is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
write or wrong.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about stories that get told, and stories that don’t. Of course, that’s part of what my book is about, but most recently I’ve been thinking about it not in the big what-does-it-take-to-build-or-destroy-a-world way, but in the smaller, what-does-it-mean-for-my-life way. (In truth, these are actually the same thing, but on different scales.)
My friend Nasser died recently. He had been a very good friend to me during a time of my life when I was otherwise pretty lonely. He was a wonderful, grumpy, handsome and stylish, extremely smart person, who could be a fierce and fun interlocutor, and had great taste in cocktails. I miss him. In the past few weeks I’ve told a number of stories about our friendship on Facebook. I’ve collected some of them here.
Nasser’s death and the stories I’ve told about our friendship since then have been the occasion for me to revisit some of my thoughts about keeping an online diary. (I’ve never been a fan of the word “blog.” “Online diary” doesn’t really solve the problem but at least it allows me to avoid talking about BLOGGING.) I’ll come back to Nasser after a short and incomplete discursus into my thoughts about online storytelling.
As some of you know (and as anyone can find out by clicking on “older than the latest” over there to the right), I had a practice of writing almost daily for many years, here in this online diary. Collected here are so many stories that mean a lot to me, alongside works-in-progress of my thinking, and also lots of silly stories that probably don’t mean that much to anyone but that do record what was on my mind—light or heavy, ready or not—at the time.
My practice of blogging slowed down over time for multiple reasons. Some of them are structural, others are a reflection of my own changing thoughts about public storytelling.
Structural: I was much more lonely during many of the years when I was writing and posting daily—those were the years when I was an itinerant philosopher, moving from job to job. My friends and family were all back on the west coast and I was in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and New York. When you have a temporary job you can’t even really settle in, and the people you work with don’t put very much effort into getting to know you. It is a lonely business. But it gives you time for writing.
Also structural: During many of those lonely years, I did not have a tenure-track job. I had a temporary gig at Amherst, then a post-doc at Haverford, and in those years I had no committee work to do, fairly small class sizes, a low teaching load. There was TIME for writing. (I am not going to go into detail right now about how ridiculous my workload is now that I’ve reached the holy grail of tenure. Suffice it to say that if I did not have the skill to draw boundaries and practice self-care, I would just work every hour of every day and still not get everything done.) (Also, those years I spent in temporary jobs were lucky. The conditions I describe are much MUCH better than many adjunct postgrads face.)
So: In the past there was more TIME (left by working conditions) and SPACE (opened by loneliness / distance) for writing.
But it isn’t only those things that changed. I also became more aware / wary of writing about my life (and the lives of my friends) in public. All of these things have made me write less in this kind of forum.
But the loss of Nasser has made me realize something else I lost when I stopped the practice of keeping a diary: the stories themselves. My memories of Nasser are fond and vivid. They are that way in part because I wrote about them then and can consult those writings now. So many other wonderful or difficult things that have happened to me in recent years may be harder to recall in detail at least in part because I did not take the time to write them down, and in writing, reflect on them, turning them into the stories that tell what my life is, rather than just leaving them as events that happen and then pass and then get remembered, if at all, unevenly.
I was in Amherst, hanging out with Nasser, in 2004-5. In the intervening years, things with Nasser were complicated. He had serious health issues. And he didn’t put much effort into remaining friends with me. I could even say he put effort into not remaining friends with me. I could explain that away by admitting that he was a very private and proud person and did not want to ask for help from anyone, was dealing with some difficult and serious things, did not want to be witnessed in a condition he did not embrace, and so pushed away most people. I know that those things are true, and they helped me not take it personally, at least part of the time, that he had no time for me. But one never fully succeeds in not taking such things personally. And so my sense of our friendship was modified in some ways by how the time since then had passed.
If I hadn’t written down all the funny and poignant and important moments of our real friendship, I’m not sure I would have had access to them when I looked back at the friendship. I might have let the intervening years change what I thought--about what was true during the year when we really were good friends. That strikes me as worth mentioning. And so it might be a good thing to commit to taking the time to tell these stories, whether in public or in a more private diary.
I’ve got a lot more to say about this, but that is enough for now. I’ve committed to trying to write in this diary every day for the month of December, so perhaps we’ll return to this scene….
11:47 a.m. - December 01, 2015
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
