Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Sometimes when I feel like I'm drowning in frustration and disappointment with myself, I clear the deck, delete the blog (how many has it been now, how many hundreds and hundreds of posts vaporized?), tear up the manuscript, shred notebooks, toss hundreds of pages of notes, poems, journal entries, etc, without looking back. I don't understand the compulsion to save everything one does. I don't think one can save oneself.

6 comments:

  1. I understand that impulse completely, and have committed blogocide myself on a few occasions. I can't shred notebooks or throw out paper with writing on it, though. That's harder to do I think.

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  2. I've ripped out entire (old, handwritten) journals/ notebooks leaving only the spines - which I keep as objects. but erasing digital files - too easy. where does it go? it goes nowhere.

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  3. rappel,

    the mental image of your pageless journals is haunting me. i'm imagining a library of such volumes. floor after floor of erased effort.

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  4. your imagination is a wonderful architect!

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  5. I only deleted one month of my blog a few years ago. It was May. It was a bad May. It feels entirely ephemeral to me anyway. I burn my old notebooks regularly though. A big fire and in they go everything. Who needs all that old crap? I don't. Make way for the new.
    love,
    Rebecca

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