(Reading early Journals 1968 – 1975 Written in March 2008)
I’m still feeling a little strange. It could be from reading through my old journals. I’ve been reading through the breakdown in Davis and coming back to Maine. Mostly desperate outpourings of misery. Not much hard data. Lots of evidence for post-traumatic stress. Maybe it’s that I feel no wish to try to communicate with her — she is so lost and floundering, and there are so few cues to who she really is. And her analysis of what’s going on inside her seems to me now to be wildly off base and useless. She’s so disconnected from everything. Desperately wanting to be rescued, and so unbelieving of rescue that she’s trying to create a world inside of herself where she can live.
I’ve been reading the City of the Solstice (1970) and it’s staggering. Descriptions of my experience in California alternate with fantasy work on “the Company of Thirteen” and “the Bible of the Future”, and with passages graphically describing the depression and terror of PTSD. Because I’m so depressed I think the writing is clumsy and boring, but it’s not. It’s plain and simple and direct, without the literary and poetic flourishes that characterize my earlier writing. I like it now. And the fantasies express needs for community, for friends I can talk to, for cosmic connection, for meaning. I’m desperately lonely, and at the time I thought it was because I was defective and worthless, but now I can see that it was simply that I was too different, too intelligent, too far out in my thinking. The people that I can actually carry on a good conversation with are rare.
I’ve finished reading Mandala — written my first year in Brunswick. (1975) It’s fascinating and discouraging. I am so wise — I see things so clearly on the intellectual level. But I haven’t a prayer of putting them into practice. Tho I haven’t a clue about that yet. I can see how that might lead to chronic depression — to have so many good ideas and be unable to enact them in reality. To be so ineffective. All the pieces of my life are there: the Terror, the Depression, the struggle with low energy and blaming myself for it, the times of blazing energy and creativity. I wish I had put in more details of daily life.