shabby because I treat it as a burden rather than a joy.

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Realizing now how my obsession with my goodness is totally arbitrary, completely made up. By the standards of probably most people on earth I am a bad person already: queer, non-monogamous, non-theist, sexually active but without children, (occasional) drug user. Yes, I'm really scum to many, even many living in my own neighborhood. But none of these things makes me feel like I'm a bad person. On the other hand, there are qualities that I don't give any thought to, like working at a library, that would make many people idealize me as "good". It's all arbitrary, relative, made up. So are my own standards of goodness. I can't use them as if they were a true measure. They are not.

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Let us abandon all this self-hatred nonsense. How I hate myself is so arbitrary and irrational and has nothing to do with actually being empathetic, patient, kind, brave, or anything like that. Stop being a good person and start being a real one. The same voice that insists on my badness is just the depression voice, only quieter. I need not listen.

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The only reason to write is to enjoy writing for its own sake and to want to share it. I am stopping caring about being published—for now and maybe forever. Publication is an engine and from what I can tell it does almost nobody good in and of itself. I must hunker down into the act of writing for a long time before I think to be published.

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Reminding myself that I have a right to feel like shit, to not be OK. I don't owe anyone, even myself, feeling great all the time. That's impossible anyway.

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Realizing that I've been going back to gather up parts of myself that I had left behind. There's a basic life force that I am reconnecting with, something before I had to put on all the layers and hide things. The way forward is illumination, honesty, truth, pleasure.

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Prayer is also a way for people to come to terms with something horrible they witnessed, a way of acknowledging lack of power to change or influence what happened.

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Thinking about war: I never care about who wins or loses or how. Never care about military strategy or might. I think those who take interest in those topics treat war as a hobby. Those, I mean, who are not involved directly.
    I always care about what happens to the people who don't fight: the famine, disease, displacements, rapes, and all those things called collateral damage.
    Those who fight wars think that what they do is important. They can't see around it, first the grandeur, then the desolation. The rest of us watch from a distance, or have our hearts broken, or have our parts separated from each other in many ways.

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What if poetry were an experience and a process, rather than a product? It seems silly to have only thought of this now, but it goes against my education in literature.

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I am so mad at myself for all the goddamned time I lost, but I can't get hung up on all that. Had I spent my 20s and 30s being a starving poet activist, I would probably now be mad at myself for having wrecked teeth and no money. And I would likely feel just as guilty about everything.

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This morning I read Stevens' "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction." I of course wasn't going to get everything out of it in a quick read over breakfast, but I got enough of it by the end that it felt a little like bullshit. That a soldier might die for a poem—I won't say that hasn't happened before, but they are generally the worst sort of poems with the crudest messages. Why is poetry a supreme fiction? Can it not be truth? Should men die for words, concepts, and notions? I need to think on it a little more—what poetry is and isn't to me, what its uses are, and what its uses should not be.
    Is that in Steven' view, the highest use of or indicator of the quality of poetry that men will die for it? That it makes their deaths logical or acceptable?

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For the record: I never liked Stevens. I had a copy of The Palm at the End of the Mind for years and finally gave it away. I always felt like I should like him, so I would try intermittently. But now I am old enough to say for myself: I don't like him! His immense talent is apparent, yes. It's not that he lacks talent or skill. It's his obsession with his own project, and his unremarkable contempt for women and Black people that permeates it, that make me dislike him. And yes, he goes on for far too long.
    I know my affinity for women poets who condense, say things in as small a space as possible. That two inches of ivory, yes. Dickinson, Niedecker, Snow. Even Hejinian's clipped precision, as voluminous as it is. These men, on the other hand, who feel entitle to go on and on—Ginsberg, Whitman, Pound, Stevens. What induces them to shut up? Only death.

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Suffering is empty of self-existence. It is value-neutral, neither good nor bad. Pain is an overwhelming and difficult experience, which is why we fear and avoid suffering. But it just is. It has as many blessings as curses.
    This whole thing—the struggles of this being—comes from not wanting to accept the emptiness of suffering. But it must be! We live in the Four Abodes, centered:

We love all beings.
We share their joy.
We share their pain.
We let them go on their way.

This being carries such a burden, so many fardels, because it wants to avoid suffering but also wants the blessings of suffering. It does not want to call grandma because of the awkwardness in doing so, but then feels bad for not having done the suffering necessary to express love. It stays holed up in itself then rues its isolation. And all to avoid suffering, as if what is feared prior to the experience is what is actually experienced when undergoing it. This poor being, like so many others, has mistaken its fears for reality. This being has been running from suffering for so long, not seeing that it is running itself into the La Brea Tar Pits!

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Let suffering be suffering—be willing to suffer. Not in a valiant way that builds up identity, but an animal suffering, a letting be. Not making a show of suffering, not going out of our way to suffer. But if you live your life straightforwardly, there will be times when in order to avoid suffering you must twist and contort yourself. This is what is to be avoided. When suffering happens, accept it in the course of things, don't pull back from it. Then it passes.

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Don't be afraid of suffering. No need to create it, but when it arises do not be afraid. This will be hard to hold to, but I see how I have been led down the path of running from suffering too much over the past few years, and how it has alienated me from life to a degree I find unacceptable.

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