Sunday 24th February

 

I was browsing the web the other day, and I came across an old entry in someone's blog where they essentially announced they were closing down, or changing their blog - it was a bit hard to decipher exactly what their intention was. The reason for this was because of the impact blogging was having on the real life of the blogger. They felt constrained by the potential effects of what they were writing - by being open, totally open, with his or her opinions, within what is an awfully public forum.

Boy did I understand that! When I started blogging, I was surrounded by people saying "Aren't you brave?" which I couldn't really understand. Well I didn't understand it until I sat down at the computer, then suddenly I'm weighing up other people's opinions on what I'm about to write. Not just friends, but my family, how can you possibly talk about private events?  You yourself may not object, but as only one half of the given event, surely you have to respect the other person's feelings!  You have to at least think about it!

Yet - and this is where it almost hurts. Like everyone else, I'm involved in normal everyday interactions, vivid intense experiences, that would make this blog so much more interesting to read. And I'd like it to be interesting, you know?

I remember reading - or hearing - some talking head spout off about how blogging was ruining the world. (Well perhaps not quite ruining the world, but to hear him, you'd have thought it was nothing less than...) I thought immediately, I know what's going on here, this is someone who's upset that blogging frees up people like me to write and yes, publish, our thoughts and feelings about absolutely anything at all, instead of restraining me to be a consumer of the outpourings belonging to the sanctioned intelligentsia.  I think what I found most difficult of all about what he was saying was that I actually understood his point of view,  My writing is restrained and constrained by fear - fear of other people's opinions, of hurting the people who read this, who for the most part are the aforementioned friends and family. I wouldn't willingly hurt anyone for all the world.

So here I am, still thinking all this through. I do so much want to be writing about real life, with a bit more oomph than I currently do, I want to blog without fear. I'd like these blogs to be a bit more like the letters I write to my friends, a bit more unexpurgated! How do I do that without actually crossing the line and revealing the personal private events in life?  Any suggestions gratefully received!

I suppose the least I can say is that at least I'm thinking about it. To be conscious is part of being alive, and I feel that through internal dilemmas such as this, I live.  I reflect. It's so much way better than being silent, unspoken and unheard.  What of course it doesn't answer is whether my internal (and that could be  interchangeable with interminable) dialogue has any validity. I can remember having a long chat one afternoon in Glasgow, with an old friend of mine, John, about art. For those of you who don't know I dabble. I do it enough to know in my own mind I'm no good, hell I can sketch a bit, and I enjoy it, and that's why I do it, because I enjoy it. John's different, he's done a history of art degree, and is a good critic of art. (I'm not sure he dabbles though, so he's quite good at seeing the other side of this coin!) but if I remember rightly, he was arguing that what I do is art. You don't have to hang anything in galleries, you don't have to sell stuff for money, you have to have an internal sensibility that seeks expression in the production of material.  Using that argument, what I blog is every bit as good as anything a talking head produces, and of course they don't like that (or at least some of them don't.) It puts us on an equal footing. My opinion has the same validity as anyone writing in say a Sunday newspaper. But I ain't that stupid, I'm well aware that what I write isn't as stylish, it doesn't quite deserve to be read with the same demand that one reads it - if you get what I mean. If it did, of course I'd be writing in a Sunday newspaper.  Perhaps what I'm really writing here is that old paraphrase, I blog therefore I am? 

Happily I'm not quite so sad!