limbo and/or cyberspace

I had meant to mark a year in the blogosphere with a post last Friday (10.6.05) but in a lather of disorientation I wrote something else entirely. So, belatedly ... a few thoughts. It was Mark Young who suggested I start this site and he who also helped me set it up. By remote control as it were, because at that stage we had corresponded but not met. It was something I approached with quite a deal of trepidation. An obsessive reviser, I was not used to the process of instant publication, as it were, and doubted that I would be able to sustain any long term engagement with what is effectively an electronic diary. In fact I now think of writing here as somehow analogous to what playing every day is for a musician ... a practice, a discipline perhaps, a means of increasing fluency. For a while I used to joke about feeding my blog, as if it were a demand I had to satisfy. I still feel like that, I don't like to let too long pass between posts. On the other hand, I don't always have something to say. I've also noticed, on the odd occasion I've taken something from the site and used it elsewhere, that the writing is more casual, or less rigorous, than I want it to be and must be revised. Sometimes the name bothers me: when I first started I was writing a book under the same title and much of what appeared here was outtakes from, or pieces of research that pertained to, the book. That book was finished earlier this year, though it has not yet found a publisher, and so the overflow from it into this site has ceased. I loved the tone of some of the exotica I was posting last year; now the writing seems more humdrum than I would like. It was to exile the humdrum to another place that I started a companion site, dérives which might paradoxically show more flash and gleam than this one does. Or not. I'm always dissatisfied when I'm not working on a book, which I'm not now, and maybe that's all I mean. I have two folders on my desktop, both with titles I really like, neither with any definite plan. One, I can't decide whether to write as a film or a book, which probably means it should be a film. The other is certainly a book but, although I know what the subject matter is, I still haven't found the voice in which to write it. And, because it is difficult subject matter, I keep shying away from really engaging with it. At the back of my mind is the thought that there might be some other thing that has not yet lurched forward into the light. I feel, I suppose, strangely adrift from my unconscious, or dream life, or whatever ... a state I recognise having been in before. A kind of limbo perhaps. I think of what Keats said about negative capability, to be able to be in a state of suspended disbelief without irritable reaching after fact or reason. (I might be misquoting here). I think of another phrase, the discipline of indiscipline. However. On the other side of the scales, outweighing all introspection and doubt, there is the wonderful, sustaining, always stimulating sense of being a part - however obscure, hesitant or refractory - of a community of writers also engaged in this extraordinary process of extending consciousness to cyberspace.


PS: ... capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason ...