Loose knit and yet not slovenly…

What now feels like a lifetime ago, but was, in truth, only 5 or 6 years past, I worked as a teacher in a university English Literature department. Most of my classes were covering the basics – the first three semesters of the curriculum covering theoretical approaches to authorship, readership, text, context, representation and meaning through novels and poems and plays and short stories that ranged in period and style from Oedipus Rex to Tarantino’s script for Natural Born Killers. Occasionally I would teach a class or two on the Gothic Imagination masters course, but most of my time and energy was invested in these undergraduate classes.

And then I was offered an interesting opportunity – to convene a cross-curricular course on Digital Media which would weave in practical skills as well as offering new ways of thinking about story and how the variety of new forms of media are influencing, not only the stories that we’re telling, but the very form of them in the telling.

I loved teaching that course. It meant that I got to weave in everything from ARGs (Alternate Reality Gaming) to cyberpunk fiction to viral marketing campaigns to hyperlinked novels to “fliction” (stories told through Flickr). One of my lectures was called The Blogging “I”, all about the form of blogging, the demographics of those who blog and blogging as autobiography. The whole topic fascinated me… and fascinates me still.

I was looking back at my lecture notes last night following a conversation with a sister of my heart, in which she asked me why I was blogging, what did it mean to me, and in what way was it an expression of my desire for an audience? These questions echoed through me, and I found myself hearkening back to a quote that I’d used in that lecture by the writer Virginia Woolf. I looked it up, and there it was… nestled in amongst an assortment of other quotes and bullet points and posited questions that formed the rest of the lecture.

‘There looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to. I might in the course of time learn what it is that one might make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously and scrupulously, in fiction. What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.’ (Virginia Woolf)

I remember speaking to this quote as an articulation of this desire for a diary-form that, with our technological advancement, perhaps now exists as the blog. That this shadow looming ahead was actually the advent of Blogger and WordPress and Medium. These platforms that launched from the turn of the century onwards that have contributed towards the democratisation of the relationship between author and reader in ways that would have been hard to imagine in Virginia’s time.

Filtering up through my memory, along with the other mental reference points that I have for Virginia of rooms and of gardens and of lighthouses and of rivers, is of a printing press. And then, tangential to that, an image on Anais Nin standing at her printing press. Both these women seeking to bypass the cultural gatekeepers and forge a direct link between their work and their audience… I imagine they would now be blogging. I imagine that they would love the opportunities available to us today.

And yet, I cannot ignore the fact that, when I was delivering this lecture in this particular class, blogging was really very popular – a lot more popular than it seems to be today. The life-cycle of internet popularity appears to have accelerated the brevity of our attention span. So, together, we have leapt from blogging to Twitter to FaceBook to Instagram to Snapchat… and rather left the blog behind in a wake formed from an endless proliferation of zeroes and ones. Yet there is something in this longer form of communication that is available to us through the blog that I have been missing terribly, without quite knowing what it was that I’d lost.

Perhaps this is hiraeth, I think….

Hiraeth – the link with the long-forgotten past, the language of the soul, the call from the inner self. Half forgotten – fraction remembered. It speaks from the rocks, from the earth, from the trees and in the waves. It’s always there. (Val Bethell)

I think it may speak from the etheric realm too, from the intangible world created by cable and software and byte and neurone. Yes, I think perhaps it does.

So for me, there is a calling to return to the blog. Not like before – because we can never go back – only onwards as we live into that distant day where the answers live. But as I am now. I want to scoop up who I was and what I’ve learned and where I’ve come to, and envelop it all into this online home here. I want something loose knit and yet not slovenly. I want it to embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I want to honour this loose, drifting material of life. I want to take full advantage of this form that once upon a time remained but a shadow looming in the long-distant future.

And yes, I’m doing it publicly. I’m drawing back the veils here and exposing my own naked thoughts as they sashay and sway in and out of the dark. Which is not always comfortable. But which I think is important. Not necessarily “important” in the sense of having any kind of significance above and beyond my own personal exploration of my edges – in writing, in crafting, in life – but important nonetheless. So, in this way, yes, you all hold me to account, hold me to my promise to myself and to this space that I will continue to return – I will be constant in my devotion.

However, there’s something more here too….

If you are reading this, know that you are the one that I write to, the one I seek to share these personal intimacies with, the one that I know can dance with me through these expressions of thought that touch on desire and wildness and mystery and creativity and the sacred. And that we get to make the dance up as we go, improvising our moves, following our red threads as they lead us ever onward to our desires of the heart.

So yes, there may be those pronouncing that blogging is just not the same as it used to be, and that, for that reason, they no longer post. Indeed, I was one of those saying these very words! But the blog hasn’t gone away. It remains a form emptied out of invested meaning. And which remains an invitation for each of us to make of it what we wish. It is our blank canvas, our unmarked page, our room of our own. A place that forms a point of connection where we can write our thoughts, be free in our self-expression, and be met there by others who feel called to our words.

Blogging is not dead. This blog is not dead. Not anymore, at least. It is stirring from the shadows that now lie in our near-distant past. Something loose-knit, elastic, all-embracing. Some form that offers substance to the loose and drifting material of our days. Something that feels a little like homesickness and a lot like possibility. Something like a diary. Something like… a blog