The blog in time

Following a supervision meeting this afternoon, the question floating around my head at the moment is how to link the temporalised "self", with the intention to blog. In writing this blog, for example - and to ignore for the moment the possibility of communicating (to temporarily quarantine the "other") - I produce an inscription and thus exteriorise what was heretofore interior (thoughts, ideas). Insodoing I thus allow myself to reflect on those thoughts in a different way. I gain distance from those thoughts, can see them in the cold light of the exterior world, examine them more "objectively". This reflection, then, relates to the present self. The intention to blog allows the present self reflection on itself.

Clearly, though, the blog is a memory object also. As I create these strings of words, whether consciously or not, I also open the possibility of memorialisation. My future self then has access to these reflections; it'll be able to remember (parts of) what it was like to exist at an earlier time, and in the similarities and differences exposed be able to explore what it is to be that person identified as "me". So (and whether consciously or not), I serve both my present and future selves in writing this, through reflection and memorialisation. To what extent, though, am I also serving my past self?

Perhaps, in laying those words down, in reflecting on who I am, I'm also betraying where I've come from. Perhaps I'm intentionally laying down memories, eulogising, reconstructing the past - and perhaps insodoing I'm idealising, mitigating, explaining, mourning. Perhaps the past self, from whence we've been thrown (in Heidegger's parlance), is always the subject of this life-writing, of this reflection. Maybe it's the Proustian search of lost time which lies behind any such activity; at the very least, the mourning of that (now past) lost time which prompts me to exteriorise my thoughts now, so at least some of the "now" doesn't get lost.

There are lots of perhapses there, but then these words themselves form only initial ideas of course, a train of thought, an exteriorisation of some things that have been on my mind. And quite rambling they are too ... perhaps a little too close to comfort to other post-modern musings. Do I want them to be published (broadcast? - are these only metaphors anyway?)? Well, it’s too late now, here they go ...