Zero Comments

The science fiction novel, The Killing Star, by Charles Pellagrino and George Zebrowski, opens with a cautionary analogy: looking for alien life is like shouting your name and location in Central Park in the middle of the night—niave and dangerous. I sometimes wonder about blogs in the same respect, whether, unknowingly, I’m sending old episodes of “I Love Lucy” into the cosmos hoping to impress someone.

Good writers know their audience and pitch their voices to reach who is out there, but what do you do when you can’t know if you are being read, when what you write seems pitched into a wishing well?

Maybe you’re more honest. With no one to please, maybe you’re compelled to please yourself and say just what you want. Seen in that light, these essays—let’s call them what they are—might be essays in the earliest sense, the sense Montaigne intended, like the French word, “tries” or “tests,” as much a way to discover what we think as to articulate it, more exploratory than formal. A good part of the excitement of blogging is saying what you found no context to say in your real life. Their appeal may be the opportunity to express the “quiet desperation” Thoreau said most people felt.

Though blogs have been around for a while now, we are still working at the inception of a new genre, one that makes new demands of brevity and directness. We’re still finding out what blogs properly can do—their limitation and promise, what they can borrow and adapt from earlier art.

I use the word “art” guardedly because I suspect most people wouldn’t assign that word to blogs. Microsoft Word still flags the word as misspelled, and the general public may think of blogs, if they think of them at all, as fundamentally self-indulgent navel gazing in cyberspace. Like most of the art of the twenty-first century, the pipe that delivers the output has a much greater circumference, and some people would say that diminishes its quality. We were better off, they’d say, when the pipeline was smaller, and only the best poems, bands, paintings, and writing made it through. Democratic art flirts with homogeneity. If everyone writes, won’t we begin to see that few of us really have anything important to say? Won’t we make it harder to find what’s worthwhile?

Rilke advised his young poet that the only reason to write is that you can’t not do it. He seemed to suggest that, hope or no hope, you keep at it because you must. I’d argue, however, that you can’t separate hope from writing. I remember a joke my father used to tell about a group of psychologists who put a child in a room full of horse crap up to his neck. They come back an hour later to find him energetically sorting through it. “With all this crap,” he says, “there must be a pony in here somewhere.”

You feel compelled to speak, yes, but you also desperately want to be heard, so much so that you risk being misinterpreted, intercepted by your employer, stolen by some craven college student, roundly ignored. The danger is a central part of it.

WordPress tells me someone is out there—I bet everyone checks that line in the dashboard the way I do—but, though I’ve yet to have solid proof, I’ll keep writing, broadcasting my quiet desperation into deep space.