My friend shuttered his blog this summer. I was sorry to see it — his posts always prompted me to up my game. When I asked him about it, he quoted Dionysius the Areopagite: “Let your speech be better than silence, or be silent.”
We hashed it out a bit, he and I. At that time I was having a minor crisis over the content here. It seemed like there was a winnowing of subject matter taking place that had nothing to do with my interests, investments or desires. Not only was the injunctive to “Stay in my lane” disconcerting, I was forced to question if a lane for me to stay in actually existed. Suburban, white hetero-normative cis-gendered Gen-X Anabaptist male, happily married, committed two decades to raising two daughters, one of whom, in recent years, declared himself “Trans” — no lane for you, mate. Best to shut up and let it roll.
I considered taking a sabbatical, but knew it would be the death-knell for my blogging. And for reasons I couldn’t quite name, that did not “feel” right.
This morning while lightly perusing posts which might qualify for “Vintage 2020 Whisky” I spotted a dropped thread — a casualty of said crisis, and not an insignificant one. The Bible vs. Walt Disney: my Scylla and Charybdis? launched a particular inquiry in a particular direction, and was pretty much 100% in my lane. It needed capping — maybe doing so might unveil justification to keep going with this business.
A quick recap: Walt Disney was “just so tired of remembering it that way” — well, so was I! I wanted to write fantastic pulp sci-fi — my grade 8 English teacher wanted nuanced reckoning with contemporary Mennonite concerns. Later, my Creative Writing prof confirmed my worst fears — if I was going to do this fiction thing, not only would I have to read a lot of crap I didn’t want to read, I’d have to write it, too. I was approaching full-circle.
It is by now a common observation that social media have given everyone a platform to let their voices be heard, thus revealing how little there is worth saying. There is a flip-side to this (to my mind rather suspect) judgment call — internet access to world wide collective media has revealed just how far removed these corporate entities are from humanist concerns. A casual observer can see it at a glance — the ledes at the pages of WSJ, NYT, CNN, Fox News, etc all have their toes tight to the line. These are all competing with each other in aid of becoming The Mono-Culture. You want to talk “intellectual content”? That particular print of wallpaper has become faded and thin.
Blogging is self-publishing. My tribe has been doing it for centuries, putting out stuff that’s every variety of regrettable, alongside unexpected material that illuminates previously hidden facets of existence.
Is it better than silence? Damned if I know. But when I look at what I produce for others, I tend to think I haven’t done nearly enough self-publishing — blog-posts, fiction, songs plays poetry recipes and psalms . . . what’s holding me back?
Thoughts to explore in a future post, perhaps. Or not.
Hope to see you in 2021 — please be well.
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| The Truth is marching on! |
4 comments:
As someone who often agonizes over the utility of blogging myself, this post set me off in several different directions. I don't have a coherent response, but I do have several points.
1) If you were to quit blogging, I'd miss you. Not that that's a reason to keep doing it if you're not feeling it anymore, but just throwing it out there.
2) That being said, I can identify with your friend. I had a similar though when I decided in June to severely limit the scope of my own blog. I decided I was wasting too much time on the blog, and writing too much crap. http://joelswagman.blogspot.com/2020/06/name-change-again.html
3) But then, that being said, I'm still going to keep my reviews going. I want to have a place to engage with the media I consume. I think it's a good intellectual exercise that I'd recommend to everyone--whether or not you produce anything intelligent doing it, the act of trying to clarify your thoughts on a piece of media will sharpen you up intellectually.
4) It's 2020, and the honeymoon for blogging is definitely over. It now longer seems as fresh and exciting as it once did, and we're all aware that we've written a lot of crap over the years.
But (as you hint in your post), a lot of interesting stuff has been written as well. It's probably the case that 99% of blogging has been crap. (Following the theory that 99% of everything is always crap). But you wouldn't get that 1 percent of good content without the mechanism for everyone to be able to write their own blog.
5). I'm reminded of something I once read on a Calvin College yearly devotional booklet. The devotional contained meditations from Calvin students, alumni, and staff, and the introduction praised these brave souls for contributing their writings. "To write is to risk" the introduction said. Whenever you write something down, you risk it being criticized, and you also risk self-criticism. But what a sad world it would be if nobody took those risks.
Hey Joel -- good points, all (and thanks especially for #1). This same friend who closed his blog also said, "You're a writer. Writer's write." True, very true. So long as I'm doing that, why not publish? Nobody's forced to read what I am drawn to write (as the stats have made abundantly clear). Put it out and keep going, 'cos life is interesting and a little commentary sometimes keeps the worst of it from wounding too deeply. Erm, also it can be fun -- to write AND to read! So, yes -- keep going I shall. You too, please.
Yes, I'll keep chugging along in some form. The reviews will keep coming, if nothing else.
Excellent! There's always grist in that mill!
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