Is this blog of mine a diary of sorts? An online space where I can process what happens to me? A place to work out the psychic and emotional issues of my day? A sort of therapeutic tool? CBT in progress via prose?
Sure.
Is it a place where I can strive to make sense of my larger life? Understand where I came from, where I am now, and whence I would like to go? Can it help me to have a plan, other than simply drifting through life?
Of course.
Is my personal webpage how I can seek to sharpen the inchoate thoughts I have on politics or art or whatever, and make them more clear through the discipline of organizing my thinking, translating them into intelligible prose? Does the process of making my thinking clear lead me hopefully to take concrete action?
Yes.
It is my artist’s corner, a place where I can “grow my soul,” after having done all the obligatory things of the day? After paying the bills, doing my job, driving my daughters all over the place, is this the one place where I can focus just on me and my slant on the world?
I hope so.
So my webpage is important to me.
I do so many things in my life that I don’t really want to do. They are obligations which adult life brings. So I do them. But they might not be a good reflection of exactly who I am. My webpage is.
My webpage is where I go to think. It is perhaps the most delicate, intimate part of me. Where I work out what needs to be worked out. Where I wrestle with Montaigne’s ancient “Que sais-je?”
Nobody ever stays the same. As Heraclitus claims, “Nobody ever steps into the same river twice. Over time the river is different, and so is the man who steps into it.” I am constantly changing. I do not stay the same.
In contrast, Parmenides claims nothing ever really changes. In some essential ways, I have not change since I was 17-years old. I am the same person. Sometimes it seems like just yesterday I was in high school. But others it seems long ago. Could I essentially stay the same and change fundamentally? Can both be true?
“Change management.” “Change vs. continuity.” Heraclitus versus Parmenides. “Que sais-je?” Michel de Montaigne. “¿Quién soy yo?” These are all big questions. There are no easy answers. But one has to struggle with them. Struggle, in fact, is the point. “The obstacle is the way.”
It is like a rabbit hole you go down into and never get out of. Or a cat chasing its tail forever. Or someone staring into their belly button to see what makes them tick and why, and getting stuck perpetually in such a pose. It is the pain, and the joy, of being alive. Of being a sentient creature. Dogs don’t do it. Neither do whales. But humans do. Or at least usually they do.
My personal webpage. Myself. My soul. The δαίμων of Socrates.
What is it, I wonder. Who am I? Where do I fit? Where don’t I fit? Such important questions.
They lead only to other subsidiary questions: How have I lived in the past? Why am I doing what I do? Am I stuck? Or not? What should I do in the future? What would be progress? What are my choices? How should I choose? Why? When? Let me weigh the pros and cons. What should I do? The right road forward remains uncertain.
Alas, my adult life. It can all be so tedious. One can grow tired of oneself.
Art Blakely once claimed, “Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life.” Art, like jazz music, can help to refresh a person. To refract the weariness of our quotidian existence and so enrich our days. It is not dissimilar to an amateur pianist sitting down to play some Bach for solace at night after a difficult, disappointing day. Or a gardener at the end of winter clearing out a garden in spring to prepare and plant a new yield. We humans are meaning-making creatures. We think and plan, and so we live lives of meaning. Hopefully.
I have no talent or training for music. I have no interest or experience in gardening. But I am passionate about writing. I enjoy thinking – I need to cogitate, struggle, and learn. So I crave the written word. Only through struggle via the written word and thought can I make sense of the world – to at least some small extent, where I can, if I can.
So I have this, my personal website.
Thank God for that.
Amen.
