Meta Girl

Not much of a journaler, consistency being a base requirement, my musings have most often found form in my visual art work or internal conversations within my lively mind. Both platforms offer plenty of space to indulge my everythingness, welcoming every attractive tangential curiosity, every enriching and divergent alternative point of view, and basically every shiney, sparkling pulse that fires a wave in this noggin.

I do however, crave a written discipline that will provide a fluid vehicle for expression that my mental masturbation and visual art practice can't quite satisfy. Being the meta-girl that I am, of course my first post isn't so much an entry as it is a rumination on the potential for making entries. But first a little history :-)

My mom actually introduced me to the world of cut and paste, teaching me to cut up my report drafts in high school and tape them together before final the final typing. I will have cut and pasted phrases in this little post perhaps 30 times before I publish it. Cut and paste offers endless opportunities for variation - lucky me!! And even though I have to peek at the keys a bit, typing has always been a more fluid conduit for my thinking than hand writing. The energy expelled in typing is rhythmic and light, it's like skipping across a flat surface, whereas writing is heavy and slow, contained more in the 3 dimensional space of the hand, pen and paper, it's more like making love or cooking.

Internet and computer platforms offer a cornucopia of expressive vehicles: word processing, graphic layout, calendars, powerpoint presentations, email, discussion lists and forums, personal ads, chat, instant messaging (IM), personal and professional webpages, LiveJournal, blogging, etc. Each vehicle offers fertile grounds for exploring expressive form.

When I first acquired an online life, my emails were dispatches to distant friends, of the ebb and flow of my passing interests and critical concerns. Postal letters and cards only interested me for spurts, but email was immediate. I am too selfish to simply "give" away correspondence, I crave responses immediately!

The forms that provided the most immediate response are the one I really became addicted to. When I post on a discussion list, I am always happily surprised by the high quality of writing I submit. When I read what I've had to say, I think "What an interesting and intelligent girl!" Oftentimes, the more intelligent my writing, the fewer responses I provoke, but at least I can go back and reread my own fascinating thinking. Instant messaging (IM) and chat environments provided a dysfunctional number of hours of exploration for the hybrid form of speech/writing it embodied. Speech has proven to be the most sludgy form of expression of all for me. Hearing myself talk, really does bore me, but the written ephemerality of IM and chat made my speech more exciting to me. Finally, I could converse, in near-realtime, at the level of my written intellect. Needless to say, I am smart enough to have found the end of those rainbows quickly enough.

Finally, while social speech has proven a dreary vehicle for me, academic speech (in the form of lectures, seminar discussion and critical dialogue) has been a rich and rewarding field of play. The interactivity and high energy level embedded within these forms is stimulating enough to enliven brain tissue in realtime, literally expanding my intellectual capacity as I go. It feels really neat! But it requires a live audience, one that I don't have 24/7 access to. (Hmmm, there's an idea for consensual slavery - a harem of intellectual exercise partners.)

Now, let's return to the topic of a consistent writing practice. Having tried LiveJournal for sometime, I became bored with my voice, again. What makes memoirs, personal musings, diaries, and autobiographies interesting? Having an interesting life certainly helps, but some of my most beloved tales are of nobodies, who don't really do much - their non-stories delight me for the air and breath contained within them. For me, the best writing has the capacity to listen; it contains enough space to accommodate the life that the reader brings to it. But a busy, flashy story has filled up so much space that there's no room for me, the reader, to muster up responses and images in a counter-offering. And even if I could, a busy and flashy story wouldn't be capable of hearing me when I read it.

This leads me to the crux of this meta post, which is to focus on a form for personal expression, using the written word, that is immediate enough to satisfy my selfishness, and challenging enough to focus my aesthetic and intellectual pretensions. The style of "journaling" I practiced in LiveJournal felt small and insular, like the writing of a schoolgirl whose world is only as big as her playhouse. I look to blogging to be a time-based and expansive vehicle that can help me tie together some aspects of my voice into a cohesive frame for varied content and attitude. I ain't no David Foster Wallace, but I'm sure I have at least as much to say.