The Tao Of Blog

The main distinction between eastern and western thought is the focus on the individual versus the universe as a whole. In the west, you can be a very good person, a virtuous and selfless person, but the focus is still on what kind of individual you are, what kind of individual you choose to be. In the east, it’s more about recognizing the fact that your status as an individual is an illusion.

Blogging is not just public diary-keeping. It is a broadcast of one’s self into the ether. The fact that blogs are not physically written on paper is not just a convenience; it is a symbol that we are all reacting to, consciously or otherwise. Blogs are “written on the wind,” assets that become instant commodities, because each one, much like the First Being, is both unique and universally accessible, from the very moment that it comes into existence.

I have had some great teachers of what used to be called “automatic writing,” but is really just the practice of forcing oneself to create content with one’s own physical self, i.e. using a pen and a piece of paper, without stopping for some arbitrary period of time. The idea is to find the truth within by focusing on one’s own body and its relationship to other physical objects, cutting through any abstractions or angst that may be contributing to procrastination and doubt.

At each stage in the evolution of writing devices, there have been those who decried the new, lamenting that progress in communication should not be measured by its ease, but by its truth (or merely accuracy). Was a fountain pen really a step up from a quill? Sure, it made writing faster and easier, but who said that was the goal? Wasn’t the goal, some have always said in such situations, to make the writing better? A lesbian friend of mine, commenting on parents whose own pathetic lives are only destined to result in sad children, said “The solution to a problem is never, ever, ‘make more.’ It often seems like that’s the solution, but it never is.”

The idea that writing, when it is physically difficult, is more likely to lead to quality is a western idea rooted in the assumption that good writing comes from the focus and discipline of the individual. There is the writer, and there is the text that he creates in solitude, and that’s it. If the text that emerges from that process is deemed good enough to be worth the energy and resources, it gets replicated and distributed. But even then, you (as an individual) either have a copy (say, of a paperback book), or you don’t.

But a blog is, by definition, written with the assumption that many people will read it. Maybe not “many” in the sense that many people will read a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, but “many” in the sense that your readers will come to you, via search if not some other way, and, no matter what you write, chances are good that it will be read, or at least perused, by someone you don’t know.

Also, I don’t know about you, but my blog posts are never composed with a notebook and pen, or even on a laptop with its wireless connection turned off. They are composed in a window that sits alongside or overlaps at least one other window, which is in turn open to the web at large. I don’t compose posts under the angst that no one will read them; I compose posts under the thrilling (and vaguely horrifying) assumption that they will be read by a great many people (“many” being a set of people that will logorhythmically grow larger over time).

In other words, blogging is not just a new type of writing because it allows people to “self-publish,” but also because it fundamentally changes the writer’s starting assumptions about what writing is.

Yin/yang cat image from Natanson.net. The other image is known as Earthrise.