There are many things that have become great explanatory metaphors for a great many other things. Computers as a digital equivalent of the brain. When we encounter the seats of our souls and its galactic complexity this becomes so pleasingly convenient. Memory, both short and long term, that we can hold and install, check its capacity and function. A thing capable of taking the in and out and processing it, making the Gollum out of clay - how very clever and how very reminiscent of us. We love looking out ourselves in primitive miniature.
This metaphor for the human brain was preceded by machine as metaphor. There is also nature as God’s mind – all encompassing and perfect in its benevolent cruelty. There is sport as war, politics as the squabbling of school children, city as anthill, etcetera.
To me the blog is a perfect metaphor for the abstract, yet ever present, concept of free market capitalism. What you think the marketplace desperately wants, what you originally thought of as being terribly clever and so very useful isn’t even discarded, it’s ignored all together. No one bought it, it sat on the shelf and then went sour - poor you, poor me.
The free market (I wonder, from what was the market liberated?) tells us where to allocate resources, where they will be of most use. With writing it’s the publishers that tell us that, and usually they tell you to allocate your resources in a place dark and dank before your writing can even sneak a peek at the glorious, profitable sun of the published world, enclave of genius and the lazily rich. Blogging has miraculously cut out the scavenging, tyrannical middle man of the literary market place and allowed all of us – the Joyces and the Conrads, the Brontes and the Cervantes – to bask in the light of well thought and well delivered criticism and praise.
We have our own methods of judging the performance of our writing, just like newspapers and publishing houses. Readership or circulation, letters to the editors, the staying power of a story or opinion and how long people discuss it after it makes its appearance.
But it is the brevity and short life spans of the blogger’s post that reminds me most of all of Richard Dawkins concept of the Meme. A Viral idea that battles it out on the savannas of the media landscape - Will your idea survive? Of what species is it? Is it Predatory or a grazer? Prodigious propagator and Alfa male of the idea kingdom, or impotent extinction list candidate?
I’m not sure if most of us have this in the forefronts of our minds when, like a lioness with cubs still unsteady on their feet, we nudge them inch by inch, syllable by syllable, out into a world that eats the young and infirm. You can not blame the invisible hand, the invisible maw that devours the sparks of our imagination. We can only blame ourselves for producing an inferior product if we are forced to go out there ourselves, amongst the graceful, powerful or dead to retrieve the corpses of our feeble young.
I admire the cruelty. I really do. We learn to watch as what we produce either bleeds a slow death or thrives and clashes with the others, combines and digests, becomes stronger with each confrontation, each victory and defeat. We send our children on their way, first day without the training wheels off. We pick them up and place band aids on their grazes. Is this what it feels like to be a parent, what it feels like to feel the pain of indirect judgment, the sting of a vicarious injury?
The first time my child (if such a thing is possible. A child, what a strange thought) gets an F at school I’ll remember my time here a JU. It’s not like the teacher is judging you, not technically, but it’s not like your child can speak for itself, it can only look up at its creator, indicating that this, this is the source of my strength or weakness. When the weighing stare falls on anyone, its going to fall on you, the parent – you could have done a better job, nurtured with more vigilance and care.
God! Now I’m mixing metaphors in a horrendous way. Post as virus. Post as child. Post as cub. For the sake of Pete, or what’s his face, get it straight. Let it shoot in its own direction. But we can’t, can we? When you look for the culprit, you go straight to the guy holding the pen (you know what I mean people). If what I write fails then I could very well lay it down at the feet of market forces, Adam Smith’s glorious apparition and its bloody hand of guidance. But that would be too easy. I could also recommend that it was a virus that couldn’t shift and change quickly enough, not quick enough to evade the sanitising anti-bodies of the Mind-sphere that we seek to infest… no, no, once again too easy. A child that has suffered educational malnutrition at home… refer to the diagnosis above, Way too f@&king easy.
I know what this type of forum reminds me of, the metaphor it can create to help comprehend and package ideas that are vast and inhospitable to the human mind, but I must also take it for what it is. A collection of quaint marks on a screen, attached to a handle that signifies a thing that thinks, that feels, that wants to be judged, that wants the stadium to erupt or, perversely, wants to see the emperors disapproval in his downward pointing thumb. A blog is a blog, and the human that happens to write it is for the time it takes to finish their piece, for the time it takes to bake the mental cake, a blogger. Pure and simple. I want to make it something else, but perhaps I just needed to write something. Perhaps the vacuum is too lonely and we throw our voices out just to hear the sound of our own company. But here I go making something of nothing again. Chin, chin – heres to this one getting devoured by the next predator that comes along.
