Beginning Again, Again
Why am I starting a blog for the fourth or fifth time (I actually lost track) in the year of Our Lord twenty-twenty? Conventional wisdom says the age of blogging ended over a decade ago; personal experience suggests I will fail to complete any creative project not driven by institutional deadlines. Then there’s the matter of content: as I’ve gotten older my views have, if anything, become less interesting and idiosyncratic, especially as I now have a greater appreciation for the wisdom of general consensus. So if I’m just going to give the same hot takes that most people already agree with, and am going to publish them years late, on an irregular schedule, where I blog about something weeks after it happened, then why is this a good idea?
Well, I never said it was. But I’ve never let that stop me before.
This, this right here is the slough that gets me every time - I finished a paragraph, I felt all right about it, and I didn’t feel like doing the work of thinking of something to say next. And that’s usually where writing projects stop with me. This is especially a problem since I combine the unfortunate traits of having high standards while also being too lazy to try to reach them. But I’m going to ignore that and keep going even if the work is slipshod and lazy.
So, why do this? Well, to be perfectly honest, I feel that blogging offers the maximum scope for obnoxious exposition. You know how children commonly love to show their parents what they have found, to repeat what they are learning, as if the hearer were a complete naif? Well, I never grew out of that. My whole career in education was stumbled into not because I sought it or was especially good at it, but because I can’t learn any fact without immediately wanting to tell someone else about it, to vicariously relearn it through them - usually much to their annoyance! (This, by the way, is the great advantage of a classroom and a teaching sinecure - it provides one with a captive audience upon which to inflict one’s exuberance).
It’s not just facts, of course. As I’ve gotten older my taste in aesthetics of all kinds - art, music, film, literature, even the geography of the planet - has continued to broaden in variety and deepen in appreciation. And as I read or watch or go, almost always alone, I can’t stop myself refracting everything through the fantasy of another person also coming to see how great and beautiful it is. (Is this entire project an elaborate cry for help about being lonely? Let’s not investigate that too closely).
So that’s what I’m about. I honestly don’t know if anyone will read this, and I hope no one feels obligated to pretend to do so out of friendship - in an age when everyone has about five or six different personal entrepreneurial gigs going that all have to be self-promoted on social media, I think we all just tune each other out to some degree, even when we do love each other. I won’t pretend to be indifferent to the idea of having readers - I don’t want to hide behind the arrogant fiction of “just writing this for myself.” But ultimately, I am going to try to write this more because I want to than because I know anyone will read it. Actually maybe it’s better if they don’t - after all, the more honest I am about what I think, the more faults and points of potential disagreement or embarrassment are exposed.
So, what am I going to try to write about? Well, that depends largely on whether or not I even get around to writing at all, which as I’ve shown earlier, is very far from a given. Even if I do, is it that likely that I’d write often enough to cover all the topics I’m setting my sights on. Still, a statement of purpose is usually helpful. So, without limiting myself or excluding anything, I’d chiefly like to talk about my feelings - about what I find interesting, yes, but especially about what I find beautiful or moving, whether that be a place to travel, a film, a poem, or a song. I’m also leaving the possibility of giving my bad opinions on global politics on the table, as well as sharing any random nerdy tidbits of history I find fascinating. But my main interest is in chasing the tail of my own artistic taste down the rabbit hole of obsessively curating what things I love and want to share with others. That, and badly mixed metaphors.
Of course, I also hope to talk about my faith. After all, the impulse to glorify and to evangelize - to rush to get others to share in the joy we get when weeping at a symphony or biting into a delicious cinnamon roll, is the same energy that makes the rocks cry out to the glory of their maker, or that drives missionaries to estrange themselves from their lands and lives. But I’m not sure how that will go for me. I worry, because I often feel more positively motivated to spread the good news of earthly beauty than to point back to the eternal. I mention this because I am trying to be more honest, more transparent, about my struggles and true feelings as I get older - there is simply not time to waste on pretense. I also don’t think I can avoid it - one of the things I’ll have to negotiate as I write about art and culture, is the degree to which my artistic tastes feel like they’re at times in tension with my convictions. I might even be in error to write about some of this - perhaps discretion would be wiser. But this is the ditch I’ve chosen to err in, if indeed that’s what I’m doing. And if I embarrass myself on the way, you’re welcome to laugh with me at myself.