Current mood:	contemplative
Current music:	Balligomingo - Elation
Entry tags:	blogging

Grunting the Soul Bare
With online journals, we're back in the twelfth century, the days before privacy existed, (re)creating the cult of the individual.

These journals are so insistently "I" focused, a declaration of uniqueness so strong it has to be made public. We're Chretien de Troyes or Marie de France, Abelard and Heloise, not only affirming the values of courtly culture but training the eye on the solo performer, the one, not the many.

At their best, online journals, as a genre, offer fascinating glimpses of crackling alien synapses. It's voyeur's paradise, better than Big Brother (the show or Orwell), where you're encouraged to pull a Hannibal Lector and cut away the top of someone's brain to peer inside. (If I'm misspelling his last name, it's because the Latin is so appropriate to my discussion.)

At their worst, online journals undermine their basic purpose by regurgitating teeny-bopper gibberish that's about as individual as a Big Mac.

"I met Bob last night."

"What a hottie."

"My dog's name is Roger and he barks a lot."

"I'm depressed because no one loves me."

So you're depressed. Either take some Prozac and go veg in front of the tube or use that feeling to write something with suicidal beauty.

In the Middle Ages, people expected their written material to circulate. Text arguably achieved a status parallel to relics: like those fragments of God, text carried an almost supernatural power. Writers and readers obsessed over it. Would it offend God? Their friends? The king? Was it an insult to Petrarch? Homage to Dante? Would it last? What did it all mean?

You wrote to matter. And if we're harkening back to a time when privacy didn't exist, when writing was public, when the individual was starting to peer a la Kilroy over the feudal wall, then let's get off our asses and do more than caveman grunting.

(What was that, dear cyberdiary? Are you suggesting that this blathering is a defense, a way of avoiding the real issues and distancing myself from yet another crappy situation? How perceptive of you. Too perceptive. Perhaps you'll have to be destroyed for probing too insightfully into my psyche, which has taken enough probing lately to last a lifetime.)

Note to self: don't write entries in 'contemplative' mode. Extremely boring.