Unsolicited Public Speech

The splendid technical tools provided free of charge to bloggers—enabling us to present words, images, indeed even videos to the public at large in a most professional way—sometimes produce a sense of self-importance the activity doesn’t merit. Unless you keep a family blog, you’re engaged in unsolicited public speech. As a corrective, I take time at intervals to remind myself what it is all about: addressing the few at random. My earliest notion was that blogging is like printing out something you wrote and tacking it to the back of the garage for all the world to see—which is at least theoretically possible if (although this is not my case) a public alley actually runs behind your garage.

When I am out of sorts two other images come from my days in Washington, DC. There at lunchtime or going from place to place, I used to encounter two quite different figures at regular intervals. One was an always very well-dressed, very presentable woman in her mid- to late-forties. She obviously suffered from Tourette’s syndrome. A small minority of such people shout obscenities for anyone to hear. Her words stood in stark contrast to her facial expression and her upright and civilized looks. Everyone listened but did his or her best to look away.

The other figure was a little man who carried a tent-shaped man-sized wooden board, his little head on top. On its surface he had laboriously written out in inch-sized capitals his troubling suspicions about the world. The story began on the front. To complete reading it, you had to go around him and read the continuation on his back. I don’t remember if the front ended with the words: “Read more…” as some blogs let you say to shorten the post and thus to tease the reader at least to sample your immortal thought. Atomic radiations released by a great government conspiracy were penetrating this unfortunate man’s mind, he claimed, and he was seeking public support to hunt down the criminals and to restore his rightful humanity. He went into the subject with a vengeance—the physics of it, satellites, the physiology of it, the whole nine yards. I once actually did what very few allowed themselves to do. I stopped and took time to read the whole message, front and back. But he was so accustomed to being ignored, he did not register my brief but concentrated attention to his story; he just kept staring straight ahead as he always did.

I’ve never been to Hyde Park in London—never been to London, either—hence I’ve never seen soapbox oratory at the famous Speaker’s Corner. But, to be sure, the audiences that drift past that corner on Sundays would no doubt make a pretty good random sample of the people who visit any blog—unless they belong to one’s narrow circle—and smile, or frown, or laugh as they pass, your voice echoing a partial meaning in their heads as they head on to their entertainment.

Thin Postings but Rich Relaxation

The sudden trickling out of posts on Ghulf Genes (and elsewhere) is not a sign of trouble but of relaxation. This is the time of year when family visits come and I “get a life,” as it were. The heat has been such that I can’t get myself to go on long, rambling walks—in the course of which, looking at skies and clouds and trees and gardens—my ideas bubble to the surface. Brigitte and I discovered a wondrous green caterpillar munching away at the inhabitants of one of our dill pots. Its official name is a Black Swallowtail—the name of the butterfly it shall become. More about that later. Observing our green wonder, feeding it, studying it—has occupied days with genuine child-like pleasure already. That’s the sort of thing that’s going on. Sitting in the shade and sipping very tall glasses of iced tea. Picking up a book, reading a paragraph or two, and then putting it down again, face open, and looking at the wind moving the tops of distant trees. You get the general idea. A little excursion to Canada is in the works too, and perhaps a trip to Traverse City in Michigan (a favorite destination for us) after that. So if, here or there, something sprouts, so be it. Ghulf Genes (and LaMarotte, Borderzone) will revive soon again as the days shorten...

Siris is Six

About two years ago I happened across Siris. It came up as a Google answer on some search I’d made regarding St. Thomas Aquinas. The site intrigued me. I began to page around and, in that process found Brandon’s poetry. The coincidence of philosophical vigor, calm sanity, and genuine poetic gifts on the same pages caused me to bookmark the site at once. The site, mind you, not the blog—because in those innocent days I didn’t as yet realize that Siris was a blog. I thought that blogs were things of the sort David Horowitz produced. Soon Brigitte and daughter Monique were also enthusiastic readers of Brandon’s poetry and other posts—and not just Brandon’s but his selection of quotes from the English-language literature stretching back in time. After I started a blog of my own, one day, with a little inward laugh at my own naïveté, I realized at last that Siris was a blog. It is more. But in the spirit of that site, I’ll avoid over-large gestures here and simply say that Siris, for us, is a cultural value and a treasure house. It stands all by itself: interesting, difficult, sometimes obscure, many-faceted, enlightening, indeed often strikingly novel, beautiful, sage, and inspiring. Such things don’t simply happen. And Siris is not the work of a leisured, retired sage but of an active man whose day job is to teach the next generation.

Siris turned six on June 2. Happy birthday!

From the private diary…

I am not a social critic. I don’t honestly believe rant-journalism does any good and think that it’s a nasty sort of entertainment. Why then do I indulge in it myself?

The clue is that an inherent problem plagues certain kinds of public blogging. I noticed, for example, that, of late, political commentary has begun to flourish on the Maverick Philosopher. Daily posting exhausts human resources. None of us is all that interesting or original; hence we reach for public issues when inspiration lags. Daily irritation with the culture is always there as stimulus—unless we’ve genuinely mastered a “media fast.” Countless blogs express this oceanic discontent. The majority rant leftways, the minority right. Neither is all that appetizing. Yield, by all means, to the temptations of silence. Now there is something worth thinking about…

Scatter

Unless a narrow theme binds them into instant recognizability—this blog is about football, this blog opposes war—individual posts are like a scatter of random particles, and looking at any one of them in isolation may seem rather puzzling to the person landing on a page by happenstance. I note the puzzlement of many newcomers who, if arrested by the content of the post at all, then seek some shortcut to rapid classification by clicking on the “about” (or its functional equivalent) in search of clues about my ideology. In other less chaotic, dynamic, or confusing times other markers served this purpose: the person’s age, the uniform (clerical garb, the sword, the shield, courtly dress), marks of class, frowning demeanor, accent. That sort of thing is also present still, reflected by print. When I land on a site where the speling is bed and i isn’t capitalized and people do a lot of lol, I do know at minimum that I’m not reading folk my age. And my writing is for many a warning sign already—or a signal to relax. Wondrous, wondrous, phenomenon. Seeking this, seeking that. Many seek facts. They find them here but then (I realize) they’re really seeking something else. They seek authority. The information must be qualified. So let’s click ABOUT and discover if this guy comes with ample qualification to say that which he said. Let’s look on his chest to see what decorations pend there. (And word usage like that, to be sure, will signal phony, phony to lots of readers.) The same facts wrapped in rebellion, rage, approval, disdain, analytical dissection, historical precedents, modern referents, etc., etc., will please now this, now that individual. Humor alone will most likely arrest the majority and cause the visitors at least to read. Strange that, when you think about it. The restless classifying mind, fiercely determined to orient itself, Quickly, already! will be paralyzed by humor so that the soul hidden behind the intellect can, freed for a moment, have a moment’s enjoyment.

Immaterial Structures

Multiple coinciding and recent experiences must have occupied my sleeping self during the night—because I woke up this morning thinking of invisible castles in the air. Do we think or meditate in sleep? I’m sure we do. In the first instance I was thinking of my and others’ blogs but by extension of all creations of the mind that take the form of words. Before I read, say, Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, that work was just a title—and a little distrusted. Mann? Writing about biblical characters? What later I read was a physical book of fairly substantial heft. Since that time the structure has existed in my mind as an immaterial reality. I’ve consulted, meaning “remembered,” a sequence of it, or the whole atmosphere of that book, quite often over the years. The whole of that, or any other novel, can’t be experienced instantly. A compressed feeling brimful of complexity is there. Or it’s there as a physical object. After it is finished, the author’s own experience of the book is exactly like mine.

In a post on form and content on The Ruricolist yesterday Paul Rodriguez suggested that the blog has unique characteristics. In his words they are familiarity and flexibility. Yes. Let me draw some contrasts. Common to all books is their physical manifestation of pages bound between covers; the content never changes unless the reader adds scribbles in the margins. Common to all blogs is their electronic form and their life-like quality of sprouting at least superficially new content all the time. Books are finished creations in which, to use terminology from Dorothy Sayers (The Mind of the Maker) an idea is worked out, executed, brought into form, and—if the idea is worthy and the effort has succeeded—will have a power, a radiation that will reach an audience. Sayers suggests that this trinity of Idea, Energy, and Power (she likens it to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), underlies all creative effort, thus every immaterial structure, not least those designed to be material—like sculptures and architectural works.

Are blogs creative structures? That is the question. Some are—to the extent that they express the process Sayers describes. In that process the idea comes first and, if the work lives up to its intention, the idea must also permeate the work. The execution, needless to say, must also express it harmoniously. Applying this rule at once suggests that most blogs are, well, something else. The outer form—an electronically rendered and distributed serial presentation of content—may qualify the effort as a blog. But to achieve some quality beyond “diary,” “chat,” “family journalism,” “journalism,” etc., it must display the trinity—even in its episodic, serial, and open-ended execution. I would bet that the majority of creative bloggers quite regularly struggle with the urge to finish this thing, to round it out, to have done, enough already! Some give this urge expression by restarting the blog on another platform. At least then it is new, another start. Veering from my subject still, there is no sense as hollow as the end of a work finally accomplished after traumatic wrestling with the angel—and nothing so blissful as the dawning of the new…

But the thought that came to me this morning and central to this post is the idea of immateriality. Blogs express this feeling well. Yes, I keep copies of posts on the hard drive. No, I haven’t printed them out. The twenty-minute failure of WordPress some weeks ago brought to mind the ephemeral character of works that persist as bits and bytes. And that event also left its mark on me and produced the early seeds of “castles up in air.” But immateriality may be—and I for one think is—more permanent than the material expression of thought in print or stone or pigment on canvas. But in this dimension for the radiating work of the creation to have its effect, it must have material incarnation, even if only electronic.

A final note on this subject. Blogs attract their own readers by their radiating power. This, in turn constellates ideas like affinity, revulsion, and adequacy. I glance at many blogs that I rapidly forget. Very few get book-marked; of those, too, quite a few fall away after I’ve followed them for a while. We choose our own reality. I’ve read lots of lots of things in the service of work; for work we need information; but then there is life. The recent upsurge in visitors to Ghulf Genes was also in the background of this post. It was a flurry caused by name recognition. Very, very few of those visitors—as indeed but a tiny handful of those who chance across this blog by doing searches on names or words—become real readers. And those who do tend already to be inhabitants of an invisible continent I also call my home.

Technology is Neutral

An eccentric way to illustrate the truth of this assertion is to point out that science is not what makes “science fiction” interesting. It’s always the story, stupid, and it matters not what the wrapper is, be it sword and sorcery, politics, a medieval setting, a cowboy tale, or the siege of Troy and its great Wooden Horse. The story is always about people.

Years ago, in one of my then endless pursuits of technological change, I chanced across a most revealing academic work, Lynn White’s Medieval Technology and Social Change. It is an absolutely fascinating work. It deals with the stirrup, horsepower, crop rotation, protein generation—and how these innovations influenced the physical environment and therefore society.

Reading that book I realized another important truth about technology. Unlike social structures, which cycle—ever recurring, ever decaying, but not really advancing in any meaningful sense—technology is cumulative and progressive. Once invented and proved useful, it will persist. The Incas had not invented the arch. But we now see that form of architecture (notice the etymological link in that word) everywhere in the world. And it won’t go away. Forms of social organization, a kind of technology for controlling people, tend to cycle. Physical technologies—in contrast with human organizational forms—benefit from the persistently uniform behavior of matter. Democracy controls that much more volatile element, free human entities; therefore it recurs in endless forms when conditions favor it and then deforms, decays, becomes unrecognizable, eventually unworkable, and gives way to other recurring forms of rule that then fit the times better again.

I stress the neutrality of technology but, having written this much (writing reveals what is deeper in the mind) I realize now that all I’m saying is that matter is neutral. Technology, after all, is just a tooling for managing matter. What maintains technological knowledge is the unchanging relationship we have with matter, and exactly the same relationship regardless of the ideological structures that guide our thought. Therefore it is in no one’s interest to neglect those things that happen to be universally useful.

I got into this subject today thinking of modern modes of communication: mail, telephone, e-mail, Internet (in general), blogs, and social networks. The underlying technology (of late) is the manipulation of electromagnetic currents and states, their transmission, storage, and manipulation using computers. And the underlying human motives that have lifted this technology into the useful category are two-fold: one is that communications connect the separated; the other is that people seek and value attention. The two are closely linked, of course. All of these manifestations have negative and positive aspects. Mail also means junk mail, telephone also means the automated nuisance call, e-mail also means spam, blogs can and often do communicate hate, and social networks, while they connect, can also distract.

It’s one of our modern fetishes to assign values to neutral mechanisms that, in themselves, carry no values at all. Or, perhaps, to make the point more explicit, these mechanisms are tools—and tools are one half of a whole. The tool user is the other half. Technology also has an inherent value. It is the knowledge of the toolmaker that it embodies, a superior knowledge of how the material world behaves. I hate technology only when it stops working properly. The indifferent, thoughtless, or exploitive uses of technology—why, that’s the story, the fiction part of “science fiction.” And there we must look at ancient concepts like original sin and not speak ill of that steady, never-changing innocent, other we call Matter, and its handmaiden, Technology.