Winter greetings to you, dear reader! Are you getting enough sun? Have you noticed that the winter solstice is my favorite holiday. Every year it rolls around and I have an urge to remark on it publicly. Shortest day! Longest night! Witchy vibes! And this year, also, a real live lunar eclipse, not seen for some 537 years or something. Did you see it? Don't worry, someone else saw it for you! I thought I would. I made sure I could see the old moon out the window, but when I looked for it again at the appointed hour, she had moved and I could not go outside to look for her because this is a doorman building and I have a mental block about it. Why? Because I have a strong aversion to being watched coming and going.This is also why I rarely post on FB other than 'liking' your posts, dear reader, and perhaps as well my deep ambivalence about this blog. (Did you notice it?) But, there are other considerations. One of these is authenticity. Can blogs be considered old media yet? I'll say this: there are blogs I love. I've mentioned some of them before. Sometimes I will go and read through the entire archives of a blog that no longer exists and it's like reading an awesome dog-eared copy of a long-forgotten experimental novel. A narrative-less, impressionistic, vaguely personal, but often secret-coded novel by a person I know or don't know or met once and never saw again, but feel I know somehow. And it is good. I think the more FB and tweets and all that other stuff I can only imagine eclipses blogs, the more I'll feel alright about them (blogs). Good news for you! And future me, who may come back and read the archives of my previous self. I cannot wait. It is already happening.
Some other obvious things I want to say. Sometimes, frequently, I forget stuff. The other day, I saw some people in Bayridge kill a possum with a stick. (Sorry.) It was a real middle-of-the-night mob scene that I thought at first was a random middle-of-the-night pickup street-hockey game but turned out to be not, and it was disturbing and awful. I will spare you the details, but it was gruesome. And then I forgot all about it until a few days later, when I was on the phone with E and suddenly remembered. So, reflection, records, memories. Can blogging make you less solipsistic by helping you remember stuff that happened? Or is the fact that it happened to you make it about you, and therefore actually still solipsism? Does the fact that I forget the stuff that happens make me more or less solipsistic than remembering everything in minute detail and/or blathering on about it in a public diary? (These questions are so 1999! Old media!)
So, I am staying at a friend's, having a mellow time with Leo and a cat (my friend's cat) in a beautiful, well-heated apartment that is not in Bayridge. I am translating and writing and watching many movies on instant and discovering television shows that I had never heard of (Soap? Anyone? Only after midnight), and generally communicating only with animals and doorpersons. It's really cold, but not as cold as Moscow, I imagine, or Canada. The other day I thought I understood Heidegger, but now that I think about it, I've already forgotten what I think I understood or how I thought it was relevant to anything I'm doing. Tonight, I will have people over for dinner and then go pick up someone from the airport and then maybe continue having dinner with all of them together. The days will get longer and I will write some chapters and then one day, I will visit the West Coast and see the desert again and I will try to hold it all in my head.
2 comments:
You kind of sound exactly like someone who's only been communicating with animals and doorpersons for a while. Not that this is a bad thing -- I'm all for introspection and you posting on the blog!
What I love about blogging (and FB to some degree, though FB is much more a place for voyeurs and exhibitionists) is that one has a whole lot of control over the degree to which one exposes one's coming and going and protects one's privacy, and if that is a marker of belonging to "old media," then blogging is much more an old medium than, say, yellow journalism, even if tabloids are printed on paper.
On the memory front, I personally have always worried about solipsism less because my fear of forgetting things seems to be stronger than that of most people, and the opportunity to make my memory digitally searchable was too good to pass up. (That said, I see no reason how a desire not to forget makes one less solipsistic.) To answer your question, though, I really don't think blogging makes you less or more solipsistic -- it only reveals the way you think about the world to others (and/or yourself). And it doesn't change the fact that everything you write is, in the end, about you and the way you see the world, but that's true of any medium, new or old -- our lives are pretty fundamentally self-centered because we can't escape being our selves, and the medium of describing being those selves thus probably doesn't make a huge amount of difference... If anything, the short-format writing of blogging is the perfect place to experiment with being the different kinds of writer/thinker one wants to be, though that returns us to the problem of authenticity :).
(I'm so sorry about the possum murder, by the way. That sounds horrific).
Anyhoo, I feel like my train of thought has long since left the station towards an unknown destination, so I'll stop, but happy belated solstice and have fun with friends and dinner and animals!
Kg, thank you for reading & responding. You remind me that conversation may be the ultimate anecdote to solipsism. Though Beckett might disprove this.
Some other things:
1) To your thought that life is primarily self-centered. Of course, but being trapped in one's body and mind is not an excuse for living solipsistically. Unless we deny the very idea of solipsism (equate it with life itself), we must make a finer distinction between solipsism and self-preservation. Else, how can we hope for solutions to problems requiring widespread personal sacrifice?
2) We seem to both be setting up the opposition memory/solipsism. To my mind, solipsism is not just self-centeredness, but an overly self-conscious performance of one's private self in public/as a public self. Memory is an attempt to preserve one's private experience, but preserving memories privately is not solipsistic, because it does not attempt a public presentation of these memories, is not a public performance of private life. I guess for me, blogging verges on solipsism because it DOES seem to do just that: to present publicly the act of preserving private memory. To be clear, preserving memories is not the problem - we must attend to our private selves somehow if we are not to lose our footing in time/space altogether. But doing so publicly does something else - not just preserves, but broadcasts.
However, as blogs are being eclipsed by more immediate and more public ways of communicating and self-exhibiting (FB, tweets - where your thoughts are not just "out there," but aggregated in the public stream of thoughts), blogs become less public, less in the view of others, and therefore (to my mind) less solipsistic.
3) The "old media" feel of blogs, to me, probably has to do with the way that you have to go to a blog to read it, rather than going to one public place (FB) to see the common stream of people's pronouncements. If the "new media" experience is this kind of relentless, rushing public stream, then blogs are more like books - crafted by individual authorial voices established over time with self-selected readers returning over time to see where the voice is going.
I'm not sure where this is going, other than to say that I feel better about blogs than about FB. And that was not always the case.
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