Journal Interruptus. Robert Roth

Robert Roth photo by Armando Mejia

 

 

Once while sitting in a park writing in my journal I thought if I lost this journal and someone found it what an interesting experience it would be for them to read it. And for the next number of months I continued writing in it with the thought of that person finding it. It was fun. The words came very easily.  There was hardly a word or sentence I had to change. It was quite a document.

 Other times I’ve written in my journal and I can barely read my own hand writing. My thoughts running way ahead of my hand. I’m not yet inside my own thoughts. And if anyone would find that journal they would not be able to make heads or tails out of it. 

Recently in the news I’ve read various situations where police have confiscated diaries, retrieved correspondences from computers, raided personal web sites and have used the words they discovered to both arrest and prosecute people. To think that the state can invade the most personal of conversations, the one you are having with yourself,  is chilling. It is a particularly vile form of repression. And when you think that most of the people who engage in this form of  repression have a hard time distinguishing between fantasy and reality, it makes the situation all that  more frightening. 

Now when I write in my journal I have police investigators in my brain. They are there collaborating with all the other forces that freeze me, scare me, inhibit me. I find myself now subtly censoring my own entries. I have twinges of unease that what I write could be used against me in a legal case. I know that this is pretty far fetched. But for others it hasn’t been far fetched and the consequences for them have been horrific. And it is a warning to the rest of us how far the forces of repression in this country [The U.S.A.] are willing to go. 

  This type of inhibition makes  it harder for me to explore, in the privacy of my own journal, a thought or a situation. What I write could be exactly what I think or feel.

 But it just as well could be  a dimension of a feeling or a thought that is magnified so that it can be examined.  In any case it is horrifying that someone can take anything I write in my journal, not something I’ve decided to make public (an increasingly menacing undertaking), and process it through a brain that is not my own and assume they can even have a clue to what I am doing. And when that brain doesn’t have my best interest at heart, when it is prone to projection, arrogance and punitive vengeance,  it is even scarier still.  I simply do not want the raw material of my journal in the hands of people who sublimate their own fury and hatred into laws and repression!!!            

The above is a journal entry. It was written in a café after I had been writing about some sensitive personal and political matters and felt a shadow looking over my shoulder.