Friday, July 07, 2006

Blogging

"If you write things down, however compromising ………., then life is redeemed from the squalor of insignificance." Lorna Sage in "Bad Blood"

You know, it is astonishing what you can find on Google Images. I always like to start my blogs with a pic, and this time I just keyed in 'blog'. I didn't want a run-of-the-mill picture of or from someone's blog, I wanted a blog symbol or concept - something which would represent blogging in an interesting way. I found this intriguing picture of taped bundles of spaghetti, and liked it at once, but I had to find out what it was.

Well, it's fairly obvious it's something to do with computers. Following the link back to its source I found the blog page of a company called DreamHost, which apparently provides web hosting services to over 200,000 domains. This picture was captioned: "Our two core routers swim amid a sea of kelp (cat5e) patch cables". That probably means more to techie types than it does to me, but I guess it is part of the networking equipment necessary for me to scatter abroad, via my blog, the seeds of my wisdom and experience.

Well, that's by way of being an introduction. Going back to my heading, I think it expresses what I myself am about here in my blog. Much as I would like to believe it, I do not feel that my autobiography would be of great interest to the rest of the world. There have been no great events in my life, I have met no particularly interesting people (except to me), and anyway, I don't think I could sustain the effort required to produce a whole book. But the episodic approach of a diary, journal or blog comes much more easily, and is well suited to my capacity, and my inclination, for writing about myself and what I am thinking and feeling.

And every time I get a comment on my blog, I feel a modest growth of significance in this vast and daunting universe. But beware! Pay attention to those two little words "however compromising". I find it altogether too easy to let it all hang out in this deceptively intimate little Compose box, and sometimes I have hit Publish before considering whether I really want my words to travel along all those taped bundles of spaghetti, to every computer owner in the world.

There was one blog recently which I published, then withdrew, then published again, then withdrew again. It is still there in my drafts, and I'm still not sure what to do with it. My code is that I am true to my own name and to who I am or perceive myself to be. But don't I have any secrets? I am still asking myself. To quote again from Lorna Sage's "Bad Blood" - (where she was writing about her grandfather's rather scandalous diaries):

"His secrets are like the secrets of a character delivering a stage soliloquy who doesn’t know he has an audience."

2 comments:

KAZ said...

Hi Judith - May I be the first to contribute to your ´modest growth of significance´ - lovely phrase.
I Looked up Sandra Kerr - good to see she´s from the North East.

Lillie said...

I too have posted and removed, posted and removed, worrying about the appropriateness of certain things, but then I decided that humans are not so different from one another and those things most often not said in public may need to be shared simply so that we do not feel so alone.
Thank you for giving us the benefit of your experience and memories. I am charmed and fascinated.