It has been nearly three months since I wrote my last post here, one that I tentatively called This dying blog. However, I have not even once felt inclined to blog again, a term that I clearly differentiate from writing, for these are two different things. It does amaze me as to why I have suddenly moved away in such an indifferent way from this blog, for no matter how trivial my blog is or was, it was still an act of creation. The reasons for this ending are as hidden at times as the beginning of this blog but some of them are not so.One hides the vivid from the obscure but these chimeras have their own space and time and they have a predilection to strike one unawares.
I differentiate true writing from blogging for writing is a calling and no real writer can fend off this monster love while blogging at best is a pursuit and sometimes quite a trivial one. And then it summates and makes you wonder as to the real reasons behind this act, this act of vanity for if I don't miss blogging, then it confirms my ideas of dilettantism though I never had any doubts about that. Ellis Sharp, perhaps the best British blogger, wrote at his The Sharp Side that the average half life of a blog is three years and I think he is nearly right. I have been around here for nearly that time though I was never prolific or regular by any means. However, one cannot generalize and speak about the motives of everyone who blogs for that would be an exaggeration and an unwarranted one at that.
I think blogging is an activity wherein one does involuntarily let slip in the odd prejudice, the temper and aggression behind the facade of a nice looking Internet page, a page mixed with some half-baked insights, that music, that feeling, this music, that thing and yet, one does slip in the temper behind the careful opinion not actually sublimated or lived through.One reveals without revealing and says without much hiding. There are some blogs that try to steal authority, basing feeling on rhetoric, opinion on a well written paragraph, a novel, a fine poem or a movie badly watched. One must distinguish between blogs that create authority from ones that are purely authoritarian, an example is the fine blog Lenin's tomb, which is basically a blog that speaks, speaks with authority but is not based in authority. There are many blogs in the British space which have now neatly merged with the mainstream, representing the same hallowed thoughts and old ideas, speaking purely from a position of authority, creating the authority of those some texts that we have grown with and refusing to show a mirror to the establishment. The rest is generally considered subaltern for it does not represent the establishment.
However, my road ends here. I do like walking occasionally and sometimes I have lapsed into carefree running but the shadows that had started to lengthen in April have now eclipsed that space which I had kept for words. Sometimes 'emotions mount the hermitage of collected remembrances' and the heart caves in. The weather, the climate, known and unvoiced atrocities, the lingering solitude after a sad song, the train of remembrance, the smoke rings of memory, other tics, some habits, the voices of a few people I recognize here, the moments when I was actually close to some kindred spirits here, these I will cherish forever. But no more new words. Just the memory and desire of, the recollection of some such thoughts in a fictional kingdom, of a subaltern memory, of an unauthenticated, unauthorised desire.
