Blogging: passing along what's left

In an effort not to make blogging an exercise in navel-gazing I have started and quickly abandoned two posts about blogging over the past month. I am learning to embrace my ambivalence about my efforts here at Καθολικός διάκονος. Frankly, ambivalence is what powers this blog, well, and blogspot.


I am currently reading the first volume of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, which is a book I have been meaning to read for 8 or 9 nine years, at least since I read Roger Kimball's Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age. Reading a section of the novel last night under the heading "Speculations on the Intellectual Bull and Bear Market," Ulrich, who is the man without qualities, that is, the modern, or one might even say, despite Musil writing the book throughout most of the 1930s, post-modern man with a bit more of a scientific twist, asks Section Chief Tuzzi, husband of his flamboyant cousin, the irrepressible Diotima, at one of the latter's gatherings in preparation for the seventieth anniversary jubilee of the reign of Austro-Hungarian emperor, Franz Josef, "Have you ever noticed...that an incredible lot of people can be seen these days talking to themselves on the street?"


He goes on to note, apropos of blogging, "There's something the matter with people. It seems they're unable to take in their experience or else wholly enter into them, so they have to pass along what's left. An excessive need to write, it seems to me, comes from the same thing. You may not be able to spot this in the written product, which tends to turn into something far removed from its origin, depending on talent and experience, but it shows up quite unambiguously in the reading of it; hardly anyone reads anymore today; everyone just uses the writer to work off his own excess on him, in some perverse fashion, whether by agreeing or disagreeing."

Not long ago, a dear friend asked her blogging friends, What need that you have does blogging meet? It is a good question, a very good question, even an uncomfortable one, which are the most useful questions to ponder. I readily admit to often being overwhelmed by reality, by my impressions of what I experience. I cannot remember a time when this was not the case. I remember growing up sometimes feeling like I was going to explode. I still sometimes feel full to overflowing. Blogging certainly helps me with this. It's funny, people ask me, Where do you find the time to blog? Unlike my other friend's meaningful question, this is not a question I find very meaningful because the things I write about are things that arise in the normal course of a day for me; even then, it is only one of the things, typically. I write about issues that arise from my experience, at work, arising from my pastoral interactions, my personal relationships, or my interior life.

My first year of blogging in earnest I would find myself asking, Why do I do this? What value does it have? Over time I came to see that the second question was lacking an object. For whom does my blogging have value? I ultimately concluded that if blogging does not have value for me, then it is useless. My friend's question aided me in clarifying this question and posing it anew, in light of several years of experience. It's also important to consider the context, that is, the experience that caused my friend to pose her question, namely that a friend of hers, who lived near enough to get together, took to posting about things, issues, that might better be discussed with someone, another person, someone who cares, will listen, etc. So, while blogging must have intrinsic value for me, it is not a substitute for my even greater need for others, for personal relationships, connections. et al.