Saturday, September 13, 2014

Why should I write in public? 1

There are several features of blogging which I find appealing and what has kept me from it, through flirtations, has been my inability to settle on what exactly those features are and how best to manage them in the context of the anti-appeals. How can I blog without resenting myself?

The first appeal is accountable deliberation. It is that slowness, the requisite doubt, consideration, and ultimately regret and reflection that one makes in writing. We have to consolidate, evaluate and coherently tie together our thoughts - thoughts which race much, much faster. It is the sense that I am evaluating what is at the eye of the mind storm: the logical epicenter of the feelings, intuitions and swirling notions that -- maybe -- underlines what rational, or at least essential, thing I am trying to develop. Writing is the creation of a Cole's Notes, of the essential constituents of thought and feeling. Deliberation is one, the act of asking "What is essential to my thoughts?", "What have I learned?", and "What do I really know?" and two, proceeding to answer at the necessarily glacial pace of written thought. 

Secondly, accountability, is the looming pressure of being correct (or more correctly, not being especially wrong). It is the anxious element. And it is the one that allows completion, and relief, and the approach of truth. By asking ourselves critically, "Am I actually right?", we have to cut through and identify what certainty and conclusion we can draw. While those will tend to be images of uncertainty and questioning, paintings of ambiguity and doubt framed in "at least certainties": things we cannot necessarily carry to any conclusion but can "at least" assure ourselves of. 

Either way, we have one, the act of asking "What is essential?" and two, the act of asking "What is right and wrong?". For here I can say both are essential, but that I don't know they are all that is essential. But, at least their confluence feels more satisfying than either alone, which each feel more satisfying than neither. 


The corresponding anti-appeal: when we ask "What is essential?", and "What is right?", we also ask "What is the value?" and "Why?". When I deliberate, and when I am accountable to the outside eyes who may see, I also have "Who cares?" as a background sound. When I write, I have whether that writing is motivated by a goal of finding something closer to truth than a whirlwind of thoughts and feelings. I have whether the accountability of a possible reader is there so that I have to, each time, ask carefully, "Is this right?" (and "Is this really right?"). There's a background answer of "No!". How much of what I do, and say, and culture in view of others is anything other than marketing? Am I writing, reflecting, concluding, or failing to conclude on the basis of how it makes me look? Do I care about approaching truth or do I care more about appearing something admirable and enviable? In other words, if I am motivated to write, and to be read - am I writing to be read, or am I writing, to be writing, to be read? Is blogging only an outlet for ego-stroking, or for acknowledgement and external assurance? Is it only a way to construct a fictional Logan?

So the essential qualm is this: am I really interested in approaching truth, or more in constructing a fiction - one which may win (or lose) social capital or tip the scales in a job search? 


I don't know. I do at least like the feeling of attempting to answer.