What I talk about when I talk about blogging
Haruki Murakami’s last book in English is What I talk about when I talk about running, itself a play on What we talk about when we talk about love, by Raymond Carver. In it, he describes how intertwined are writing and running in his own mind, and how flexing the physical muscles prepares him for the ordeal of novel writing. With practice and repetition, the exercise becomes an end in itself, part of his being.
Unfortunately for my health, I do not have the same kind of relationship with physical exercise. However, since many years, I have found that I require some kind of social exercise to keep both my mind sharp and my shyness compensated (possibly over-compensated). In 2002 several friends moved out of town, so we stopped our weekly gathering and world review, several hours of continuous banter, information flow and challenges, under the excuse of playing games, but really an excuse to eat to excess and talk, talk, talk, from 6 to 8 hours straight. I was lost for a while, without even being aware of it, and indeed I turned on myself, reading and computer games taking up my time but only a pale substitute of what I needed. E-mail can never replace that kind of stream of consciousness, unrelated series of trivia, so although we tried it never brought any satisfaction so we slowly drifted apart. I also focused briefly on mailing lists and fora on diverse subjects that interested me, but in a short time I was burned out by the narrow focus and limited novelty once you had assimilated the basic set up.
Then, in May 2003, I stumbled upon another of those apparently interesting fora, and I decided to get at least a few days of mental and social stimulation. What I supposed would take me days, after plumbing the archives and beginning to interact with the natives, took years and would represent quite a few changes both in my life and my views of the world. But that is another story, better left for another day.
Today I am writing about blogging, or I am supposed to. Although the trigger for the restart was the new information on my nickname, the real cause for the ressurrection of the blog is a sudden release of mental resources. I had no place with the adequate set up to post this information, having retired from the William Gibson Board a few days earlier. And I already felt, inadequate though the board may have been the last couple of years, a missing part, a yearning for communication.
One of the things that have changed through the years is the need for feedback. It is no longer needed, as long as I know people read me. Rather than needing feedback, I know that any feedback means that some piece was either very good or very weak, or specially touching for someone. As well, through these years and as the board degenerated as a source of interest, amusement and challenge, I have been substituting, via real life and e-mail, its absence. Because despite the failure of the initial e-mail conversations when you are trying to recreate a spoken word interaction, it has its own advantages, such as traceability and memory, that make it valuable in itself, if the interaction did start as e-mail or similar written word correspondence.
Reflecting on Murakami’s attitude, while soaking in a hot shower, my favorite self-reflection moments, I realised how much I needed that mental exercise, how grumpy I feel when correspondents do not answer, friends are busy and the current hot forum is slow. And then my output and creativity start to go down.
The blog started from the beginning as the exhibitionist part of my virtual image. The parts that I do not need to explain time and time again, and also those aspects that I prefer not to discuss at depth, considering that once they are presented there I do not need to explain again unless they fit perfectly the current discussion.
The exhibit, but also the loneliest part, because even if other correspondence gives me the basic idea for a post, the writing itself is a solitary process, and the general direction and aim of the blog remains clearly in my grasp, even if I have no clear long term aim, and few short term aims. But it is lonely, mainly, because it is terribly selfish, so there is very little feedback. It is not secrets I share, it is worms I hope to extract, bringing them to the light.
Talking with people my age or older, a typical memory is the Cold War and the fear of "The Bomb". Yet now, in the not so Cold "War on Terror", destructive capacity is roughly the same, and people are not really worried about MAD, but a small group of fanatics living in caves.
However, although I know many people touched by the black spell of the bomb, the trigger has been the reread of Coupland's Life after God. It has a whole set devoted to living with nuclear fear, and it is the only part of the book that is alien to me. So that made me wonder why...
In my experience there are some unique reasons why the Spanish people were mostly immune to the MAD bug. Although nominally an US ally, Franco's dictatorship was so isolated politically and also culturally that it did not really belong to the Western powers. When Spain finally joined NATO in the late 80s, the Cold War was officially over (or that is how it was sold to the Spanish public, anyway). During the dictatorship there were much closer concerns, and an enemy (depending on your politics) right at home. The media was very tightly controlled, so there was no scare mongering, at least with that matter. And the Jewish-Communist-Masonic conspiracy that the official media pushed as the explanation for all the difficulties of the regime became so quickly an object of ridicule that to see a far-away country as a menace seemed ludicrous. Once you are laughing at a hard situation, it is difficult to take seriously another one.
As I was more immersed than most, I should have noticed the phenomenon. I am thinking of The Day After, of serious articles in Scientific American on Nuclear Winter and radiation spread, Constant reminders in Time and Newsweek of the relative tonnages of atomics per capita. But there was very little of all that in the Spanish media.
When Reagan ressurrected the fear, we no longer were a dictatorship, but still we were mostly turned inwards, and NATO was considered a hurdle, something we had to pass to get in the EEC. The Russians were not the enemy, at least for the big leftist blocks. Even if there was concern on the American bases in Spanish ground, it was more a problem of national independence than concern that they could be a nuclear target. Not being afraid of nukes in the 50's, our parents did not frighten us in the 80's.
What I want to say is that this culture of fear is acquired, and inherited. We have our own hereditary fears, but not this. Maybe that is why we do not fear Terror as much, either, despite having been a target already. We do not have old Cold Warriors frightening the new generation. Or if they frighten them, it is either for those socialists that burn churches and expropiate enterprises (a bit ludicrous, that one) or the police state that used to curtail freedom.
A healthy fear, that one, if it keep us more free, to remember we can lose it so easily. ¶ 10:57 AM
There are several reasons for the rebirth of the blog. I hope I will discuss them later. Now I will just present the trigger event, which meant a certain insight on how my mind works.
A year ago I explained how I believed I had come with the name. Making my infrequent Google presence check (just googling "psychophant" and checking if any of my tracks were in the top ten hits) I decided to go further than the first ten, and was surprised to see a name I have been thinking about lately, Primo Levi.
Primo Levi has been an unacknowledged influence on me, for a long time, both his autobiographical books and his short stories. Humour and rational detachment, even in the worst circumstances. Or the armour put up by a shy, intelligent person, having to cope with absolute horror. I read a lot of his works in my teens, and I was thinking of rereading him (wondering if I would be up to the task of reading him in Italian, and otherwise if it would be better to read him in English or Spanish).
All of this comes because in Storie Naturali (1966, my birth date), a collection of short stories, there is a short story entitled Psicofante, which is translated into English as Psychophant.
That book is not among those I recollect reading, but short stories have a way of appearing in unexpected places, collections and anthologies. And I even think I know where and when I read it. Anyway the story seemed familiar. It concerns a party where one of the guests brings a "psychophant", an object that creates an object that somehow exemplifies the person holding it. An "objectifier" (what a nasty word), if you want. A novel about hiding secrets, self-justification and of course dehumanization, all in a small package. Just like the psychophant.
Psicofante keeps the elelephant connection that originally brought me to it, but somehow knowing that I had read the word before sheds doubt on my own previous reasoning. Nothing that would change anything, just a concern on what the being in the control room is really thinking, and how fallible memory is.
Read Primo Levi, it might do you good, and Auschwitz should never be forgotten. ¶ 8:41 AM
