The posts that aren’t here

For months now I’ve been engaging in a bit of self-deception related to this blog. As soon as I got off the plane (actually as soon as I showed up at the airport) I started writing in the notebook given to me by a friend and teacher from back home, about the million things I’ve been thinking about ever since February 5th. My intention was that I would take these things I’d scribbled down in my notebook and publish them as a record of my time here, in a manner akin to original meaning of “log” a chronological record of thoughts, experiences and happenings.

That notebook is filled now, the first of such gifts that I’ve ever successfully completed, something I see in itself as a kind of accomplishment. And yet most of the things I wrote have stayed there. Worse, or perhaps just more strange, I’ve misremembered those things I wrote as if I’d posted them. I’ve presupposed a kind of bed of recorded writings on this blog that were never there, that have stayed in ink and paper and never crossed over. And then, perversely, I find that I’ve only written things here, when I didn’t have them written down in any previous medium, precisely because I feared that I’d forget them otherwise.

You’ve all done this. You’ve written something, or practiced a musical instrument or read a book or any number of productive things precisely because you were supposed to be doing something else. It seems we’re always supposed to be doing something else.

But there’s another element to this that occurred to me as I was rereading an email correspondence with a friend. She told me that her dad’s death was always on her mind in the months after it happened, in a way that seemed so obvious to her, but that was not obvious to everyone else.

It happens to me too. I'll be sitting at dinner having pizza and beer with some American friends here, and I mention my dad’s death, because it is relevant to something I was talking about. Well of course it’s relevant! It factors heavily into my thinking, so it seems only natural to make explicit reference to it from time to time. And yet when I do, I have this whole lot of explaining to do and have to deal with people’s reactions which are inevitably frustrating, whether inadequate or overblown. Usually, to avoid this issue, I just don’t bring it up.

This is actually one of the great advantages of a blog as a means of communication. Blogs can be anonymous. I've been reading one such personal blog lately, which among other things is about the personal experiences of a woman who's been in an abusive relationship and was raped. By its anonymity I can read about the thoughts and insights of someone who would never have told me these things face to face, but which I’m able to access precisely and paradoxically because I don’t know her real name.

It's not anonymity that's really important though, my dad's death isn't exactly a secret that I would need to hide with a pseudonym. It’s already in the realm of common knowledge; the obituary comes up in the first few entries in a Google search. Unlike Harriett, what happened to me happens to most people and is completely ordinary in many ways. And yet any treatment I give it verbally seems inadequate, or seems to misrepresent my relation to that reality.

That last sentence seems really abstract, so let me try to be clearer by analogy. My dad’s death isn’t something that happened—it’s a reality that’s in the background of everything, like the bass part of a song—maybe you don’t always notice it’s there, but it colors everything else, and if it were possible, you would notice if it went away. It isn’t the melody, it’s not obvious and in-your-face, even though it may get a solo (and inevitably some people will start talking at this point, as if the music has stopped). It’s undoubtedly important, as it is the base upon which the rest is built. But it is important for its constant and enduring presence and not because of sharp pitch or dramatic changes.

Writing, in particular the blog medium, can be good at this not so much because of the potential anonymity though the net (although this undoubtedly does help some people), but becase it allows you to explain things on (and in) your own terms, and it gives the person on the other side of the glass the ability to take it or leave it.