Names, Lists, and Questions

                Hi there, reader. Hope today’s been a good one for you. I figure now is as good a time as any to sketch out what I’d like to do with this blog, beyond the obvious things like shouting out into the void and trying to coax it into talking back. For one, I’ve got a question that’s been bothering me for these last few weeks, months, or really for the better part of my life up to now. It’s always been there, in one form or the next, trying to formulate itself, trying to understand itself. It’s not an easy question to come to terms with, because as I try to find an answer I always have that image of myself in my head, watching myself looking for answers and wondering why I’m bothering to look in the first place. How can I ask it if I don’t know where I am, what I am, where I’m headed? But how can I know what I am if I don’t already know what I’m asking? I’m always at cross-purposes with myself here—it’s something like when you look in a mirror to try to see how others see you, even though you know in the back of your mind that you’re always posing for a mirror.

                Let’s try again. Maybe a better way to start would be to explain, to define, to try to catch in words just what I mean when I say that this blog is “A Daily Weblog on Reading, Writing, and Apocalypse.” These words mean things, of course, but those meanings are not and can never be within the words themselves, but more in the other words that we can say about them. And this process can and probably must go on infinitely… or at least indefinitely. I think this is probably one reason that it’s so much fun to explain things, to become more and more detailed in our explanations to the point that we realize we’ve really explained nothing at all, and all that remains is an empty meaningless shell of words around which we try to trace the outlines of a possible meaning. In other words, there’s something terribly indecent in somebody composing, say, an instruction manual or a scientific theory.

                Which brings me back to Reading, Writing, and Apocalypse. Now, let’s make a first, terribly superficial pass at this by dividing this into parts, like so:

1)Reading: this is what you’re doing now. No, of course it’s not necessarily all you’re doing. I’ll wager that you’re more than likely breathing, sitting (or standing), maybe scratching your ear, probably wondering why I’m blathering on so long on this point. But, God willing, among other things you’re reading right now. But just what is this “reading?” Naturally, I apologize for seeing a problem here where there obviously isn’t one, and I really hope you can clear this up for me. But let me think this through, say this out: when we read, we think of it as something fairly simple, fairly innocuous, these days even fairly old-fashioned. But I wonder if reading is really so harmless a process as all that. Say we look at reading from the viewpoint of a biologist… what an exceedingly odd behavior! Look, the subject just sits there, fidgeting, running eyes over a lot of funny black marks and in the meantime showing the whole range of human emotion, from hilarity to sorrow to amorous passion to existential dread… and this is a normal activity? What could these people possibly be up to, what are they doing, what are they really all about? What could possibly be going through their minds?

Just look at her. Sitting there, reading her book. What's going on here?

2)Writing: this is what I’m doing now. Of course, I’ve read before, and will again. You’ve probably written before, and will again. The two activities presuppose one another in a funny way… although, all things considered, it’s not at all rare or exceptional for things to presuppose one another in this way. Light presupposes dark, good presupposes evil, life presupposes death—and I could of course go on in this vein. But what really gets me about writing is that this, of all things is the oddest, most self-defeating, and yet at the same time most wide-ranging and enduring means of communication that we human beings have ever come up with. When we write, we hide ourselves away for hours at a time, trying to make everything just so. And so we hide ourselves away… for the sake of communicating something more effectively? Are we really trying to say anything here or are we just playing around with words? This is something I’d like to look deeply into, to try and work out just what it means to turn writing into life and life into writing. Just what are we doing to ourselves when we become writers, after all?

Just look at her there. Sitting there, writing. What's going on here?

3)Apocalypse: this is in some ways the simplest topic that I have to talk about, but precisely because of that it’s the most difficult. Now, strictly speaking, there’s not much to be said about apocalypse. It’s either there or it’s not… although that’s not quite right either. Now, rest assured, when I talk about apocalypse I have nothing like an end of history or an end of time in mind… although of course, strictly speaking, I don’t necessarily not have that in mind either! In the old Greek, apocalypse meant something like the disclosure of something hidden, the lifting of a veil or the revelation of a secret. Among other things, I think the concept of apocalypse offers us a way of seeing not only the way reading and writing work together and complement one another, but also—and you’ll excuse me if this sounds vague, I’ll admit I haven’t quite worked this through—a way that reading/writing as an activity fit into the structure of this our life.

Finally, something that makes sense!

               It goes without saying that all of this is, at least for now, fairly preliminary, subject to change at any moment. At this point, of course, the blog is only in the second day of its existence. It has plenty of opportunity and freedom and potentiality, it hasn’t yet become fixed in any particular form or way of being. So there may be departures… there may be wide departures. But there’s the game plan as of now. Hope it turns out well. All the best to you, dear reader.