Thursday, September 29, 2011
“you”
I’m obviously at times alluding to “you” in this blog (and on Webpages), but only one person would know whom that could specifically be. Other readers are supposed to see a general writerly, textualist, literary issue represented. I’ll carry that theme to heights which a typical reader might not anticipate. What fun.
But there’s also a privacy that’s alive at another blog. This abstract fact serves my public interest in inner/outer differences I’ve recently expressed via Webpages linked from here. But the content of the inner complement is nobody else’s business. Yet, writing in light of that here (in a way that no one but you could discern) is an elating prospect.
However, the abstract point is useful, in two ways: Firstly, conceptual venturing about intimate life is one side of a living byway that belongs to each of us, in our private ways; so, portraying inner/outer differences here expresses something living for anyone (within bounds of public confession).
What might be generally said about individuality? What might be exemplified in narrated individuality or confession? These kinds of questions are implicit to all of Literature (if not philosophy and psychology, too).
Secondly, the ambiguity of ‘you’ is validly valuable here. Other readers are potential intimates, at least in the sense that intimacy belongs to each of us in our own way, our own life, yet as shared potential of presence (though here, only via text), such that conceptual excursion may confess things that our anonymity to each other makes easier, in a humanity of intimacy (so to speak).
What is truly loving?, for example. (Letting go, as well as letting be, are integral.) Such a question is as old as ethical thought. It’s integral to Literary sensibility (obviously) and psychological understanding (e.g., genuine happiness). How far with you, in anonymity, might I pursue this usefully and credibly? How genuinely might I anticipate you? (Or: whom is really anticipated? Whom am I becoming in you?) I’m not confessional because I need your validation. I’m endeavoring to share what I hope is useful. Yet, what is this wanting to be fruitful to the stranger intimately? What’s the nature of the boundary between credibility and incredibility, plausibility and implausibility, creativity and symptomology?
Good questions, no?, regardless of details from a life named factually.
The boundaries of textuality are deliciously fluid, sometimes deserving of lamentation.
Perhaps you, general reader (a Victorian idiom?), are a kindred far away I’d love to know.
Anyway, I’ve lived too long to bother hiding themes of intimacy we all live. I don’t mind seeming to make a fool of myself in public by being candid.
At the inner blog (or to your sensibility unknowable to me), you’re always the only other reader (or I write to you as if there’s no one else), because you want that, wrote me so—told me you’d accept my invitation—so, [t]here we are, in a liminality of text, like an allegory of human Time, since all that may remain between the dead and the living, the idealist and the realist, is text, which other kinds of tangibles are, too, in their own way: photographs, personal treasures, ….
