Why I don't Blog

[Here's a note I shared with a group some time ago -- kind of self-referential and out of date by now, but this is an interesting place to put it]

I’ve been privately wondering why I don’t, and probably won’t, blog.

When I was in college and after, I fancied I’d somehow write for a living. As a philosopher and lawyer, I’d received awards and praise from a variety of folk I held in high esteem (though the circularity of that didn’t occur to me at the time). And, I actually thought I had a lot to say (but then, so does my son).

So I imagined that the highest aspiration for me was to be a writer, documenting the shape of the Zeitgeist for the continuity of Civilization. Perhaps a cottage on the Italian coast, with a view of the Adriatic, binoculars and a typewriter …

But now, years later, when the tools for realizing this early aspiration are so powerful and ready-to-hand, and when the audience is “us” – with the barriers all down – I find myself literally speechless.

It is obvious there is something important going on here, part of what I’ve been seeing for 20 years now. Writing has come to ME, so why not join the party?

I honestly don’t know. I feel like the last guy high school to ask for a dance.

It’s not for lack of respect for the ‘pros’. Although it strikes me that much of blogging is what Heidegger called “gerede” – idle talk – I have great admiration for many of those to whom I subscribe, who are genuinely capable of novelty on a near-daily basis. There are some who seem like a self-contained worldwide news staff, able to ricochet near-realtime revelations from halfway around the world – all from the toilet seat. Some must just have very excellent drugs indeed.

Most obviously, time is an issue. Given the demands of life and business, just HOW do they find the time? Of course, “time” is the most notoriously elusive and unreal concept in life, and is in large part a measure of discipline, so perhaps I simply lack discipline?

But there’s more to it. For one thing, writing, to me, is a focused act of will. It “takes something out of a person”. It’s hard work, as King George might say. It’s not simply a matter of copious leisure time (though I suspect a few of the pros do indeed have the money necessary to buy the time for their leisure). Nor is it the disproportionate reward:effort ratio. It’s a matter of energy. Where do the ergs for all this spontaneous creativity come from? Maybe that’s it: I lack energy. I dunno, and I don’t have the get-up-and-go to think about it right now.

Maybe it’s the nakedness of the regular publication of what might ordinarily have been given over to a private journal? Perhaps a sort of aversion to exhibitionism? (Though, by these terms, I’d be counted a voyeur.) I’m reading Thomas Merton’s journals, kept over a 25 year period of his life as a Trappist Monk. I’m trying to imagine Merton blogging and I can’t. It was a different act, his journal. It had all the prosaic spontaneity of a blog, but until 20 years after his death, it was just between him and his God.

So, maybe, in the end, it’s the line between public and private that holds me back. On the one hand, it seems to me presumptuous to think that the world at large is interested in my latest interests, hobbies, strategies, political views, philosophic musings or pimples. On the other hand, it seems to me to be – for the most part – none of their business.

I fear blogging like the Aborigine tribes are said to have feared the camera. I think there really is something to the notion that one’s soul can be stolen, or better: rendered up, by technology. WHY would one do this? If writing, and in particular this form of ad hoc flow-of-existence-writing, is a snapshot of some aspect of one’s self in its everydayness, what would motivate me to share it with others-I-know-not-who? What would it be like to live inside of what you are about to describe in paragraphs destined for a thousand different IP addresses? I hesitate to leave trails behind me, not for fear I’ll be held to account for them, but because I’ll identify with them, and that they will identify me. Anonymity and a certain historical opacity is its own kind of freedom, as I suggested in another note.

Of course, if this is true, why am I telling you this? Oh, never mind.