Take me, for instance. I've been writing letters helter-skelter in all directions. More words. I go after reality with language. Perhaps I'd like to change it all into language, to force Madeleine and Gersbach to have a Conscience. There's a word for you. I must be trying to keep tight the tensions without which human beings can no longer be called human. If they don't suffer, they've gotten away from me. And I've filled the world with letters to prevent their escape. I want them in human form, and so I conjure up a whole environment and catch them in the middle. I put my whole heart into these constructions. But they are constructions.Saul Bellow, Herzog
I had a blog once, it outlived it's purpose though, so I got rid of it. Friends enjoy what I write, and I would like to please them, but blogging was supposed to be for me. You blog because you think others should read your thoughts. At some point when I was blogging, I was writing things for the sake of updating my blog. When I went back to read my posts, they didn't seem valuable or worth sharing. I didn't see anything there that was really worth reading.
I was still full of this optimism for the internet. I believed in the whole "Global Village" thing, I felt like there were ideas to share. I felt that, if enough people wanted a Renaissance we could have a Renaissance, and it wouldn't matter where we lived or whether we worked in stores or offices, or what our names were, we could do it. Global Village. Peer to peer.
At the time I was reading Vaclav Havel's letters to his wife, compiled in Letters to Olga. I used to have this weird interest in prison memoirs... Gramsci, Bonhoeffer, Havel - great ideas have been developed by people in confinement. Havel's letters are remarkable in that they reveal a man in a state of physical weakness (stress, pain from hemorrhoids, emotional neediness directed at his wife, etc.), and yet he prevails over a totalitarian system that tries to silence him.
I came across a good book: Herzog, by Saul Bellow. I'm about half-way through with it and among other things, it's about the crisis of intellectuality in conditions of complete intellectual freedom. The main character--a professional thinker about the world, i.e., a philosopher--has read everything (obviously without having to work hard or run any risks in tracking things down), can say whatever he wants and write about anything at all--without anything ever happening (either in general terms or to him). But his thoughts are constantly in a whirl until at last it drives him batty. (It is more complex and multifaceted than this; I'm just looking at one aspect of it.) A professional with "words" goes mad in a situation where words have no weight. He clearly lacks what we [in Communist Czechoslovakia] do not, which is to say a situation in which words have so much weight that you must pay quite dearly for them... In my last letter, I wrote of the conflict between words and deeds. Words that are not backed up by life lose their weight, which means that words can be silenced in two ways: either you ascribe such weight to them that no one dares utter them aloud, or you take away any weight they might have, and they turn into air. The final effect in either case is silence: the silence of the half-mad man who is constantly writing appeals to world authorities while everyone ignores him; and the silence of the Orwellian citizen.Vaclav Havel, Letters to Olga
I might have misunderstood the internet at the time I was blogging: I do love it, but its ubiquity may, I worry, be causing us to be less energetic readers than we would be. When there is so much written information available to us, and so little time to really look critically at who produces it and toward what end, it begins to just "wash over us." Critical reading is something to practice, and I observe in myself a tendency to take in assumptions without taking the time to look behind them. And that is what I was probably hoping to combat: I wanted a blog that didn't eliminate uncertainty, but pointed to it and hope that it made people more thoughtful about it.
I don't think that is what I am trying to do this time. Now, I think, I just want to have an outlet to express myself and combat the personal silence that Havel observed in Herzog. And if I end up just writing unheeded missives in an attempt to instill a conscience in a world that isn't receptive--and appear strange in the process, just as Herzog did--oh well then. At least I tried.
