whiteboard

A Blogger’s bubble

Start off with some tantalizing blog-extremism:
“What can YOU write about today?”
An empty screen opened on a blank-word asks you how and what on earth can I talk about when everything is swallowed into images and personalities faster than I can whisper “happy” or “hmmm”?

A few days ago, sitting at the Goldsmiths Café, we were enjoying the funny early-September atmosphere when Goldsmiths students return and Goldsmiths chatter goes on for a re-fill.
A friend starts telling me about a flatmate that had just handed in his thesis on the writer’s block, so writing about not knowing what to write about. I first misunderstood his thesis title to be the writer’s blog.
I started to imagine an active blogger updating his posts on the meaning of writing, the emptiness of his screen, the silence of our keyboards etc. This confusion made sense, considering how much technology can now format our writing for free but also how blurry the exchange can be between the writer and the random, the blogger and the anonymous visitor.
After understanding the student in question only developed this in a paper most surely destined to be reviewed only by a couple of thinking-heads, I felt slightly disappointed… but curious nevertheless, because we often experience this type of thinking in college-time.
Why disappointed? After all this is what our writings are destined to, to the small satisfaction of graded results.

What counts is what comes after, so let’s blow a few bubbles and think of the future.

It’s hard to be a writer. After a few years of breathing in the history of story-telling, thinking out the same bubbles maybe, often the pressure of participation rhymes with the pressure of efficiency and novelty in a world where the creative concept is built on colours, package, and many a writer’s fall into the endless black-hole which only seems to satisfy the ego of the reader. The reader writes back in the next page, your screened blackboard, a white-board imagined before you could put it into words… We collectively think out descriptions of each other, with it the absence of reality, the silence of all voices.

Silence of exchange and simultaneity of intuition

The writer’s block and the writer’s blog are a whiteboard for communication.
For its hard being a writer, and its easy being a blogger.
No wonder blogging isn’t too popular among us tinker-thinkers! Still when I hear literature students’ difficulties in writing out, for a collective, or in a collective of writers, it makes me think of those that are trained to write the world amidst a see of screens and business-meetings.
Is Kafka’s metamorphosis the transformation of this trained group into a group of dreamers and nightmare-killers?

I’m left to add my graffiti on a surface polished millions of time by the council’s street and wall cleaners…

The time left to write is time to acknowledge passion and potential, otherwise it is mere sacrifice. My vision isn’t just horizontal, but I see strings of power and despair held together by fear and emptiness.
Emptiness is everyone’s, and silence is to be shared. Silence is hard put, too late to learn. Yours to write.