If you are tired of those who wish to take from you by force
then we can find all that we need by sipping from the source

Just give me a few minutes as I talk to you alone
no friends no fakes no internet no links no telephone

so we can be
communion unafraid of unity
bare all for me
you only hide your greater beauty

beneath the interruptions of
our endless worldly chores
and those whose blind intrusions
make them unintended bores

who can really blame them
for seeking out your light

so goes the night

Now most of the people I know who used it have stopped. It is in many ways a dying platform, at least for my age group.

This is probably due in part to the prevalence of social networking sites. There are so many other options for this kind of self-expression.

It is also probably due in part to the fact that as adults we now in theory have so much to lose from being open about our thoughts, anxieties, personal life choices. Whereas before a community of sympathetic acquaintances could form pseudonymously, now we have to worry about real people judging me.

Also, many people may just have grown out of their need for it. They have people in their lives who are able to listen to them.

There are people who get away with expressing their feelings publicly, for display. We call those people artists. It is acceptable to express any kind of otherwise unsightly despair, or longing, or mischievousness, or what have you if it is a work of art. It’s not a confession; it’s an essay.

That’s not entirely true. We can accuse someone who writes a book of being self-indulgent. I’ve always thought that in these cases the joke is on the reader. Don’t like it? Stop reading it! And yet, people sometimes read books, I think, in order to have a conversation with somebody where they don’t need to talk or be witty. They can practice being a good listener.

“Oh my god, I can’t believe she’s going on and on like that,” one might think while they read a book. “She is so self-absorbed.”

We do this all the time when listening to real people. Well, certain real people. Well, certain “we”’s do this. And yet, we don’t put a stop to it. We must, on some level, like listening. Maybe it’s about caring about a person, even when we wish they would get a grip. Maybe we like feeling superior. Maybe it’s entertaining in some way, and our feelings of judgment are themselves part of the entertainment, our drive for the interesting so much stronger than the drive for the pleasurable or the perfect. Maybe we look for that in books.

All idle speculation and really neither here nor there; I don’t read that many books I’d consider “self-indulgent”. Really I just remember hearing somebody say that once about a book recently. Hearing that has come back to me to now as I write this. I wonder if what I am writing now is self-indulgent.

Where was I?

The thing about LiveJournal was that I could just be honest there. Honest with myself, honest with the world. I could be as crazy as I actually was in my hypomanic states. I could be as depressed as I was in my moodiest adolescent moments. That journal is a liability, and yet for a long time I felt as though if I didn’t write down the things that were filling my brain and let them out into the world, my skull would split open.

Things are a bit different now. I’m older and more tired. There are more people in my life who could hurt me if they wanted to. There are more people I could hurt accidentally if I were too open about things. I care more about hurting people by accident.

And yet, I am only half myself without a regular outlet of the kind I am describing. I’m not the kind of person who can present himself fully in a conversation with other people. My trains of thought are too long to sustain that kind of interest. I’m constantly abridging myself.

The compromise, I guess, is to be self-indulgently self-expressive somewhere discrete.

But there’s a problem. I can’t separate myself from my work, and my work is public.

“I can’t separate myself from my work.” What do I mean by this? Well, some people are able to go to work and spend the day alienated from it, daydreaming or simply busying themselves, then go home and become who they really are. I’m not able to do that.

I know this because the other day when I looked up my birthday in a book of astrology, my page told me so. That I had to find a way to keep my emotions and passions in my work.

Also, I know this because I’ve read an editorial review on Amazon of Seth Godin’s recent book Linchpin. If you haven’t read this review, I would highly recommend it. It tells you that Seth Godin thinks that “Everyone’s an artist now.” That you have to be passionate about your work in order to be competitive because things are too interesting now. Never mind that this speaks to a very narrow demographic within the professional class, though in a sense it is true that the people who still have jobs are mostly really passionate about having them.

Anyway, I’m not going to do well in a line of work that requires me to be silent about things that are important to me or bothering me. In fact, if there is anything which I can consider a specialty, it might be complaining incisively.

“My work is public.” Yes, it is. I’ve committed myself to this route. I’ve worked in open source software, where the fruits of my labor have all been for public consumption. I have been involved, as a matter of livelihood, in a number of open mailing lists. Now I have decided to pursue an academic path, where once again I’m supposed to be dedicating myself to generating an propagating ideas.

What I think what this adds up to is that I need to start moving the emotionally laden blogging into a sphere more tied to my “real” identity. To me, this identity is the identity of my full name, Sebastian Benthall. I was given a unique name at birth and by that fact I am easily traceable on the internet. My mother does this routinely. I do this to other people compulsively upon learning their names. I wonder what it’s like for the people with common names, who can be lost in a crowd of words. They live a different life.

I’m trying to excuse myself, somehow, for something that is in many ways anti-social behavior. I want to be able to express myself openly here, as honestly as if nobody were listening. More precisely, I want to be able to express myself here as if God were listening. Admitting that is awkward as it raises lots of questions about what I actually believe, whether or not I believe in God, doesn’t that mean I’m some kind of crazy or something. You know.

But that’s what I think I may need at this point. Previously, I’ve tried to keep this blog something more focused, something more broadly appealing. I’ve tried to keep it as Art. I wanted it to be that if you followed the feed, you would only find things that were well-crafted for your consumption. My feelings would be wrapped up in symbolism. Somehow, that was supposed to be more palatable or interesting for you.

I still hope that I’ll be posting things that are art here. It’s a little painful to write that since I associate artists with pompous self-indulgence, and somehow I’d like to believe that I can produce something artistic that is interesting for you without believing that I am a capable artist and whatever that implies, and without doing it in a way that is a self-serving release. Writing that to you, here, makes it clear how self-destructive those worries are. Of course, I can’t attempt to do something I am trying to keep myself from having confidence in. And I can’t be motivated to do something that provides me no solace except through self flagellation.

You see? It took writing that to you to figure through that twist in my soul. It’s still there but maybe I can work on it now.

So you’ll see where I’m going with this. I’m going to start being more honest, more confessional, here. Starting now, with this tangled apology for why I need to be more honest and confessional. I’m psyching myself up for it.

Because I’m afraid. I’m afraid of what will happen if I do this more systematically. I’m afraid something I write may come back to haunt me in a way I didn’t expect. I’m afraid that I will insult somebody by accident or on purpose because I’m not a very nice guy.

But I’m also hopeful. There’s a character in Kierkegaard’s writings, the knight of faith, who lets go of everything on faith that he will get it all back again by virtue of the absurd. He is easy going and unperturbed in his choices. And so, I am going to try to have faith that if I let go of more of myself here, let it spill out a bit, I will get myself back by virtue of the absurd.

I invite you to unsubscribe from this feed, as it will soon become terribly self-indulgent.

GIVE UP! or not.

(on the girl you have a crush on /
why would you? You haven’t even tried!!!!