This, to quote Basil Fawlty, is typical. «Absolutely typical… of the kind of… ARSE I have to put up with from you people!» You people, in this case, being myself. And the ARSE, in this case, being the tendency to start something with the intention of continuing, only to stop a moment later. To start a blog, post daily for six days, and then stop for 18 days. What is that, if not abominable?
Now, I’m beating myself up over a single case of negligence, concluding with out much thought that this single case is «a tendency». And I write this intending to publish it on The Typewriter Ethic, where no-one is likely to read it. If someone reads it, the only way I will find out is if the person sends me an e-mail, since I deliberately skipped adding analytics to the site.
Not writing about this is an option. I could spend my time writing about something more interesting. But what would journaling be, if we didn’t allow anything uninteresting or unimportant into it? And what is The Typewriter Ethic, if not a journal?
Pretending that this case of negligence never happened is an option too. Today is May 19th. My previous entry was published on May 1st. I can easily make it appear as though I published new entries every day in the interim. Considering how honesty is out of fashion, faking it would be «the right thing».
I’m torn when I read the first four paragraphs of this entry, between the feeling that I’m whining and complaining and being pathetic, and between memories of reading other people’s journals (Orwell, Wittgenstein and Dahl, for example), which had «unnecessary» entries too. On one end of the spectrum sits the idea that this text should not exist at all, and certainly not be published on The Typewriter Ethic or anywhere else, and on the other end of the spectrum sits the idea that this type of writing is some of what journaling is for.
I have used journaling in attempts at «dumping» thoughts, transferring them from my mind, or from «my head», onto «paper», in a belief I believe to be incorrect, that putting thoughts in writing will erase them from my mind. I have used it in attempts at thinking more carefully about the ideas that keep appearing in my mind, to analyze and understand them, in case understanding thoughts was achievable. This use of journaling I still believe in, although I am unsure whether any real understanding is possible. A understanding will never be anything more than an interpretation, one of many possible interpretations. But even if understanding or epiphany is impossible, going through this digestive process continues to make sense. Not going through the digestive process would leave me with a life of undigested ideas of unknown origin, and what would that make me?
I have come across the expression «brain dump» at some of my workplaces. A brain dump in a corporate setting is a massive document of unstructured text, written by an employee set to leave the company. The author has been asked by his or her manager to «document their knowledge», to prevent this knowledge from being lost at the end of his or her last day at the company. Having read numerous brain dumps, I have found that «dump» is an apt description, and that the word «brain» is out of place. To call these exercises «brain dumps» is simultaneously an attempt at flattering the outgoing employee and an acknowledgment that the result has almost no value, unless you are a scavenger willing to sift through tons of garbage in order to find one small piece of usable scrap.
When I look at my own writing, including this journal entry/blog post, my sense is that I am much less able to assess its quality and right to exist than I am when reading other people’s writing. Is this actual blindness in regards to my own writing, or is it an unconscious aversion against really looking at what I do, from fear that I may have to admit that some of it is good? I ask the question like this at least in part because I have little problem discarding what I do, - if I am negligent in the reading in my own texts, the negligence is a denial of quality, not a denial of non-quality. This, at least, is what I tell myself, unable (?) to say whether I’m speaking the truth to myself or whether I’m lying or «in denial».
As if that wasn’t enough, I don’t trust other people’s assessment of my writing either. And I have this persistent sense of moral duty always to «be honest», to «try to see things for what they are» and «speak clearly». It’a all a jumble.
I say that this journal entry/blog post is chaotic, without knowing whether it is chaotic. I make the statement that the entry is chaotic, because I feel disoriented. However, there has been instances in the past where I felt that a text was chaotic, and later discovered that it wasn’t chaotic. And where other readers didn’t detect anything chaotic about it, but instead claimed that the text was unusually clear and well-structured.
But let’s pretend that this entry is chaotic and explore the possible explanations for it. My sense is that it is in fact chaotic, and that it is chaotic because I didn’t write anything for more than two weeks, and that my mind has become constipated, and that everything is being evacuated in a disorderly and mixed-up way. The image that pops to mind is that of a multi-car pile-up where all the cars have since been compacted, shredded and dumped, and that I - the writer - sits down trying to document the make and model of each car and it’s place in the line before the pile-up happened.
Back to the first paragraph. My problem today is the feeling that always overcomes me when I «haven’t written for days». It overwhelms me and puts me in self-flagellation mode, a mode which disturbs me as I finally sits down to do the very thing that I’m self-flagellating over not doing earlier. This goes to show that stupidity breeds stupidity.
The «obvious solution» is to write an entry a day. Doing that would prevent constipation. But mandating a program like that will lead to another problem: The feeling that the writing is forced and therefore can’t be any good. But my sense is that this other problem is preferable to the one I have written about in today’s entry.