My third blog. I am against the name itself. Blog. It sounds so.....pop. And the posturing. Ohhhhh God. I have noticed that almost every blog that I have read has a very intense element of posturing in it, this one not exempted. Style is a different element, it is in essence, projection, not posturing. You aren't striking a pose with your style, you are taking a stand, assuming a stance. That is mainly because of course, one of style's demands is that you displace your ego and write in a mad rush that will be subject to hours of patient, flab-developing editing. And, Karthik, you don't scroll up and read your stuff in some silly narcissistic way. Blogging is the watering hole, the pasture of the 21st century human. I find it surprising that people blog, but a lot of things about people surprise me, so that is neither here nor there. Why does one blog? Why do I wish to blog? No idea, really. Man was given language not to generate ideas, but to disintegrate them. A paradox cannot exist without language, can it? All Cretans could lie, and a Cretan could notice it, but let him say it out, like Parmenides, and it turns into a paradox: "All Cretans lie." A blog is a way of escaping from your ideas by writing them down in a self-indulgent, self-conscious form, in an attempt to repulse and attract at the same time. One writes to indulge in oneself, and hence one is self-conscious, hence one feels the need to attract a reader, and hence one needs to repulse the reader, so as to protect the very ego we sought to indulge. (and I am looking up again. Goddammat. I wish, so badly, to crush my ego and break it into little, screaming pieces!)
Now, arrive at an even more twisted level to the paradox. First is the lowest level, the innocent display of one's meager intellect (though by no means weak intelligence.). Second, the self-conscious attempt to develop an orientation without submerging one's self, making the blog both a megaphone and a mirror. Then, the self-conscious attempt to destroy self-consciousness, and explaining the first two levels, which is to turn the blog both into the life-line and the precipice, the last call for help from a man impaled in the crags of his own mind, in his own self-criticism, self-contempt, a call that haunts more, the lower he falls. And the last level is when you click the close button and put on your jeans that are getting too tight for you, which is both the reason for the blog, and its mockery.
What a bastard I am. I am not even making an effort to write this way.
In order to underscore another irony in this situation, (and also to show off my meager poetry writing skills) I'll post a poem now.
I am exalted in my quietude,
in white vaults of beatitude.
am I right, am I wrong?
crutch to weak, staff to strong?
Prisms cleave the ray's virtue,
minds dissect to seek the true
I am their sum, of wisdom new!
Traversed life, seen all, I
like white ray passing from on high
white am I, soft, sweet: serenity.
(and how convincingly I managed to lie.)
