White Hole
Ed brought me home a book yesterday, to help soothe my trouble soul, he said (or something like that): Letters to a Spiritual Seeker, by Henry David Thoreau. His first letter leapt out at me like a gentle dragon lying in ambush:
I am glad to hear that any words of mine…have reached you. It gives me pleasure, because I have therefore reason to suppose that I have uttered what concerns men, and that it is not in vain that man speaks to man. This is the value of literature.
Then Richard gave me this present too. (Ed and Richard often work in unconscious tandem. It’s even stranger and more unsettling when they’re in the same country.)
There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to. Montaigne
And then Krista sent me this:
To hear and be heard. Being a mother means that we are not heard. We are often more the role than the person underneath because the person underneath would love to say, surefinewhatever when the child refuses to eat carrots AGAIN. But as the mother, we put our foot down. And then we come and blog about it so the layers of ourselves can be heard. We are so isolated and yet in such a huge global community that to be heard, more and more, means getting heard on a large scale. Blogging is this generation’s village meeting. Our women’s circle. Our quilting bee.
Which is something I wrote to her when she wondered about why she blogs.
Yes. This is right. This is why I blog. To connect. To communicate. To hear and be heard.
Blogging is a relatively new phenomenon and is also a relatively fluid form. What a blog is, is partly defined by the blogger. Political commentary. Celebrity gossip. Business advice. Craft inspiration. Soapbox speaking. Environmental activism. Personal journal. Therapy. Company. Still, there are things all blogs have in common:
They are personal.
They are public.
They request, by their presence, a readership.
Blogs are personal: Blogs, even the most dry political commentary, are at root a series of personal essays, unfiltered through an editor. Unjudged. Just out there. This lends itself to (as someone commented) narcissism. Hey! It’s interesting because it’s me! I wrote it! To some extent, this might actually be true. The human experience is interesting in all its infinite but minute variations. However, it’s certainly not wholly true. Good blogging, it strikes me, is like good literature. It takes the moment and makes it about the whole, lifts it up to show how how it connects to other moments. Too much ME, darling, ME! and you might as well be writing a journal. And there is some stuff that other people just don’t need to know, whether or not you care if they know it.
Blogs are public: Some bloggers know that their mothers are reading. Some bloggers don’t care. Some bloggers hide their blog from the solid people in their lives. Some bloggers don’t. However – no matter how small or large your readership, no matter how insignificant you think you are, your blog is a public document, able to be read by anyone.
Blogs need readers: Is it a blog if no one reads it? What is the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree falls in a forest and only squirrels notice, did it make a noise? A dent? You’re with me, I know.
I am having (have had?) a bloggy crisis. The unutterable pointlessness of my little corner of the blogging world sank on me. That I clearly took too long to absorb blogging points one and two is clearly apparent.
But I am going to get back up on my aging horse, dammit. I like blogging. It matters to me. I’m just going to do it better, try harder. Stick to my new precepts of true, kind and necessary. Try and write more posts that I will be proud of a year from now.
Oh, and include more pictures of breastfeeding mothers, just to annoy the conservative right. And to belatedly celebrate World Breastfeeding Week, which I meant to post about but didn’t while I contemplated my wrinkly navel.
Helena’s welcome to the turning world
“It’s hard to allow yourself to be vulnerable in public, but as I said to a friend today, it’s a good way to begin to see both applause and condemnation as equal in irrelevance to the process of claiming your own story.”
~LJ of Life on Earth and Other Accidents
I saw this quote on Blueberry Pie awhile ago and saved it. It seems like now is the time to unlease it.
Glad to have you back in the world of peace, light, breastmilk, and words.
I am glad you received the support you needed to find your footing again. That picture is so beautiful and your posts are amoung those I look forward to. Selfishly I am very relived that you are back
I’m glad to see you recovering part of your equilbrium. I have heard/read many writers talk about what happens when family members/friends get angry about something they wrote. Most treat this as a “when” not “if” proposition and work on communicating to their loved ones why they have to write about certain painful truths. Elizabeth Berg (sp?) in particular has some nice essays on this topic. As you say, we write publicly because we want to share some personal truth with the world. It is a basic tenet of writing (or any art really): Not everyone is going to understand this impluse.
I think a major risk in anonymous or semi-anonymous blogging is that risk of not understanding coupled with a person feeling betrayed. If you had a book published, people would know, and while they might not agree with your subject, they wouldn’t feel like it was hidden from them. With blogs, so many people seem to rely on a false sense of anonymity to protect them from any audience members who may see themselves in what is written. Some bloggers rely so heavily on this cloak of anonymity that they throw common sense and discretion out the window (this is not you! Others, but not you
). Look at history: the person behind the pen name always gets discovered. I try to write knowing that I am going to make some people upset, mad, and angry. But, I don’t hide the fact that I blog. I don’t handout the url at family gatherings either, but I don’t try to keep my blog (or other writing) a secret. This is just my opinion, but I think that more bloggers need to blog with the idea that the person you least want to read something will read it eventually. Now, how to handle that is a personal decision for each blogger.
All the best as you wrestle with this!
I recently started a novel that is centered around a small town in the late 1940s…it is a light-hearted read with quirky characters and an easy-going story-line. One of the characters in the book has her own radio show broadcast every morning from her own livingroom. She shares neighborhood news, recipes, household tips, entertainment, thoughts about kids and parenting and a lot of it is lovingly humorous. While the show’s content is not all terribly “important”, as defined by the world at large, it is precious to her listeners. As soon as I read about “The Neighbor Dorothy Show” in this book I thought of blogging! I don’t share anything terribly earth-shattering in my blog, but I feel that I connect with other people that understand, for whatever reason, why my latest knitting dilemma has me up at night or how heart-breaking it is to watch your child try at something and fail. Isn’t that why we blog? To reach out to others? If we were just reflecting on these things for our own musings we wouldn’t publish them, would we?
I think that it’s wonderful that the more things change the more they stay the same. We may sit at our computers and send blogs out through the World Wide Web instead of broadcasting with a radio tower in our back yard, but it’s still the same. We covet relationship.
Thanks for reading the long comment!
(By the way, the book is “Standing in the Rainbow” by Fannie Flagg…enjoyable if a bit fluffy)
signing off,
r
I am glad at your decision to piss off the conservative right.
I think every blogger goes through a “what the hell am I doing here?” stage. And then ultimately realizes how important this little forum has become.
I’m glad to have found yours.
That picture absolutely captures the beauty of motherhood(and I hated every minute of breastfeeding).
I’m with Krista on blogging being this generation’s village. Anna Quindlen thought of newspaper columns as the back fence. I wish blogging was more mainstream so that more people could find comfort.
It matters to me that you blog, so grab your knitting and leap up on that horse, I love your words.
hurrah!
thats the spirit!
i’m glad to see
that you are ok with
the oddness of the blogging world…
cause dang it,
i’d miss you
and your words.
Your picture made me stop what I was doing and get lost in remembering the absolute feeling of calm and bliss and cosmic connection that used to overwhelm me when I breastfed my daughter. It was like we were one person again, a closed loop, love going back and forth from us to each other, oh I loved nursing her, especially in the afternoons when I’d lie down and put her there beside me (the lazy way!) and she’d drift off to sleep with milk dribbling out of her mouth and everything was right with the world.
To echo Kristin…I often wonder what the hell I’m doing, being a part of this whole blogging thing, and desiring it so much…and then I realize that it’s what Krista said, which is what you said to her, no?
Keep on keepin’ on.
Oh. And the picture? Beautiful.
De-lurking to say thank you for writing this. I enjoyed reading your thought process about blogging, as it where.
I enjoy blogging because I enjoy telling my story, but I enjoy reading blogs because I am interested in other people’s stories. This medium puts me in touch with your “head space,” and it’s remarkably powerful.
And now I must go fill a juice cup. Excuse me.
Our ancestors sat around the fire and told stories, drew pictures in caves, taught their young how to understand and survive the world through myth and legend. We created language and writing so we could communicate more easily. And now we blog. If you write something down and don’t burn it afterwards, chances are it will be read by someone sometime. Isn’t that the point?
We share so we can both learn and teach. It’s a pity the conservative right won’t enjoy the picture of the nursing mother – it amazes me what our culture thinks is “proper” and why. We often take what’s most natural (communicating, nursing…) and twist it into something shameful. Selfishly, I’m glad you’re continuing to blog and fly in the face of someone else’s self-imposed propriety. I would miss your common sense.
I miss nursing. It made me stop whatever I was doing and care for my child, no matter what else needed doing at the time. In doing so, I had to relax and spend some quiet time, doing something super important. Holding my child. Looking at him or her. Bonding. What a marvelous thing we got to do, and how supportive I intend to be of any woman doing it.
I am glad you have decided to carry on. I only just found you and I would miss you.
thanks for regenerating interest for my own blog.
i keep thinking about killing it.