When mulling over ideas for our diary, keep in mind
that the entire rationale for the character diary is to resolve the
emotional turmoil that dominates so much of our own lives. We cannot
reveal the source of that turmoil by telling stories of chivalrous heroes and
virgin heroines. Some of our character
diary must be emotionally cathartic, a place to detail and dump the worst
of which we are capable, the most intense and evil of our desires. We must
be familiar with our own evil before we can hope to trace its origin back
in the tangle of our emotions and fully understand what it represents and
what its consequences would be if freed in our lives for real.
Our imaginary scenarios need not be sanitized. Ideals
are abstracts. Using ideals as a template for behavior, idealized goodness
and idealized evil, is to erect a facade against the nitty-gritty of the
mundane. Ideals of both good and evil are often used as a cloak behind
which we hide anything that falls short of perfection. It's far from
uncommon to see adolescents who cannot hope to reach the pinnacles of
sainthood decide instead to tap into the depth of evil, as if good and evil
exist in such terms beyond the brightly colored pages of comic books and
Sunday sermons.
If perfection is an ideal in our life, our character
diary is still useful in delineating exactly what a concrete ideal
entails. Ideals are like the poles of a spectrum, but we mock our ideals when feigning our behavior. Playing pretend is senseless. We
cannot hope to achieve perfection in the real world. When we try to be
good, we are confessing our imperfections, or we wouldn't have to try to
be good. We can't achieve good without knowledge and acknowledgment of
imperfection. One is defined in terms of the other.
When we write our diaries, we write as if these
fictional people and events are real. If they ring true to our ears at the
time we write them, we have achieved our goal. They may not ring so true
at a later date. Our ulterior motives will visibly seep to the surface,
which is exactly what we want to see happen.
Areas of our diary that lack emotional intensity and
sound stilted or artificial are indications of our unwillingness to
'confess our sins'. We are toying with puppets rather than expressing
gut-felt emotion. We can circumnavigate unpleasantness and do our
preaching, if we wish, but we'll recognize it as propaganda intended for
our own ears. We are not writing to impress others. We have no one to
deceive. If we bore ourselves writing the character diary, we must look to
levels of self-inflicted repression that may be causing dangerous levels
of monotony and tedium in the real, work-a-day world.
If our diary sounds too emotionally homogeneous, toss
in an evil villain, and then write from the vantage point of this villain.
Let him do his evil unrestrained. How does too-perfect protagonists appear
from the point of view of a bad guy? What's the bad guy trying to
accomplish? Is he frustrated, or just callous?
Again, there need be no taboos or off-limit subjects in our
character diary as long as we keep them private. Our deepest and darkest
fantasies seethe away in the dissociated and unrecognized depths of
ourselves and wreak their havoc at that level regardless. We can seek
outside help if these fantasies trigger actual urges to harm ourselves or
others. Otherwise, they need to be dragged into the open for inspection
and analysis no matter how much we fear or secretly enjoy them.
The greatest motivation for 'evil' in the world is
infantile rage. Lust bereft of love or compassion inflicted upon a victim comes in a close second. The entire purpose of our character
diary is to stir up the content of our emotional depths and catch
ourselves rationalizing, justifying and intellectualizing bad behavior of
this nature. It needs to be caught and recognized for what it is.
The purpose of the diary is not to change our behavior.
Rather, we need to understand the emotional dynamics of our lives. We need
to have some insight into what is happening in the background when our
triggers are tripped. The last thing we need to be doing is to to beat
ourselves up over what we see as deficiencies. Beware the temptation to
subdivide the psyche into bad guy/good guy, Doctor Jeckle and Mr. Hyde
personalities. Think of bad behavior as largely unintentional programming.
It's not what we really want out of life. Our
belief system in general is causing a problem and needs review and reassessment from time to time.
Two more practical rules apply to our diary. We write
in a loose-leaf notebook so that pages can be added at a later date. If we
are using a computer, we put our diary file in its own folder. Voice
recordings are discouraged. We will fear being overheard as we speak. We
may not wish to say aloud 'bad' words we would otherwise write on paper.
We may begin our diary in one file, but if we enjoy the
challenge, we'll wind up with more than one diary and character to write
about. We may wind up with many, and then stories to incorporate them all
into a single 'playground'.
We date our entries and then put away what is written
for the arbitrary period of one month. We continue adding entries to our
diary, but we don’t read files less than one month old once they are
written. We don't edit them. We allow bad grammar and spelling to stand.
Later, we may see reasons for this mistake or that and find our errors of
utmost importance.
As we add our entries, we will sound reasonable to our
own ears. Reading them cold a month later, we may become suddenly anxious
to revise, to hide the bloopers and blunders and excessive fetishes that
inadvertently reveal too much about ourselves, stuff we'd prefer not to
see the light of day. We find it suddenly possible to read between the
lines, to see what we secretly meant to say as opposed to what we said for
the sake of prudence, or to be politically correct.
Rather than hide such blunders, we circle them with a
red marking pen.
Self-deception is an amusing process. It's a process of
chasing one's own tail, telling white lies, catching one's self doing so
and covering it over with a rationalization, intellectualization, or
justification, other white lies and machinations, except they never hold
for long and need to be constantly adjusted, upgraded and redone.
There's nothing wrong with these self-deceptions, these
lies we tell ourselves. The less divided we are between thinker and
thoughts, perceiver and perceptions, the less we are inclined or even able
to commit these self-abusive offenses. They just need to be acknowledged
as self-defeating and disarmed. They do damage because they fool us far
more often than they fool others. Even when we get sincere nods from
others, if we were telepathic, we'd
too often hear an exasperated, "Oh, boy, here we go again..."
This is what we've been wanting to uncover all along, a
peek through the weak spots of our facade. Thoughts cannot stay slippery
when committed to paper. They get pinned down in concrete. A critical eye
at a later day renders their depths as transparent as glass.
As well, we may be surprised, not so much by what we
wrote, but by other story lines to which we alluded and discarded. Fiction
is like spending that one dollar bill mentioned earlier. We can imagine
unlimited uses for a buck. We have all those things we want to
buy in mind when we spend that bill, but we can only spend it on one
thing, not that entire wish list. Afterwards, we are ever so briefly
depressed and confused. What happened to all those other things we wanted
to buy?
But, unlike a one dollar bill, we can, anytime we wish,
go back in our character diary and pursue any of those potential jump-off
points for new story material. Regardless, we'll know of their existence
and we'll know our priorities. We'll know why we chose the one story line
over the others. We'll know our motivations for doing so.
As mentioned, our character diary may dwell on the
subjects of sex and violence and other, equally unsavory behavior. The
entertainment industry has a particularly difficult time balancing the
suppression of sex and violence with the potential for earning big bucks.
We are told by self-styled moralists that it’s not good to peek into the
darker corners of the human soul, but we love doing so anyhow. Dwell too
much on dark subjects and we may be tempted to express them in real life,
they say, or fall prey to them, and there's a certain truth to that
observation. But since when has attempts at suppression managed to contain
human misbehavior? Since when do the good-doers manage to escape their own
temptations in the end? They've already made it clear that they understand
the dark side of human behavior well enough.
Why the persistent tie between sex and violence to
begin with? Sexual violence caters to both masochistic as well as sadistic
tendencies. We all harbor a touch of both in the primitive depths of
ourselves. Are we all evil and perverted at heart?
Because sex and violence will be a subject of
contention that tends to creep into fiction and may undermine the
usefulness of our diary if avoided, we’ll address the issue. There is an
answer to the tie between sex and violence lying in wait in a most
unexpected area of our being. It evolved in the distant reaches of our
evolutionary past.
Simply put, sexual passion is derived from the archaic
and primal feeding frenzy. Watch piranhas frothing about their bloodied
prey and it’s almost as if those simple-minded little brains have been
switched into a controlled epileptic seizure, one that feels really good,
like an orgy of sex. As soon as the food supply is exhausted, the seizure
is switched off and the fish are back into search mode.
The feeding frenzy is a quick and easy way to acquire a
full stomach. While the food supply is available, the most efficient way
to consume it is quickly and completely en masse.
Obviously, Mother Mature is playing nasty games with
the pleasure centers of the piranha brain to ensure efficient feeding. The
piranha froth away because it feels good. It's fun, and sexual
reproduction is another necessity animals must engage in. It take a bit of
time and patience to complete. Do they do it
with a sense of duty and responsibility? Hardly, not any more than we do.
The same kind of frenzy utilizing the same invaluable
pleasure-center is used in sexual behavior. The pleasure center is
overloaded to ensure compliance to and culmination of the act, but notice
as an aside that the pleasure center caters to conscious presence and is
far more than just a motor reflex. Conscious presence is the recipient of
the reward. An orgasm means nothing to a being who is not conscious.
Sex is a powerful force in our lives, but an act that
is absolutely necessary to survival. Conscious presence may, and often
does, try to resist the siren's cal, not because of the inconvenience, but
because we're a bit ashamed of our autonomous plumbing. We make noises
having sex. We're equally upset by farts and burps. All-powerful egos are
in control of the human realm, or so we would like to believe, but babies
must be born whether we want them or not.
Mother Nature has other cards up her sleeves when mommy
takes her first look at her smiling, gurgling offspring, and when daddy
realizes what a cool thing he's inadvertently done. Nurturing mode kicks
in, and more stimulus to the pleasure center, everything from the
sensation of soft skin on one's finger tips to the suction cup of a small
mouth on an erect nipple.
The link between the sexual orgasmic frenzy with the
feeding frenzy and the deep confusion between the two isn't at all
difficult to follow. Bugs may eat their partners while having sex. Mammals
use their teeth and their jaws to immobilize their sexual partner. We
humans refer to our ‘sweethearts’ as 'lamb-chops', 'sweetie pies', 'honey
buns', 'pumpkins', or 'gum drops'? Do we normally have sex with gum drops?
Haven’t we ever heard little old ladies murmuring, “Oh, isn’t she (or he)
just sweet enough to eat?” as they dot over some hapless infant? We
might wonder how many children have been traumatized by just such
ordeals.
Why are our most endearing expressions of love those of
cannibalism? We need to at least be aware of the nature and origin of dark
and primal behaviors. Suppression and ignorance will not further the aims
of our cultured and civilized selves.
Therefore, if we incorporate sex in our character
diary, we should not concentrate on the 'spiritual' aspect of passion at
the expense of darker urges we encounter now and then. Ensuring that
explorations of these dark aspects of our desires get put to paper provides
a more accurate understanding of the issues involved. Nothing ‘spiritual’
is ever lacking in ulterior motives.
We let our diary character exhaust its passions
whatever they may be. We take care to express absolutely everything we
need to express, embarrassing stuff, stupid stuff, disturbing stuff, and
then we retrace our material before we finish the entry, not to edit the
material, but to add details to our account. We add commentaries from our
characters point of view and allow them to explain themselves fully. We
add witnesses to these events and their valuable perspective of events.
We take the reality of these fictional people
seriously. Our reactive processes have the power to create an endless
array of personalities, most of which could have been our own, given
slightly different circumstances. We are all ultimately fiction, the
product of choices of perspectives of consciousness that have no identity
beyond their unique and inviolate, acausal point of view from which
space-time lives are constructed.
Next to sex, death is the second major emotional issue
with which we content. If diary characters die, we dissect, not their
corpse, but our feelings and motivations for those deaths. If we take
those deaths too much for granted, or feel satisfaction, we may have a bit
of a problem to work out. An experiment was once done in which ordinary
people were given the power to inflict electrical shocks to people who had
committed various fictitious offenses. In reality, the electrical shocks
were faked. Had they been real, more than a few subjects would have been
executed by their self-styled, morally superior judges taken at random
from the streets. We can be self-righteous and superior and feel our
enemies deserve personal harm, but very few people do bad things because
they feel themselves, or know themselves, to be evil. Most evil is
committed from a vantage point of moral superiority and seen as good,
justifiable, or at least necessary.
So, we must vary our vantage point, even if we must
force ourselves to become someone's mother, father, or child, and suffer
character deaths from those tragic points of view as well as from the
point of view of the murderer, or the victim. We must know that good
and evil have a tendency to reverse roles when we switch perspectives, and
we cannot be afraid to switch perspectives. Evil is not a supernatural,
amorphous cloud of 'I just want to hurt you because its my job
description'. It wears a human face. It needs something, and very many of
us at one time or another have been tempted to take what we need rather
than earn or ask for it.
We do not fear to write about powerful human emotion in
our character diary, but we are advised not to get lost in those emotions.
Too often, they are the rantings of the infantile contained within each of
us and contain very little in the way of true power. As an example of true
power in our human worlds, consider the newborn infant. Babies are
fragile creatures who take years of intensive nurturing before they attain
autonomy. Think about the energy it takes to raise a child to adulthood as
opposed to the energy it takes to kill on the spur of the moment. All of
the disease and stress of the environment and man's predilection for war
has never been sufficient to defeat the adaptive and unadulterated force
of a parent's love for a child, derived from our overall desire and ability to protect and nurture one
another.
How many times have we been told that the world is
filled with evil? Take a look around and see that it is filled with light
and life and only tainted by evil. Write about the dark side of human existence as a catharsis, but
persist long enough to reemerge into a lighter place.
We do not censor ourselves, but we have no intention of
ever letting anyone read what we have written. If we are inclined to do
so, chances are we are writing to impress that other person and not for
our own purposes. If we write for ourselves, we will not want to share it
with others. If we are using a word processor, freeware encryption program
are available on the internet to hide our files from prying eyes.
Working on the diary daily keeps the imagination
engaged. A sentence or two per day would be an adequate minimal effort. At
times, hopefully, we will want to write more.
In the end, we may find our diary useful for
brainstorming, for disciplining the ephemeral, fleeting, and chaotic
content of the imagination. We explore scenarios of confrontation and
interaction with others. Words on paper or on a monitor stay put long
enough to give the opportunity for deeper thought, enhancement, or
reconsideration.
Writing our character diary alerts us to the nature of
daydreaming. Fiction is a means of organizing the chaotic nature of
daydreams. On paper, we slow them down and fix them in place long enough
to study their valuable content.
A study of daydreams is the best means of keeping track
of a train of thought, and the character diary is a controlled study in
daydreams. Remembering our train of thought at any given moment enables us
to backtrack and consciously rerun the train of our associative thoughts.
They show us the emotional and cognitive foundations of our lives, our
beliefs about ourselves and the nature of the reality we each manifest.
