The Journal
There was a bar once upon a time in Peoria that had a New Years’ tradition where everyone present would write down something bad that happened to them the previous year —a bad job, a break-up, etc.— and proceed to throw the piece of paper into a small fire. It signaled a kind of closure, an opportunity for rebirth, a cleanse from the strains and darkness of the past.
Like so many mystical behaviors, I love the idea these types of actions signal, even if I understand more needs to be done to overcome hardship than to simply chuck a piece of paper into the flames.
I value when we turn to the elements as a kind of holiness. Isn’t at least a little interesting that we think of both water and fire as elements of rebirth? Despite all the ways we look towards something spiritual beyond ourselves, we still look for ways to latch on to what is tangible and real.
When I started writing songs, I did so in a small journal. One of those nice, overpriced, but fairly typical items you’d find on the shelves of Barnes & Noble. Compact enough to carry anywhere, but college-ruled so that I could actually fit entire songs on one page. It was in this journal that my songwriting lived, the sort of artifact you could see and touch. You could see my failed attempts at abandoned songs, the constant crossed-out lyrics, the laboratory of my creative life. In an era before I was writing books, this journal was the singular holy grail of my creative outpourings.
The journal eventually filled up, and the artifact was complete, no longer a living, breathing, changing thing, but a testament to the songwriter I had become in the interim filling of its pages. This brought about an opportunity.
There is a story —possibly apocryphal, I don’t know— of Picasso painting something on a window in real time while a group of people looked on. He carefully obsessed over the details until he finally came to the end, looked at the work, and promptly destroyed it. In the story I heard, the people dramatically gasped, outraged by, or lamenting, the loss of such a beautiful piece of art. The lesson Picasso was teaching was that art is valuable even if it's transient. He did the work, the people present saw the work, the cycle was realized. It feels like he was practicing the painting version of oral tradition. Art could be ephemeral and still matter. Perhaps matter even more because of that ephemerality.
There is a line in the movie Troy where Achilles says that “the gods envy us; they envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed.” I think Picasso and Achilles are speaking the same language. Not only is temporary navigable, it’s powerful. It’s defining.
I thought of these things as I stared at the journal. On one hand, it was holy, a singular artifact with no equal anywhere else on the planet. On the other, it was finished. The work had been created, given to the world by way of records, and the New Years’ tradition of the bar spoke loudly. The value wasn’t that I have this journal in my possession at all times, but rather that I ever had it in my possession. I wasn’t finished making music, so perhaps there was some catharsis to be had in ridding myself of this journal. New songs would be written. New journals would be filled. It was an opportunity to move on.
I’m big on these sorts of moments. Lines of demarcation, allowing any excuse to straighten the coat, brush off the pants, and start fresh. I didn’t have a fire in my bedroom, so my transformative moment wasn’t to be quite as dramatic. All the same, I sat with the journal on the floor of my bedroom and ripped out each page, one by one. I took a moment with each song, glancing at the birthplace of each of these creative actions that I’ll never be able to fully explain. To each I gave an appreciative nod, and tore out the page with conviction. I watched (and listened) as each song was ripped from its cradle, the journal getting thinner with each tear. No matter my feelings of each song, they received the same fate, finally given the appropriate equality they each deserve in the history of my musical journey. Until, finally, the last page was torn and all that remained was the faux leather cover, like a shed snakeskin lying useless on the ground.
The journal had every song I wrote up through These Hills Are Gonna Rise (2019). For the two albums since, I have relied on my convenient, but less-romantic, Notes app on my phone. Per usual, I welcome the convenience, but recognize something is lost in that transition. But for the next album, a shiny new composition notebook is perched atop my keyboard, already beaming with the first new song for the new record.
I wondered if I would regret destroying the journal. Would there be days when I felt that I had obliterated something I shouldn’t have? Something that should be in the Museum of Brian —or an actual museum should I become something notable someday.
In the Book of Ecclesiastes, there is a lot of talk about everything being “vanity and a chasing after wind” —there’s another one of those elements popping up again. Buddhism speaks often to the impermanence —much like the wind— of all things. Does the journal even matter? Do the songs themselves even matter?
They do inasmuch as they add another chapter to the story of humanity, or as Walt Whitman so beautifully wrote in “O Me! O Life!”:
What good amid these, O me, O life?
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
Like Picasso’s window painting, the impermanence is the strength of the work that I do, that you do. The privilege is that of adding a link to the chain, driven not by how long that work lasts, but that while you were here, the chain remained strong.