Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Altered Journal: Violent Sheep

I have found journaling in existing books very handy to do in the car, waiting rooms, all sorts of places where I don't have a lot of time or room for pens, watercolors or supplies. There is something spontaneous about it--in the moment. But I have to laugh at the expressions of people observing me as I desecrate a perfectly good hard covered book. They are priceless.

The photos here are of raw journaling. No planning. No direction. Not meant to be pretty. Akin to an idea generating process called clustering where each single idea or word generates other thoughts, other words about an issue, like branches of a tree, each reaching out and away from the original single thought or word toward some new idea... This spontaneous play of words and ideas is just a beginning. Gathered together into some kind of sense, the journal entry to the right comes together something like this:

Move on, in, over, inside--slowly. Teach a lesson.
I shake. Shudder. Sigh. Hostage?
I exhale again and again. Emotion. Discomfort. A flood of feelings.
A willing hostage. Sacred. A prisoner of desire.
A flood of passion. Denied. Diffused. But not disguised.
Released and built again. Foreboding. Impending.

I anticipate: Command me.


I am having a little trouble veering away from the subjects of the books I journal in and, as a book collector since my childhood, I have more than my share of books to alter. Tyranny of the Meek:Violent Sheep by Michelle Cole (1980) is basically about a culture of passive aggressiveness and lends itself well to entries about power struggles of both a positive and negative nature, lovely conning personality types, and about a rather unsavory ex of mine.

In the future, I'd like to take a book and pull a theme or story from it that has absolutely nothing to do with the book's original premise. That would be a challenge.

These particular entries, which are pretty straightforward, barely embellished and not by any means considered finished, suggest an enticing play of power rather than passive aggressiveness:

Take the wool from our eyes:

Thousands of scenes create possibilities. Offering a chance within minutes an opportunity to express.

The Gauntlet, larger and more complex. Increasing control at the hands of god; not the monster.

Something else happens. Something more than control.

An Altered Journal

This site will feature my journal posts, and I promise to experiment. It won't all be pretty, but journaling and art fill a need it me that I can't go without feeding.