Blog Culture: December 2003 Archives

It's clear now that I'm stuck on sex tonight. Was just thumbing through some previous blogs from Richard, back to the beginning of this web log, in March 2003. Found there Richard's idea that someone should record his poems, drafts and all, for all to see, on this thing called "Wiki." (He provides the link.) Now, there's an interesting idea--not only to unzip but to toy with it MTV style. Actually, I agree, it would be a beautiful thing to see a poem become.

Anyway, here's the sex part. I tried the link and was taken to this Wiki site (I am new to this stuff), where I clicked on "What's Wiki." And here is the definition I get:

"Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly."

What? Laugh at me if you will. But the underlying theme here is "Hey, it's easy as pie to use this thing!" Delivered in the most sexless techno-jargon I can imagine.

Struggling the past couple of weeks deciding whether to write in blog or in the more traditional journal, with pen and ink. I've kept a journal for almost twenty-five years. Now, with access to this blog, I feel some pull both ways . . . but what does that mean, both ways? Tonight, I want to think about the private journal.

Supposing one keeps a journal that nobody ever reads? This ought to make it, then, not so much a journal as a diary. Dear diary. The diary, as a cultural phenomenon, contains all sorts of pablum and splash: emotional outburst, self-pity, whining, narcissism, shallow self-analyses, shallow analyses of others, the day's weather. It's a record of the worst of one's character & discipline. A site of delerious masturbation!

Now suppose that you save everything you write, every spiral-bound, thin-ruled volume. This says maybe your work isn't so private after all. The voyeur, perhaps some niece or grand-nephew one day, or a graduate student in anthropology, is invited. When the mark is made, the word inscribed, the voyeur is sent his invitation. But not for tonight. Maybe when you are dead, maybe long dead. (But you toy lasciviously with the notion that you will one day be exposed!) There is so much of the posthumous about writing: the breath preserved.

Now, here's one immediate difference between the saved private journal and the blog: delay. Delay has its effects, structurally, upon thought. It makes sex furtive and delectable and unreal. (Something to note for later consideration: my response to the Web--emails, chat rooms, discussion groups, instant messaging, now blogging--even when I participate only as voyeur, is squeamishness.) If you write something about yourself in your private journal in, say 1987, that you return to read in 1999, who is that later person? The most intimate of voyeurs. Writing anything, there, knowing that one day "you" may return for a peek at your old self (two selves so very private that there are no mediating readers, no "public"), you are Narcissus.

But there is no knowing the later self until it returns, prodigally, to the site of the earlier self. And therein lies the beauty and the distaste of the self-written text. Barthes: "Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language." Even one's own handwriting has changed over time, as often as one's one. (Has anyone ever studied this phenomenon among writers?)

So there you have it, the most private of texts, the personal journal never shared with anyone but one's potential self, in a way writes that self into existence. And one comes back to it as the Prodigal Son. How impossible this is with blogging!