Why we blog – escape portal, therapy or land of our people?
I went back to my blog this morning, which is over seven years old. It’s bizarre to me that people still visit it… understandable, perhaps, because there are a few seemingly forgotten books and films on here that clearly live on in some people’s imaginations.
‘What kind of imagination’ was the question I vaguely asked myself when I started collecting together some of the things I was still drawn to, having a notion they were formed in the ‘imaginative culture’ of my childhood – the books, the TV and the music. These were all portals which suggested more to life than the mundane things that the adults in our lives were slaves to, popularly known as responsibilities.
But what’s the function of these portals for well-worn grown-ups? I blogged with reservations: I was determined this wasn’t nostalgia (meaning, I understand, ‘a yearning to return home’). It was relevant now, and not all those inspirations escaped derision from the ghost of my long gone 20-year-old self.
There’s a letter from a parent to a child in Tracey Thorn’s book Another Planet. What struck a chord was the line:
‘So do I have any advice for you at all? Not really. Except that, like all young people (or come to that, even old people these days), I know you worry sometimes about being cool. But don’t. Who cares really? Cool’s overrated. Warm is better.’
Tracey Thorn, Another Planet, 2019
Which is something I have lamented quite a lot recently. To quote Morrissey, shyness is nice but it can stop you doing all the things in life you’d like to. And so can cool. And actually, being cool is the opposite of cool. Genuinely (and if you can manage it, passionately) getting a rush about the things that make you feel good, and sharing that – the instinct to want others to feel it too – is quite an innocent, child-like response. Most people won’t ‘get it’ or ‘get you’. Put yourself in your wrong context and you’ll feel as reduced as a bag of bargain bucket supermarket flowers. You might feel stagnant even if you don’t quite smell yet.
I’m not one for memes but I do like the one ‘Show your vibe, find your tribe’. Despite vibe always sounding like it could only be uttered for a short window of time – the weekend of some mythical prog-rock fest in 1973, for example – no other word quite sums up the often indefinable and intuitive response we have among others, be it a gentle dawn chorus or a dusty pall of possibly radioactive material.
My point being that blogs, and the subtleties they allow, and the space to reflect, seem to be used by people who need to reconnect with their inner world and relation to the outer world – the sense of self – when most online forms of expression are immediate, proclaiming and projecting an ideal.
I’ve discovered there are lots of carers who blog, caring being a stage of life, if chosen, which involves coming up close to the suffering of others and ourselves. It has the potential to consume identity. In addition, at any stage in life comes a time when we realise things once felt more carefree, and we don’t know yet if that feeling will ever come back.
Then there’s the rite of passage when we move into the front line of mortality when parents, once bedrocks of stone – regardless of the quality of relationship – turn to sand, and nothing will stop the tide.
Or all these things and everything in life that can take away the light. I started my blog in 2012 just after my dad got sick and went into a home, which I found pretty hard-going. I stopped blogging later because life then became a conveyor belt of dealing with elderly care, its fallout and the impact on everyone affected.
In stressful times many of us read or watch escapist fiction because it’s pretty good to get lost in a space where possibility is infinite and identity is an ongoing thing. I told someone that watching four seasons of an epic TV series one summer was great de-stress therapy. It threw me into greater challenges than mine and explored – with some nuance – how people deal with genuine adversity.
‘But it’s not real!!!’ they exclaimed.
Momentarily I was ready to be reduced, but instead announced – not without shades of Brian Sewell, minus the accent, ‘Of course not. But that is the purpose of all art, to help us make sense of life.’
Collecting the imagery, the books, the films – any of the portals to places that remind us that life is a pleasurable thing, either because they are familiar and suggest security, or, and where the real value lies, because they shine light on the selves that get lost or aren’t discovered yet in the fog of responsibility, makes a living resource.
When I wrote my ‘about’ page all those years ago I said:
‘Ambrosia’ is from the 1963 film of Keith Waterhouse’s book Billy Liar, an alternative land that Billy escapes to in his imagination, away from things that are small, narrow and dull. It’s anything that clears the fog in a sometimes mundane world…’
Now, I don’t think it’s the world that’s mundane. It’s the self that is mundane, forgetting what we need to thrive, and accepting what can feel like an inevitable way of dealing with whatever it is we all have to deal with in some way or other, wherever it is on the scale.
Yes, we can escape into ‘portals’ and the things we enjoy, but being around the people that ‘get’ whatever part of ourselves they connect to, is the happiest place to be.
WHISTLES IN THE WIND 