On The Blog

There are, I hazard, saints of art who have simply waited mutely all their lives rather than profane the purity of a single page with anything less than what is perfectly appropriate and beautiful -- that is to say, with anything less than what is true.

The past few months have seen a steady decline in my desire to blog. This is partly due to the lack of readership that this blog has suffered from its inception, and which (to my mind at least) invests it with the imaginary purity of purpose that some people claim to strive for all their lives. But let us not lie. I am as much a slave to attention as anyone else I know; as much subject to its indifference as I am to its continuing presence; as much a human being as a telephone call would reveal, and more than this blog ever can. That this blog does not reveal this aspect of my nature is unfortunate. I crave readership.

But there is also the (not quite) unrelated issue of my aims. I began this blog so I could improve my writing skills. Whether or not that goal is closer now (a year later) I cannot say. What is improvement, anyway? How can one definitively claim to have become better? The presence of a comparative implies the presence of a datum, a reference point; I do not think I have any such. Not even -- and I can almost hear the ascending sonorous clamor -- myself. If I have improved it is in a limited way; in the sense that I regard adverbs with suspicion, in the sense that my commas are placed where they heighten the effect of the prose rather than obscure it. But these achievements are lilliputian, motes in the eye; they conceal the larger question at hand.

I have a 'day job'. I can even at this point abandon my writing with no tangible losses, monetary or otherwise. Perhaps two or three will feel a twang of incongruity if I announced to them tomorrow that I would be giving up writing to pursue Computer Science or some other such equally 'promising' field. Of them one will perhaps even feel a vast sense of relief. Writing is after all not something that people should do. They must go to work everyday, experience the quotidian disappointments that attend it. No, such an announcement will at best met with joy dissembled by an outward grudging resignation. I may even receive $50 instead of $20 on my birthday (which, to anyone who is reading this and has forgotten, is on April 4th. Lavish gifts will not be deemed inappropriate. I want an acoustic guitar.).

But then--if no one cares -- then why write at all?

I find it harder to read these days. A word used too often, a sentence out of place, a passage that is badly written -- these of course I have always found repugnant, and the past few years have only heightened my sensibilities in that regard. But there is also the pith of it, the imputation that people can in fact be expressed by language. Our depths remain unexplored even by ourselves; a writer can scarcely do better. If I were a character, I would ask my author if he was doing justice to who I was, and listen carefully to the answer. Writers seem to think somehow that they own the story that they're writing, that somehow its 'theirs' to mold. At the heart of all literature is a perennial arrogance, the certainty that one can in fact do justice to the beauty (or ugliness, or anything at all in between) of life; an elaborately contrived self-deception.

Blogs are even more culpable in this regard. If it is difficult to understand people through books, it is nearly impossible to do so through the medium of a thing as literal as a blogpost. Blogs are unfortunately not art. They can be about art, but only in a superficial way. Blogs epitomize the hubris of the world of prose; if novels claim to understand people in pages, blogs claim to do the same in words. They heighten the effect of stereotypes, summarize where they should elucidate, draw false parallels, and place literary references out of context. They take advantage of the authority we give them. They prevent us from leaving our rooms. They deceive.

And so blogging has charred a hole through my preconceptions of the written word. Hardly have I written an article than I begin to think that there is more to its subject. The fact that this is always true -- regardless of the medium -- does little to comfort me. Paragraphs arranged lengthwise neatly can be appealing from an aesthetic standpoint, but they do not begin approach a semblance of what is true. So much the worse for them if they pretend to do so, because eventually we will come to understand ourselves better, come to regard ourselves for who we are rather than what we can do. It will be then that this obscene medium will disappear for good.