31 July 2009

To Blog or not to blog

To blog or not to blog, that is the question:
Whether 'tis truer to existence of man
To sacrifice individuality for the sake of belonging,
Or to bear arms against a sea of cyberspace,
And by opposing, gain self? Defy to write,
Once more; or for to write to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand unnatural shocks
That technology imparts, 'tis an assumption
Devoutly to be sought. Defy to write;
To write: perchance to live: ay, there's the dream;
For in the written word what life may come
When we have recorded borrowed thoughts,
To give us pains: there's the regret
That makes calamity of so long reflection;
For who would choose the shadows on the wall,
The super flat world, the desert of the real,
Transcendental idealism, the mirror stage,
The simulacrum of truth and the signs
That sacrifice of the physical makes,
When he himself might his identity take
With a blank leaflet? Who would philosophies bear,
To grunt and sweat over weary lines,
But that the dread of something after self,
The undiscovered country from whose confines
No dreamer returns, puzzles the truth
And makes us rather bear those symbols we have
Than fly to Other that we know not of?
Thus self-consciousness makes cowards of us all;
And thus the native view of ontology
Is transfixed with the collapse of civilization,
And simulations of great existence
With this regard their individuality turns away,
And lose the words of action. - Soft you now!
The fragile Absolute! Noumenon, in thy script
Be all my being remembered.

Nothing but Voiceless Words - the Beginning

How strange a thing for written language - all we read are the ghost of thoughts. The graveyard of the mind. The only reality is past. By the time sunlight reaches us it is six minutes old. By the time I hear you speak, you've begun a new thought. By the time you read these words, years will pass.

With every moment the world is remade. Every moment the present. Every moment is a new beginning. With the smallest movement of a proton or neutron the universe is unmade and remade. Time is of use only in understanding past and future. We cannot comprehend time in the here and now.

We have memories. And to keep those memories as clear as possible (for with each moment they fade and change), we record them and hope. Hope when we read these words again we can reclaim a piece of self as we once were. Hope that when someone reads these words, maybe we can share a memory. And for a moment that passes as it happens, we can connect.

That is why I write. That somewhere in this mess of thoughts there's a moment of clarity. And maybe we won't be standing alone. You'll be with me, and words will be the bond that holds back the tide. More than just me. More than just you. Connected in the past, we shall touch again in the future.

Nothing but voiceless words. A pattern of curves and lines on a screen that somehow translate to an understanding of a human soul behind the lines, behind typing fingers, behind imageless eyes.

"Ah, but we die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger."
- Cocktail Party