Kombucha is a new project I’m trying out: to publish my diaries — or sections of them — in public. To share my inner world, such as it is, with the outside: with both those who know me, my dear friends, and also anonymously — with the wider internet. Aside from occasionally obfuscating names, I will otherwise try to be extremely sparing in my edits to these entries. If you continue to follow these entries, my intention is that you will be seeing them ‘raw’, as I first put them to the page1.
I came to this idea when I realised recently that the most exciting and radical writing I was doing was occurring in the pages of my journal. I think this is, at least in part, because I wasn’t trying to impress anybody. I wasn’t writing a “poem”. I didn’t have any particular audience in mind. I was writing for myself, writing because I needed to write. I was — I am — trying to think through the things which were troubling me — which are troubling me. These are things which I have a visceral need to think through; both on the page and with my body. Because I had this need, I didn’t try to make the ideas presentable, to dress them up. And so they came into the world naked, like we all do…
There is both a personal and cultural history to this project. Perhaps it goes without saying, but: we live in an age of unprecedented moral and cultural disarray, of constant war and destruction, and the planetary-scale rape of ecosystems. We are probably on the cusp of a fearsome and godlike kind of intelligence — artificial intelligence — whose inner workings we won’t be able to understand, and whose disposition towards us as a species is at best unknown. Many people — and I do not exclude myself from this camp — might argue that we have already in fact achieved this new kind of alien intelligence. And all the while we as a collective seem to have learned nothing, and the blood continues to flow…
I don’t think the human body evolved to deal with such constant states of agony and extremity. Perhaps saints are evolved to deal with such states — or demons. But most of us are neither of those things. And while we are certainly not the first peoples to have faced a crisis of meaning, there is something about the scale and voracity of what we’re face to face with today that feels new; uniquely ferocious, uniquely millennial. Haruki Murakami has written about how there was a certain ease to things in the nineteen-sixties; one felt that it was still somehow possible, he says, to have an impact upon the world, in some tangible, material way. If one thing defines our current era, I feel it’s how much to the opposite of that we are: the possibility of something like revolution strikes us — me — as almost quaint. As something beyond impossible, belonging to the realms of fiction.
At the same time, this is a personal journey for me: I started writing when I was a teenager, around the time when I came of age, which coincided with the financial crisis of 2007-2008. It was a moment when the material certainties which had underpinned my childhood world seemed to be falling away, or were — at the very least — being called into question. Many lies that we had collectively been told — that we had told ourselves — were suddenly in the public eye and visible to all. The reasons we had for living the lives that we were living no longer made any sense, began to come undone. It was, as Jack Kerouac might describe it, a “naked lunch” kind of moment.
And it was and is an event which has had reverberations throughout the culture — particularly in the part of the world where I live, in Western Europe — right up to the present moment. It is not an understatement to say that the crisis of 2007-2008 has shaped the culture, at least from where I stand. And my response to this was to start to write.
It goes without saying, but I don’t know how this project will work out. I honestly don’t. And I must confess that it scares me, it deeply scares me. I’ve never tried anything like this before, and perhaps I’ll find that I can’t do it; or, specifically, that I can’t do it in public: maybe there’s something inherent to the privacy of journal-writing which gives that particular document — those documents — their force. Something which just doesn’t translate into the public domain. There are certain things in this world which need to be kept a secret, after all, in order to function, in order to survive; that’s just how it is. And I know this. And a small, scared, and vulnerable part of me almost evilly wishes that such turns out to be the case with this project. Because it would spare me from finding out where such honesty might lead. It would mean that I could return to my private world perhaps unchanged, or unscathed.
Actually what I hope — what a better part of me hopes — is that doing this in public will make it a sharper blade. A sharper, more precise way to cut back against the layers of pretension, hypocrisy, deeply-entrenched self-flattery, vanity, and moral decay that we all — to some extent or other — must engage in to get by. The rot which surrounds and engulfs the contemporary heart. A rot that perhaps poets must engage in, more than others…
I’ve got this friend who calls me coca-cola. He says I’m his favourite fizzy drink. Kombucha is a fizzy drink too, made from fermenting tea with sugar and live bacterial cultures. It is effervescent and slightly sweet. You can make it from green tea and black tea although black tea is most commonly used. It probably originated in China but is now a global business worth somewhere over a billion dollars, popularised in the West as a kind of feel-good health drink, an alternative to alcohol. I was drinking it as I wrote this article and that’s where I got this name from. This strange, alive, fizzy drink contains bacterial organisms which are thought to be good for your gut, for your digestion, for that other part of us that “thinks”.
A note on how this will work
You can get a free week’s worth of Kombucha when you subscribe. After that, I’ll charge a nominal fee of £3/month, which will give you access to all my posts. Whilst I’m not doing this to make $$, it is important to me that I know my audience is committed. And that means: willing to part with something.
This may change in future, of course, if nobody signs up… :-)
Click the button below if you’d like to come along for the ride.
It’s worth adding also that I won’t always share contemporary diary entries, or sequential ones. But I will make this clear with the date of the post.
Part of this enterprise for me is also about actually reading through some of the entries I’ve written over the years. And finding my voice and seeing what part of me — if any — is at all consistent, in and through that. I am very curious about consistency. I only very seldom read old entries. But I am interested in honesty and guilt, at this time, and a necessary part of that is to take stock of the past, to understand where one has emanated from...
EDIT: Kombucha will cost £3.50 a month (not £3 as the post says). Apparently Substack has a minimum chargeable amount, I guess to make the Stripe fees worthwhile.
Best of luck with this.