My stance here, and my stance there. Taking on a certain perspective and allowing the writing to impart that. Cleverly expressing myself in certain ways to reveal and conceal what I choose about myself. Hiding behind metaphors, or perhaps finding the metaphors to express what's going on and thus satisfactorily expressing myself. Blogging seems often a self-infatuated exercise. Yet, if you love to write, you love to write...
After a few years of blogging in various communities I am amazed at how we repeat ourselves. Variations on our themes. Our writerly narratorial voice intact, our approach consistent, only minor variants in plot structures change. If it's a litany of daily life, after a few years life every day begins to look nearly the same. I'm terrible, I know! But I drop in and out of sites, sometimes months apart or longer, and find the same writing from the same stance and the topic barely changed! Oy!
Do we write ourselves into our own paper bags or what?!
I'm the same, I don't deny it! Always approaching, never arriving, the play of my 'sensuous intellect' (as it's been called) and yet another dancer painting, ho hum. We've all got our pet favs and peeves, our beloved Weltanschauungs and experiences, theories and authors and styles to uphold our world-view. Somewhere on the time line of our lives we established our taste and how to groom ourselves for the 'look of our time' and stuck with it, even 50 years later. Never mind my writing style, my hairstyle almost exactly the same as 30 years ago, but, yeah, the clothes have changed. If cotton didn't eventually develop holes and disintegrate, I don't know though.
Not that I'd want us all to change, either. Please don't misunderstand. I don't know what I'd do if I discovered a 'different' persona writing at your site - fear that you'd developed a potentially alarming split personality? There's comfort and security in visiting a wide array of sites over a long period of time and discovering that, yes, everyone is still the same, then you can rest easy and sleep at night.
It's why we don't realize we are our very own 'repeating records' that intrigues me. I stopped writing journals after a 3-day marathon reading dozens and dozens of them in the late 90s when I realized that I was still saying things that I said when I was a teenager and still thinking them somehow new! Pointless. If I wasn't going to figure it out after all that writing, I never would. Hence shifting to more public writing, of which this blog is a vehicle.
But I find the same clinging to the 'same old, same old' that I found in my journals, and is it true that we each really only have one story to tell, and we tell it over and over in slight variations all our lives long, and if we're lucky we crystallize it in one really good telling that somehow outlasts us? Becomes relevant beyond us.
My tongue has been loosened today and I do apologize for these long posts. Prose poetry, and mine begins to look much the same after a number of years even though I can see that there is development, okay minor development, but... :-) is much harder to write than this kind of outpouring. Fingers just click the keys, keys I don't even have to look at, it's like they're wired into my poor brain.
And, anyway, August is a slow month. Can't you tell I'm edging for commiseration, or a confrontation, a discussion, a disagreement! Anything for excitement.
Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
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somehow i doubt it - i believe that if you wrote 4 posts, one summarizing your life in your 20s, then 30s, then 40s, and finally 50s you would see many differences in your story, many changes in your trajectory, and remarkable growth in your understanding of yourself and life. think about it - would be an interesting read for us! :-)
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely! I was noticing just recently, and embarrassed to notice, how many times I had repeated myself in my blog and thinking: well no wonder I get bored with it! I guess the only way not to do this is to change direction and start blogging to a specific theme or structure, rather than whatever occurs from day to day. And, indeed, maybe it doesn't matter. Certainly, although I find myself boring, I find others much less so, even if they also repeat themselves. If someone is to my taste, I guess I can take an awful lot of them :-) I can certainly take a lot of your dancer pictures - more please!
ReplyDeleteAh, Sky. You don't know how wonderful it is to hear from you. I do very much wish that you get the photograph problem sorted out and start posting again - I miss your beautiful writing! And your lucscious garden...
ReplyDeleteAnd I see you've thrown me a challenge in response! Only FOUR decades, ha! Of course, I started reviewing my life mentally immediately on reading your comment, and it's continued today, but I don't know if I'm up to that kind of summary yet. It's, oh, so, so, complicated... stories within stories. I wouldn't say that I've repeated myself, no, though in some significant ways I have, but that my world-view hasn't changed very much. Recently I found some writing of eating fruit with a lover at 26 and here I thought that sort of writing that I do was inspired by Fruitflesh by Gayle Brandeis, which I bought a few years ago (it's an excellent book, btw, 'seeds of inspiration for women who write'), and I find that I was writing like that at 26 and had utterly forgotten that I ever did! Worse, I have 'major insights' now and then find I had the SAME 'major insight' at 20, and understood it better back then! One of the pit-falls of recording your entire life, I guess :-)
But I will take your challenge and carry it and respond when I can... and throw it back to you! How about a post describing every decade of your life?
Jean, it's wonderful to hear from you too!! I don't think our repetitive strains ought to embarrass us - it's in our patterning, and no doubt part of why we manage to keep looking the same too. Continuities. It's just the forgetting that we've covered that ground many times that I find intriguing. Why does it always seem so new? Pooh Bear and Eyore circling...
Last night I scribbled something without reading glasses and meant to bring it with me today but forgot... about how we think we're forging through in a linear way but that all our lives we actually circle ourselves. On the subway to work I thought even physically as we age, it's like that too.
I'm not sure that repeating ourselves is problematic in any way. The recognition that we do that may be! And then there are sites where the blogger categorizes posts into themes - like Dave's: poetry, nature, etc. And the elucidation of each just gets richer with each post.
It's just, oh, that we'd like to feel that we are developing, growing, becoming. Not going around and around on the same spot!
However, if that's the way it is, then, :-), let's make it a real romp!
"...we tell it over and over in slight variations all our lives long, and if we're lucky we crystallize it in one really good telling..."
ReplyDeleteYes, or one telling that someone happens to notice, as if we're a bird that's been singing the same song over and over, alone in the forest, and one day, for one moment, someone happens to walk by and hear the song. They don't hear the thousands of repetitions, of course. Maybe it's best if they only hear it once.
Richard, what a beautiful image of what I was trying to say you weave. I'm listening to birdsong outside the window now. Yes, that's it, exactly.
ReplyDelete