this morning marks the end of the first year of the golden fish blog. it also marks the beginning of the second year of the golden fish blog, a coincidence that has not gone unnoticed!
here are a few thoughts on the matter of this blog.
that it has drifted across the map of what is possible through me in terms of content is a given. the subject matter is widespread and very occasionally follows a thread, but more often it reflects an interest, an achievement i want to share, or something i stumbled across, a memory, or even something someone says that makes me think “man, i’d love to know more about that”.
i noticed that some elements of what i began with faded off somewhere - not gone but not evident either. i also noticed that art and music drifted backwards in time, left the edge as it were. i noticed that my internal self was often left out of the equation at key points. my own sense of that is that it is out of consideration for the reader.
there is a strange distanced dialogue that takes place when writing a blog. the distance is driven by comfort, the degree of space the writer needs for themselves to preserve privacy, and then too, consideration for the reader as i mentioned above. how much does the reader actually want to know about the writer’s internal dialogue? hard to say and not generally a point of discussion in blog comments either!
stats counters might like to know that readership ranges from 5 or 6 hundred all the way up to 1400 a month. but i have found that readership isn’t all that important to me. it was for a while but it’s the process of thinking up an idea, or responding to a memory, or needing to know about something and then researching it, assembling it, and finally sharing that i find most enervating and motivating. that has happened 568 times in the past 366 days!
i had thought that the blog might find “a voice” but in fact it has no single voice because i had mistakenly thought that subject matter and voice were one and the same and i know that they aren’t. voice is a much more subtle beast than that. because i am interested in so many things, and especially by those ideas and events that i don't presently know about, the voice if there is one, is whatever exists in the space between my being, my thinking and my writing.
so, to close off the first year, here’s a lovely song sung by lisa gerrard who is accompanied by her former group dead can dance. the song is entitled “devorzhum” and is accompanied by lovely images of the visible universe.
thankyou for visiting.
steven
4 comments:
Happy anniversary, Steven!
hey thanks goldenrod! thanks for all of your visits and comments as well!
steven
Here's to many more years!
hey loren, thanks for dropping by and thanks for the nice comment! one of the nice things about time - well sometimes it's not very nice - is that you get to look back at a stretch of events and compress them into degrees of worthiness. was this a "good" year? was this a year filled with amazing events? was this a forgettable year? you know, that sort of stuff. i find myself doing the same thing as a teacher - i'm starting up my seventeenth class and thinking back over seventeen years of teaching and wondering where all those kids are and how they're doing. the blog has been really good from many vantage points not the least of which is that it compels me to write, to read, to think a little and to be doing something other than all the other things i do. i'll see where it goes from here. glad you can visit.
steven
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