The Cerebral Mum

A while ago I wrote a post about why I started this blog. At the risk of being redundant, I think it deserves some expansion. In the last couple of months I have learned some things about blogging. I have learned why I do it and I have learned what it can do.

Chris Garrett wrote an article for the Blog Herald today, 3 Non-Financial Reasons Why Anyone Should Blog. It unified some of my thoughts and gave me a sort of framework through which I could express them.

The last but not least of Chris’ 3 reasons was the joy of writing. This is obviously an important one for me. I have talked about my need to write over and over again, but I have never mentioned that thing which drives it: My need to be read.

I know there are people out there who “write for themselves”, or I am told that there are, but I cannot relate to them. For me, the need to write is a need to communicate.

This is a polite way for me to say what many writers feel: That what they have to say is worthwhile, that their voice should be heard, that they have something to offer the world. Orwell said there were four motives for people to write: The first was Sheer Egoism, and the following three contained that egoism within them. Writing requires arrogance. No matter how meek, how insecure or how neurotic writers are in their daily lives (and I, myself, can be all of those things), when it comes to their work - published or unpublished, paid or unpaid - there is nothing diffident about them.

In the first sentence of the paragraph above I used the term “writers feel”, but that was coy. Writers know. Even in the depths of despair, even when they go back over what they have written and loathe it, even when they loathe themselves because of it, there is still something in them that is assured.

How much contradictory arrogance did it take to say, as Sartre did in Being and Nothingness, that “Man is a useless passion”? How much authority did Anais Nin assume when she wrote,“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say”? Writers are secure in the privilege of their voice. I am secure in mine.

My arrogance in this respect may not be the most attractive quality, but there would be no literature in the world if this quality did not move writers to create it.

Blogging feeds writers. Immediately. One push of the button and there are faceless, nameless people all over the world reading what you have written. Your voice is no longer lost in the wilderness, waiting on rejection letters from publishers, hoping for people to hear you. Eventually. When you’re dead. That audience writers know they are entitled to is suddenly, actually, there. They encourage you and they challenge you.

And sometimes, they are moved to speak.

This brings me to Chris’ 1st reason to blog, networking and making friends. Before I started this blog, I had never read a blog. I had written poetry, short fiction, essays, parts of film scripts and half a novel. This was a new medium and I needed to learn. So I dug around and I found voices I wanted to hear, voices I wanted to respond to. I fell in love with blogging, not just because I love the sound of my own voice but because I love the richness of everybody else’s. If all of the arrogance I have written about so far seems a little repugnant, think of this: The humility to be moved by other people’s words is the other side of that coin.

I am a terrible “networker”. I find it difficult to slow myself to the pace which is required to build friendships. I do not have the patience to mine the archaeology of character and I struggle to connect when the cores of us are are covered in the dust of our social boundaries. In the physical world, it is difficult to see inside the vessel and it is difficult to be seen. In the blogosphere, such a synthetic world, there is a visible reality more truthful and more raw than we can perceive in real life.

I once wrote to someone dear to me that if we were able to see all people as they are we would be blinded by the light. So we see our few; we see our “bright, particular stars“ and it is the rarest of joys. Here in cyberspace, the skies are so much clearer.

I have seen so many bright stars in these three months of blogging and the brilliance of their light astounds me. I have seen strength and generosity and sensitivity and integrity. Not everyone I have met through blogging will become my friend in the traditional sense of the word but my contact with them has enriched my life and my mind. And I am so grateful for it.

Just as I am grateful for the opportunities blogging has brought to me, which was Chris’ 2nd reason, and my final one. I have had the opportunity to interact with people I would never have come across in real life, I have had the opportunity to write and to be read. I have received support for my feelings, my thoughts and my work. The enthusiasm I have found here has given me the impetus to return to my novel and I have been asked to join a small writers’ forum where I can work toward finishing it, no longer in a vacuum.

While Chris’ example - a published book on the shelf in Borders - is more concrete than those I’ve listed above, blogging is drawing me, step by step, closer to that goal.

I really need to sign off now. Once again, I have spent the evening at my computer when I should have been packing boxes and doing dishes. And sleeping. And yet… I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of why people should blog and what blogging can do. There is so much more to say.

But not tonight.

I’ve been meme’d.

I’ve sat on this for 4 days, partly because of my computerlessness but mostly because the task is not an easy one:

Name 5 of your strengths as a writer / artist.

Like Musing who tagged me, I could easily name 5 weaknesses, or 50, but even though I will state I am a good writer, my reasons for doing so are based on why I write and my experience when I write rather than being an analysis of the writing itself.

Although it seems counterintuitive, writing is what leads to understanding, not the other way around, and I am hesitant to take away a little of the mystery of the process. But craft as much as art creates good writing so this is a meme worth answering.

(I should probably clarify that when I think of my writing, it is my novel which dominates my thoughts. None of my fiction is published here (yet) so you will have nothing to weigh my opinion against. You’ll just have to take my word for it.)

Strength #1 - Truth

Truth is unwieldy. It is large and paradoxical and difficult. I write the truth; the brutal, raw, ugly, uncompromising, but never absolute, truth. It is my standard of beauty.

Strength #2 - Reading

You can only learn about language - both what it can do and what it can say - by reading. Years of studying grammar and style cannot substitute for it. They can only make conscious what you already know. Being a good writer is dependent on reading. And the best reading inspires you and challenges you. It makes you pause and write whole passages in your head, it makes you reach for your notebook. It makes you think and it makes you flow. I have the appetite for it and I feed it.

Strength #3 - Poetry

There is poetry in my prose. It is driven by rhythm and imagery. It is rich and dense. It can be read aloud. It can be read again.

Strength #4 - Voice

My voice is my own. I’m sure I could name “influences” (Henry Miller and Violette Leduc spring to mind) but they are writers I recognise something in, writers I feel an affinity to. I could never hope to emulate them and I have never tried. The content and style of my writing is mine alone.

Strength #5 - Love

You cannot write the truth and hate the truth. If you try, you will go mad. I love people. As they are. I know their infinite potential cannot be seen without accepting the depths to which they can sink. The best of us and the worst of us are the same. The subject matter I write about is often sordid, often unhappy, but it is never negative.

For this meme I tag:

• Rosemary Nissen-Wade
• Edrei Zahari
• Rebecca Woolf

I have no idea who I am. I am in stasis. I interact with few people. I am not working. I do not see my friends. They are ghosts. They live in the world I used to belong to. The only human contact I have apart from my son is Big Sis whom I am both too close to and a world apart from.

Of course, I see other people. I pay the check-out clerk for my groceries. I say, Have a nice day. I speak to the Maternal & Child Health nurse as she weighs Caspar and checks his head circumference. I watch the audiologist as she moves the dials and records Caspar’s reactions on a photocopied form. I ask for a locker key at the front desk when I go to the gym. I say, Thank you.

But these people are nobody.

Because I am nobody.

I blame the suburbs, but it is I who is to blame. I am a snob.

I was always a snob. I liked large things. I liked words which could be capitalised. Truth, Beauty, Art. The people I loathed were those who went to the opera so they could say, “Last night I went to the opera”, those whose tastes were formed by magazine and newspaper reviews: What’s hot? What’s not?

I liked the way the world flooded my mind, rushing through it like a braided river, sometimes of water, sometimes of blood. Everything moved me. Everything was made of words.

When I read Henry Miller I would salivate. Even the bed lice and the pissoirs would make me salivate. Miller said:

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. _{Tropic of Capricorn}

And I was.

I am no longer. I do not want to be aware of the minutiae of life. I reject it. I am self-destructive. I can no longer even feel the Nausea.

I want to feel ill again at the sight of my hand. I want life to be large again. I want to be that girl again, who, when she walked down the street, felt so huge that shop windows would explode and cars would burst into flames. Years ago, in my novel, I wrote:

...I have been trapped here in this silent inertia by my desire to drive earth’s gears into reverse and nothing – nothing! – can be unmade in this world of time. It will not devolve for me.

Writing is prescient.

There is nothing I can do except write until I am true again.

When I first set up this site my intention was to create a vehicle to keep my friends and family in the loop with all things Caspar. His Oma and Grandad and most of the extended family are overseas or interstate and I’m terrible at staying in touch. And perhaps his father would read it and feel a little closer to the human being we created. He can’t be here, and that seems much harder to me than being a single mother. In the last couple of days, however, I’ve realised why I actually chose to communicate this way. After all, I could have just bulk-emailed a monthly newsletter.

It’s because I’m a writer. I have been ever since I learned to write. And I’m not good at small talk so those “newsy”, intimate posts I first added to this blog read like contextless babble from some entity other than myself. I don’t like her. Good writing always has context. Context exists within it the same way our consciousness is grounded in our bodies.

And I’m a good writer.

I know this because when I write my thoughts expand exponentially and the world becomes both clearer and more mysterious to me. I know this because when I write I recognise my skin. I become aware.

I know this whether I have an audience or not. And by audience, I mean those people who can or could hear me, not anyone and everyone who adds to my click count. I will always a have an audience of one: I can hear my self. And I know where I am: I am home.

So it’s time to remove those first Noodle Posts (What is a Noodle Post?) and let this blog be what it knew it was even when I didn’t.

There’s still a lot to do. I need to fix up my tags and categories and make this space organically functional for whoever chooses to read it. There are a couple of pages I want to add, a couple of design changes I’d like to make. I still have a lot to learn about feeds and and trackbacks and bookmarking. But all that pales in comparison to my need to write.

So the first, and probably the most important, lesson I have learned about blogging is to just get it working, then write. If that’s not why you started, maybe you’ll find it’s the reason you keep going. Not just in blogging, but in life.

I’ll still be posting Noodles for my special people, but I will pay them the respect of writing them. My noodles will be served with saffron.

So this is it. I don’t care anymore.

I think that I have spent over five hours today (interupted by changing nappies, making bananas on toast, playing on swings at the park, buying groceries, singing Klap eens in je handjes and going “sploring”) wading through the quagmire that is WP Theming in hopes of solving all my “lipstick” problems. Those five hours would have been more productively spent if I had been lost on the Yorkshire moors searching for Heathcliff.

So this is it. This is what my site will look like. It’s functional, and readable and I don’t care. I didn’t start this blog in order to spend my time “designing”. I started it so that i could WRITE, which is the one thing I haven’t been doing at all. It’s past time that I actually let everyone know that I was here and that they had a way to keep up with what’s going on in my life, and in my head, given that I’m so isolated at the moment.

And who admires the gilding on the cage when the bird doesn’t sing?

This blog may not turn out to be Solid Gold but I’ll be singing.

Klap eens in je handjes, ^{Clap in your little hands,}
Blij, blij, blij. ^{Happy, happy, happy.}
Op je boze bolletje, ^{On your angry head,}
Allebei. ^{Both of them.}

Handjes in de hoogte, ^{Little hands in the air,}
Handjes in je zij. ^{Little hands on your hips.}

Zo varen de scheepjes voorbij… ^{That’s the way the little ships sail away…}

^{Translation by Anchar}