A secret chart

Leonard Cohen once said “please understand, I never had a secret chart to get me to the heart of this or any other matter.” I suspect the man was being disingenuous. If anybody has a secret chart, Leonard Cohen does.

Today I went back through about the last year or so of my blog, and I realized that I have been compiling my own secret chart. Behind every post — — and every sequence of posts — there is a deeper story, one that is not explicitly revealed on the page. I suppose this is the case for all writers.

In my own case, I can recognize the stretches of time when I was feeling joy or excitement, restlessness or despair. Some posts are painful to read now because they bring me back to a moment in my life when I was dealing with something quite difficult, and others are a delight to read because they take me back to a time when things were flowing, and everything felt deeply right.

In some ways a blog and a journal are precisely opposite forms. In a blog you say only what you are prepared to be heard by the entire world. In a journal you pour out everything that you wish to be heard by your own heart.

Yet in both cases, there is a chart, drawn by your words, tracing out the changing contours of your inner life. There is, most definitely, a chart.