4th June 2025
A description of the purpose of the website Diary, such as this can be remarked upon without undermining the very same
The reader may share a feeling with me that it seems prudent to keep a diary, though, in my case, I have never been able to settle upon a theme for such a thing, for the most obvious one — myself — holds little interest for me (which is not to say that I do not ruminate or introspect, for I do these in excess, but rather that I should not like to reify such habits by sitting down to them with pen and paper).
But the perceptive reader will have concluded that I must have devised an answer to this conundrum, for here before them is a diary entry. However, I cannot reveal my answer except circumscriptively, by relating how I was inspired by Freud’s account of free association in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899):
For [dream interpretation], a certain psychic preparation of the patient is necessary. A double effort is made to stimulate his attention for his perceptions and to eliminate the critique with which he ordinarily views the thoughts which come to the surface in him. It is advantageous for concentrated self-observation for the patient to occupy a restful position, for him to close his eyes, and for him to be explicitly directed to relent in the critique of the thought-formations which he perceives. He must be told further that the success of the analysis depends upon his noticing and telling everything that passes through his mind, and that he must not allow himself to suppress an idea because it seems unimportant or irrelevant.
… [when the patient engages in critique] he rejects some of the ideas which he has perceived and cuts short others, so that he does not follow the trains of thought which they would open, and toward still other thoughts he may act in such a manner that they do not become conscious at all — that is to say, they are suppressed before they are perceived. In self-observation, on the other hand, one has only the task of suppressing the critique; if he succeeds in this, an unlimited number of ideas, which otherwise would have been impossible for him to grasp, come to his consciousness.
Freud observed that some of his patients struggled with this practice and he suggested that it requires a temperament ordinarily found in artists, quoting Friedrich Schiller on a correspondent’s parallel difficulties with creative expression:
The reason for your complaint lies in the constraint which your mind imposes upon your imagination. It is harmful to the creative work of the soul if the mind inspects too closely the ideas pouring in at the gates, as it were … In an artist, the mind withdraws its watchers from the gates, the ideas rush in pell-mell, and it is only then that the great heap is looked over. Critics are ashamed or afraid of the transitory madness which is found in all creators, hence your complaints about barrenness: you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.
The intuition we started with — that diaries are surely useful things — is for me an intuition that they can be conduits for creative activity, but insofar as this is correct, there is nothing else that can be said, for to say any more would be to make certain discriminations about their form and function which would suffocate possibilities as yet unperceived. The only practical course of action is to write without justification or design, as any analysis of how to proceed can only degrade that which it seeks to refine.
from The Way of Chuang Tzu by Thomas Merton
When an archer is shooting for nothing
He has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous.
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
Or sees two targets—
He is out of his mind!
His skill has not changed. But the prize
Divides him. He cares.
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting—
And the need to win
Drains him of power.