First, Again

So here we are, again, in a new place, a new voice, a new day, a new birth.

A wellspring of thought and creative action, I hope.

My first blog, begun several months ago, was a blend of personal and professional and highly personal thinking. It was (and still is) an act of self-formation, although I have now abandoned that blog. I have not yet erased it, nor copied it, but I do believe I consider it closed, like a buried time capsule. It served (and continues to serve) an important function in the act of self-formation, and play, as well as exploring the nature of writing for an audience that is indeterminable but nevertheless real. That indefinable awareness of audience continues to be part of the attraction to a blog--the notion that there might actually be a real yet unknown and undefinable reader out there. It breaks through the isolation I feel when I am writing at home, never knowing if anyone will ever read a single syllable of what I write. (At least the kinds of writing that I really care about.) . Somehow it drives me, when writing, to keep that awareness open. So that the decisions I make as I create these linear constructs--always pushing language forward, shaping thought as it arises, letting thought formulate in the act of writing--are made with some larger belief that the writing and the thinking actually matters, somehow. Matters more than other kinds of thinking and writing.

Another attraction? Most writing is recursive, moving back and forth. Blog writing, for me, at least, is a push ever forward, a simple matter of exploring on the fly, testing things out. In other instances of writing, I revise, reshape, rethink, reconstruct. But a blog does not allow for block moves, or cut and paste, and I find that exhilarating, like the old days when typing on the fly with a manual typewriter: every keystroke was a commitment, and once you got the energy, the zeal, the connection, the juice, you just trusted that and you formulated on the fly. The result was sentences and globs of thought that you'd never have predicted before the session began.