To blog or not to blog?
As I prepare to leave for my pilgrimage in Portugal and Galicia, a couple of people have asked if I’m going to start a travel blog. I have mixed feelings about blogs. When they first crept into my awareness, I found blogs exhibitionistic. Why, I thought, would people put the intimate details of their lives on the internet for any stranger to peer at. What’s that urge about? And then who reads blogs? I’m still trying to integrate my experience of living in Lesotho, where most people have no electricity and are nursing family members with AIDS by candle light, with living in Sugar Land, Texas, where most people live in mansions and still support Tom Delay: “He’s done so much for our community.” So I think about access, about the cyber-gap, about who lives in the global village, who cuts the grass for whom. About 166,000 people are in prison in Texas. I visited Guillermo today. He’s been incarcerated since 1992. He’s working on his three-minute speech for the graduation ceremony at the end of the Gang Renunciation program he’s in. He asked me whether I thought it better to quote Sun Tzu or Gandhi. He reads. The first book he asked me for, back when he was still in solitary, was Thucydides. He has never used a cell phone, a computer, or an ipod. Portable CD players were the hot new thing when he got locked up. His mom died this past March. He’s working on his soul. He said the change has come gradually, “Not like no lightbulb moment. More like a very slow sunrise, like a ten-year sunrise.” He says he used to want to find the people who pressed charges against him and beat the shit out of them. Now he wants to find them to make amends. He said, “I hurt them, and they didn’t have nothing to do with the pain I was in. I feel so bad about that.” I told him I’m going to light candles for him in chapels, churches, and cathedrals all over Portugal, and his eyes filled with tears. He’s never sent or received an email. Guys like him don’t read blogs. So I think about audience.
In its favor, blogging is less intrusive than email. Potential readers have to go to the blog in order to read it, and they can do that when they’re in the mood and have the time and inclination. A blog doesn’t deliver itself to people’s in-boxes unexpectedly, along with viagra spam and quick notices of committee meetings; a blog doesn’t arrive between one deadline and another with its strolling pace. I know what it’s like to be in a great hurry, to pause for a quick glance at my email before dashing off to class, and to find there a great wail of sorrow, a confession, or a lengthy philosophical consideration of, for example, the cultural politics of blogging. Actually, I send emails like that more often than I receive them. Emails can be ignored, of course; delayed. I put the most important ones off and begin to feel guilty for not responding. I wait for time to write a thoughtful response; it slips off the screen, it slips my mind; and then I don’t know where to begin. “I’m so sorry to hear that you and Leslie separated seventeen months ago. I’ve been so caught up….” Delete. “How’s the chemo going?” Delete. “I’m so sorry about your dad’s Alzheimer’s….” Delete. These moral dilemmas don’t cloud the universe of the blog. A blog moves at its own pace, is discreet, expects nothing. Read it or not. Respond or not. Blogs are just there, thousands of barbaric yawps sounding over the rooftops. All that mighty heart lying still, being what it is. Zen-like.
When and what to blog? First, a pilgrimage is holy time. It’s time to disconnect from usual time, to be alone, to be nobody: no role, no ties, just an open channel to the present moment. That’s why I’m doing a pilgrimage! If I could get what I’m trying to get, sitting at home at my computer, I wouldn’t need to go to Portugal. Christopher Maurer named the problem in answer to my philosophical blogging email. He suggested I blog, but not while I’m in Portugal. He explained:
“What actually happens is that the electronic worm in the brain starts looking around for a computer, and you spend too much time worrying about getting online, checking e-mails, fretting about computer problems, etc. Blogging may be good, but interrupting a journey in order to blog must be very bad. One of the enjoyable parts of traveling is to rediscover — reaffirm, re-consecrate– time and space. Life in the U.S. tends to trivialize them; the net annihilates them. Travel can remind us, at least, how vividly they USED to exist. Besides, each trip has its FORM, growing inside us, ripening enjoyably, like a little image of our journey on this earth, and the computer dissects it into random, senseless parts.”
That’s reason not to blog on the journey. I might stop the blog when I leave for the actual pilgrimage, on July 12. I’ll keep a journal on the trip (I’d like to see anybody stop me; I’ve been doing this all my life; it’s an obsession). If I stumble across an internet cafe during the journey and I feel the ache to connect, I’ll blog in. But it’s not a PLAN. I’m not taking a cell phone or a laptop. Inserting pictures on the road will be problematic. Most of all, I don’t want that electronic worm in my head. Insh’allah, when I come home, I’ll edit the journal into the blog, much as I did PASSIONATE GUEST (RIP, a victim of Katrina, all remaining copies lost in the storm). Editing and blogging the edited bits will give me a chance to digest whatever it is that will have happened between July 12 and August 12 and to share that with anyone who cares to know, without dropping big emails in their in-boxes.
Tags: Blogs and Blogging, Galicia, Portugal, Santiago, What does it mean?
Kendall
I have just completed reading the memor of Margaret Mead and her husband, Gregory Bateson written by her daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson. It is chalked full of wonderful quotes, but this one seems most appropriate to your narrative. “The asking of any question shapes the answer.”
What an adventure! Best wishes, friend.
Just a quick thought:
Blogs can also function as an online repository, a place to store writings, ideas, names and other info. This way, even if your laptop or journal gets lost, stolen, broken, or somehow ends up in the ocean, you haven’t lost everything. You can also accomplish this by e-mailing things to yourself — I do this frequently with critical files for my work, leaving attachments for myself floating in cyberspace in case an airport x-ray machine scrambles my memory cards, or any other horrible possibility that might result in the loss of my data. Its my own third-level backup system, but I think blogs are even more secure, since they exist independently of fee-based e-mail..
Kendall, that miracle.