Reading harold_maude's journal

I was thinking this morning about on line journals v.s paper journals and I began to wonder something.

When a person keeps an on line journal does that make them a type of exibitionist, and the people who read them a type of voyer? The reason this question crossed my mind is because of the rating system here. The other on line journal I keep has no rating system, and so there is no way to tell if anyone reads your journal entries. It give it the feel of being very private. And that gives way to being more raw at times, because of the illusion that no one is watching.

When I came here and started writing I figured that no one would read what I had to say even though it's on line and completely public. I figured that like my other journal, which with the exception of one comment to one entry by someone I know, there have been no comments, giving me the illusion that it was hidden in some dark corner, and all of my intense, ravings about things like the ones I keep in my paper journals, that this too would be a place where my thoughts would go unnoticed. But after learning more about this site and that people have the ablity to rate what your saying, that changed how I approached writing here. I found that how I wrote here was different, not as dark or as intense as I do in my other on line journal.

Then as I was thinking about it today, it made me wonder if keeping an on line journal, and reading what was going on in other peoples lives made me both a type of exibitionist and a voyer. Then I had to ask myself if that's what keeping an on line journal is even partly about, does that make me some kind of twisted individual, who needs approval, and who needs watch other peoples lives from a detached place, and end up having some kind of opinion of who they are? If I met any of them in my travles and found out they were someone who's journal I'd been reading and had a bad opinion of them, would it keep me from getting to know them in person?

I think, after sorting through all of this, that I've come to some sort of conclusion about myself. That knowing what I say is being read that it does affect what I write here. If I wrote the same kinds of things here that I do in my paper journals and the other on line journal, I suspect that I might been seen as someone who desperately needs psycheratic help and a unabriged dictionary, I know the dictionary thing would be ok, because when I start writing I end up mispelling words because I'm typing too fast.
I'm not sure how I feel about all of this....and if I let you see all sides of the inside of me, will you take up rocks and throw them or will it cause you to weep, or simply walk away, or will you stay, because I'm as human as you...

He left part of himself here
the other day.
And to pay him hommage
because we miss him
we ended up framing
his empty cigarette package.

You haven't gone far.
I can still smell your thoughts.
They linger
some like onions and fish
others like herbs drying in the sun
or summer roses
all warm and rich,
and still others
like burned left overs
stuck to the bottom
of my favorite pan.

I've had similar thoughts on this topic; I, too, keep a separate online journal, one that does not have a rating system. I have never, however, kept a paper journal, so I must be an exhibitionist.

Only in a mental sense, though. I do not approve of public nudity. ;)

I think part of the reason I've never kept a paper journal is that I don't like to hand write things for an extended period of time. It makes my hand cramp up and I usually end up smearing the ink or crossing things out.

But the main reason I post things online is not so much to get approval as to simply feel that someone might be listening. Talking to friends is excellent, but people on a forum like this one, who you've never met in person, can sometimes be the best objective audience you could find.

As far as reading the journals of others, I usually only read ones with subjects that catch my eye, or those of people I've interacted with on the forums long enough that I know they always have something interesting and worthwhile to say. And some of it is natural curiosity-- hey, s/he is an intriguing person intellectually; what are they like as a human being?

But I don't consider reading the public journals of another person that you don't even know personally to be voyeurism. After all, if they wanted it kept a secret, they wouldn't share it on the world's most public forum, would they?

My stepdad isn't mean, he's just adjusting. -Death to Smoochy

Intersting thoughts...thank you for a different view. I've been doing alot of introspection lately, searching my heart and soul for the foundations of my motives. Sort of a self check, and in all my thinking I had not honestly considered why I read other peoples work, except that when I "see" only their words stripped of all flesh, it takes away all obstructions.

I've come face to face with some things about my self that I'm not exactly sure I like. Having some different views on the same thing helps. Thank you.

I have been reading the journal entries of harold_maudeand Bunk, and it has sent my mind spinning off in several directions. I find it a challenge that I love, to find the common thread within my thoughts. When I first logged on, I read Bunk's journal entry #26259, and began to respond, but then realized that his writing was reminding me of a piece of writing which I committed to my paper journal in 1993. I went back, dug it up, and committed it to my online journal here under the title of Memory and Forgetting. I decided if anyone accidentally read it after reading Bunk's post, then they could see how the threads and ripples of water are so deeply interconnected that we can't even be sure where they originate.

There is a German word, something like 'the gnoesphere' which I have heard before, which refers to the uncanny way that several people in vastly different places and times can have similar thoughts. I think what actually happens is that we perceive ourselves as seperate, and therefore able to watch each other, when in reality, we are all one. We really are. Most of us just don't know it, and trying to explain it is impossible. It isn't understandable through any math or science which we know. It is something that you feel in your bones. One day, you just know it. It is as if, when talking to other people you are collecting the other pieces of your different selves, as in the 'tikkun olam' of Kabbalistic lore. The vessels which were broken at the beginning of time, are being pieced together again, like a broken tea cup.

Is it voyeurism to read what other's write when it echoes your own thoughts?

I have come across several responses to posts on this website, where people have expressed gratitude that someone else said what they wish they had the capacity to put in words. When a writer commits words to paper, he sometimes forgets that he is not only doing so for himself, but for many others. He is speaking for others who remain silent. He is breathing new life into the thoughts and minds of others, like a flute held to the lips and breathed into after years of not having been played. The flute of human bones, like a box of bones, like the box of the brain, like the quena made of human bone.

I, for one, do feel like an exhibitionist, but what is wrong with that? In exposing myself, I allow walls that have been built up from years of pain, as well as reticence of even the joy, for fear of jealousy, to be broken down. I feel like a butterfly crawling out of its cocoon.

And when I look at writing such as Bunk's:

When you are watching a pool of water and it is disturbed by a single drop, there is a splash and the ripples spread across the surface.

I feel that someone else must be feeling somewhere else in time, that their writing, that my writing, that other's writing has set them off on a course which they had never seen as clearly until that moment.

As for how that pertains to this website, each drop of water( each writer) splashes into the water(NAO), and the ripples eddy forth slowly...

As harold_maude says:

the cosmic dance, we are all part of it, and that makes us one...yes?

Even when we are gone, from the NAO, from our homes, from the earth, the ripples we send out are echoes of us, overlapping into other echoes of us, until they are indistinguishable from the beginning drop of water. It would follow, as well, that since memory can be cellular in the brain cells of those we come in contact with, that we are really never forgotten, and therefore, we really never die. Even if the people whose lives we have touched can no longer actively remember us, like the ripples of what was formerly a drop of water, we continue to exist for eternity... our minds, ideas, thoughts being linked for all eternity. Whether someone logs onto a website like the NAO or not, whether someone can write their thoughts easily or not, does not matter. Someone will speak for each of us in time, if we cannot do it ourselves, because we truly are all one.

When I wrote Memory and Forgetting originally in 1993, from a place of deep sadness, and existential angst, I could not forsee, that in reading these last few posts by other writers here, I would find the link, the thread, between my current way of thinking, and that of the past. Thank you.

My mind is made up...not like my bed, which is a mess.

This post was edited by rosyxxx on Sep 08, 2004.

Hmmmmm...seems we are all being drawn together by cosmic threads that are driven by solar winds from some distant star...

when the question of voyarism and exibitionism posed its self in my field of vision, I had to explore it. I'm in a place right now of alot of question, and searching for answers that deal with the depts of who I am and why I do what I do...it's been kind of crazy in my head for a while.

I've been reading past journal entries in my other journals and several of them deal with the need to fight the want for death. Seeing nothing but blackness and not being able to find a way to stop them. Like going through a type of death. Here however, because I'm aware that what I write is read, I'm finding I involuntarily keep thoes other things on a chain...I know that sounds kind of strange. But it's almost a knee jerk reaction. I don't know if that makes sense.

It's almost like this is a safe haven from falling into complete madness. I've been doing some reading lately that suggests that madness is just mearly another form of genius. I don't know if it's that, but I do know that there are times when I just want to vacate the planet because everything in society is so ugly and so violated that it makes everything in me scream in pain.

reading the entries of other people the last few days makes me wonder if on some level there is a desperate cry going up that has made the need to be voyeristic and exibionistic a nessity, I don't know if that makes any sense...maybe I am just going crazy....