Publish and be Damned*

I wrote this in 2006, when social media were still young. Blogspot was the popular medium for bloggers, who habitually offered lists of  other blogs they recommended. See for example Bryan White’s Encyclopedia of Counting Sheep with his journal of dreams. 

Reading it again, I still hold to the view that blogging is a way to entertain readers with your own life and thoughts, without cost to author or reader. Best-selling authors do it for a living. But they have to be compulsive writers as well.

To be a writer, you only need one reader. If you google “literary blogs” you will find those which gossip about literature, rather than consider themselves as literature. I am not interested in gossip, and abhor the clichéd thoroughfares of discourse. But I think blogging is my kind of literature, at least for now. Crawford Kilian is one of those who consider that blogs are a new literary form capable of the heights. Seth Godin, giving Advice for authors, strongly recommends a blog as a trailer for a book, starting three years before its publication. He also counsels against the mean-spiritedness of keeping the ideas for the paying readers:

Understand that a non-fiction book is a souvenir, just a vessel for the ideas themselves. You don’t want the ideas to get stuck in the book… you want them to spread. Which means that you shouldn’t hoard the idea! The more you give away, the better you will do.

The book as a souvenir—that’s a lovely idea. You go into a museum or art gallery full of priceless artefacts, then on the way out you purchase souvenirs: a bunch of postcards or a poster. And here we are not speaking merely of ideas, but of experience. Possess a book, and it languishes on your shelves like something washed up on a lonely shore. A blog remains on the public shelves of the world’s greatest library, available to every borrower.

For years, I “wanted to be a writer”, without considering what it meant. Not to be a journalist, not to write best-sellers, but once in a while to move others as I have been moved. It sounds so vague. More than anything else in life, I have treasured the magical anticipation when raw creative energy builds within me. What does it want to shape? Not till it manifests do we know.

In the paintings of Van Gogh, the novels of John Cowper Powys, and in music from Senegal and Jamaica, I find the very essence of what I want to do in … in these blog posts! I’ll give it my best.

As a young man, I was aware of intense pure impulses to feel and share. But I did not know how to deal with a magnetic force which tried to pull me away from the common world; an excitement which reached its peak in solitary contemplation but frustrated my attempts to bring it forth.

Now, Darius says: “You are extremely fortunate – and fortunate enough to know it.” Oh true! And how fortunate to spend the rest of one’s life sharing that knowing, so that others too can see that they are—can be—equally fortunate. It will be enough. It will pay my share of the tax that we each owe to this world—to give something back.

I used to be vaguely inspired by nuns in enclosed orders, “praying for the world”—an action with unprovable effect. But now our bright silk prayer-flags can flutter in the deep blue of the blogosphere, for all to see.

*  “Publish and be damned”
The Duke of Wellington’s response in 1824 to John Joseph Stockdale who threatened to publish anecdotes of Wellington and his mistress Harriette Wilson.

Comments
Hayden
although it doesn’t speak to the title “giving something back” it does seem to me that, to be a writer, a reader (even one) is the icing on the cake. To be a writer, I believe that it takes only one, critically important thing – to write with intention. To focus on readers rather than writing leads to popularity contests and – worst – common-denominator writing.
Nila-kantha-chandra
Dear Friends, I am very happy to announce that I have put up a collection of my poems on the internet. This is titled Inheritance: Poesy for Oneness and Well-being. It’s accessible at: http://inheritance-poesy.blogspot.com/  (no longer) I would like to invite you all to visit this site. I would be very happy to read your comments/critique. I look forward to hearing from you! Best regards, Rama
Vincent
Hayden, I agree with you completely on this! All the same, the feedback from reader(s) is an essential stimulus as far as I am concerned.Rama, congratulations! I am resistant to their religious tone, but they will repay more sustained reading.
Hayden
August 9, 2006
Vincent, I agree that feedback is a great help. For me, though, years ago, pre-blogging, I found that if I concentrate on the writing and not on the fact that I was neither published nor preparing to publish, the writing was liberated.
The other thing I was thinking of when I commented was slavishness to those add-ons which count the number of visits. One suspects that people decide what to write and say based on how others respond. I’m not suggesting that this isn’t valid, just that often -not always—it appears to cheapen both the writing and the process.
Vincent
I do accept your point, Hayden, but I have been scribbling away in secret for most of my adult life. The quality was poor and the subject-matter of some (a masterpiece called “Seer & System”) was so obscure that it bores me to recollect it. Then I started to write articles for a literary magazine (La Lettre Powysienne) receiving much needed encouragement from its editor, and then various forms of internet forum (one of which you know about Hayden).

All this has shown me that my objective isn’t really to be a writer at all: but to be me, a pathless journey which discloses itself at each step. Along the way, I got a book published (once a cherished dream) and discovered my own complete indifference to the result. I’m not blogging to establish any popularity, but certainly to share, and have dialogues. I like to have a discreet counter on the site! When someone writes a comment, I sometimes feel like devoting an entire post to replying, just for the joy of cross-fertilising ideas. It is significant that of all writers my heroes are John Cowper Powys, Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard.

Powys I consider the greatest novelist of 20th century: but he remains almost unknown, perhaps because he never wrote down to his readers. Wittgenstein’s works were mostly published posthumously from incomplete manuscripts, apart from his Tractatus, in whose preface he writes “Its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it.” (There are large parts of it which I do not understand!) Kierkegaard had a private income enabling him to publish at his own expense and so not care about popularity. He is difficult to read too!

But I do want to communicate, and to reach people in dialogue. I think of two Jesuit priests, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin, whose literary works were posthumous and written perhaps against the rules of their Order. They and their work suffered from this.(Of course I am not comparing my amateur scribbles with any of the above authors.)