This very morning, in the midst of a heated discussion with my beloved spouse, my eyes (seeking some rest-place) perused the nearest bookshelf to the table. Top shelf Proust and Beckett’s complete works. Next shelf down the Kafka shelf. Beneath that the Dostoevsky shelf. Finally, bottom floor a shelf of Henry Miller.
I felt a familiar tugging, this things that happens as I walk through my house and am ever stopped long enough to actually look. My stomach, my limbs, my fingers, my nose need or desire some particular bound and beautiful carrier of words. Today – the resonation settled on Dostoevsky’s “Writers Diary” and Gustav Janouch’s “Conversations with Kafka” and a single-volume work of Kafka’s “Diaries.” I never know why, but after two decades of magnetism and result, I just go with it.
These become the first things I peruse when I reach my desk, get busyness out of the way and household necessities, have cleared air and desk to get down to it, this labor of languaging. I met an interesting energetic man earlier in the week who goes by “Sam the Writer,” another local word-lover (who also led me to WordPress and the idea of blogging) and apparently he had planted the idea of all this nonsense in my head – of rattling off my head more spontaneously that “blogging” involves. I’d always viewed it all as a part of America’s “everyone’s a star” mentality – millions of human critters out there letting their brain brittle bubble and boil out over the planisphere of shared space. Who needs another?
Probably no one.
But my wife had pointed out that sometimes she listens to me when she doesn’t really feel she has the strength, because she wants to and cares…and knows by the way I am talking that I need to. Maybe blogging will help her poor soul. So here goes the splattered, I hope dialogue, but feels an awful lot like monologue thusfar.
From Dostoevsky I stumbled right into as good a tagline as any for “blogging:”
“My situation is as uncertain as it can be. But I shall talk to myself and for my own amusement, in the form of this diary, whatever may come of it. What shall I talk about? About everything that strikes me and sets me to thinking.”
“What truly shapes life, what makes it meaningful, is always taking place unnoticed before us.”
“We all know that entire trains of thought can sometimes pass through our heads in an instant, like sensations of some sort, without being translated into human language, never mind into literary language. Your idea, even though it may be a bad one, is always more profound when it is within you, but when you put it into words it is more ridiculous and less honest.”
“constantly concerned with moments of transition, uncertain boundaries in life and between life and art.”
“All that I have seen, heard and read”
Here goes….
