From 1984 Journals

Olivia Dresher

To pick a career is to pick a type of conformity.
Life without mystery means you've finally grown up.

* * *

Emotion is the mind and heart mingling,
longing to be one.

* * *

I feel history in the wind.
I feel my childhood in trees.
I feel the loves I've lost in poetry and music.

* * *

Only insights that I can give away teach me.

* * *

My apartment:
where intimate moods are symbolized
by objects and colors.
To walk into where I live is to walk into me.

* * *

Autumn is home to me.
The cello-sound of early autumn.

* * *

The young man on campus shouted at me, waving his Bible:
"Buddha didn't die for my sins!"

* * *

We're miracles in prisons of self.
We fear those who can break through—
but mostly we're jealous.

* * *

Thoughts are easier to change than feelings, because feelings are built right into our bodies. In contrast, thoughts are closer to the surface, like clothing. If thoughts are our clothes, then they reveal the personality of our feelings; but feelings are our nakedness.

* * *

Art reaches you only if life reaches you.

* * *

What is childhood?
The living myth inside us.
(Those of us who had a childhood.)

* * *

"Fear is faith in reverse."

* * *

Insanity: a perverse union with the self.

* * *

A woman's anger is protest;
a man's is loss of control.

* * *

Desire implies an obsession with some aspect of the material world.
To not desire is to not act.
Desire seeks an object—and wants to be one with it.
But, ultimately, desire seeks to go beyond itself.
But it never can.

* * *

What we all have in common:
we were born furious and scared.

* * *

My thoughts are fast and wild, and I record them as if to catch them and give them to the page forever, so I can be free of them. The slow pen, though speeding, is never fast enough; some thoughts always slip away, back into myself. Hence this desire to write, explore, to catch the thoughts that got away...
Everything I feel, think, and experience demands this kind of expression, as if, without expression, my life would only be a half-life.

* * *

Dogma makes the mind violent.

* * *

A friend wrote:
I feel alone but I don't have enough time to be alone.

* * *

Americans worship what's ordinary.
As if to be ordinary is to be innocent.

* * *

They live trends as if they're living the ultimate truth.

* * *

The mind goes crazy when we put things off,
because the mind remembers everything
and tries to remind us of what we're avoiding.
When we try to avoid what the mind unconsciously remembers,
we get headaches, breakdowns, depression.
There's no escape.

* * *

Nothing happens to me unless it happens to all of me.
I can't localize pleasure or pain.

* * *

Violence as revenge:
People kill because a side of them has been killed.

* * *

Suburbia: where the violence of sameness lives.

* * *

Staying at home is like staying in the past.
The subconscious comes up, but habits take over.

* * *

Intensity is the awareness of not being unified,
longing for unity.

* * *

To doubt is to avoid responsibility, you say?
But maybe doubt is the biggest responsibility of all.

* * *

When we seek something new, we're really seeking to run away
from something old that we're not totally facing.

* * *

From a poem on the radio:
I sing like a bird trapped in the wrong nest.
Out of terror I sing.

* * *

Life without insight is an insult.

* * *

How do people poison themselves?
By trapping their beauty.

* * *

The reason he's so uninteresting:
because the only jokes he "gets" are his own.

* * *

We've become what our bodies can't do.
Hence, our technology,
and why we keep killing the animals.
Our inventions and our wars reflect
our jealousy and revenge.
Innate helplessness has turned us into monsters.

* * *

In back of everything is The End.

* * *

Every moment we're with someone
our whole being is summed up in that moment.

* * *

Life is a story of how we deceive each other and ourselves.

* * *

The god of childhood memories:
a dazzling light surrounded by darkness,
and darkness surrounded by a dazzling light.

* * *

People with small handwriting aren't outwardly emotional.
(I've yet to see an exception to this.)

* * *

Sleep is loss of ego.
Everyone is real when they sleep.