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MS told me, in a momentous though quiet and unfussy meeting of far-flung friendships forged through LJ, some months ago that he was attracted to my stubbornness for insisting on employing the written word in my livejournal (these days, blog would have become the de rigeur terminology) and never have once used a photograph to illustrate my thoughts or daily experiences. This is primarily because I am lazy and have very little inclination to picture my life visually despite cultivating a rigorous taste for the visual art as the years go by.
On the other hand, I think I was just as intrigued by a principally anecdotal tale of how the French daily Le Mondewas able to resist publishing photographs alongside their news and editorials. I have no way of finding out how true this is, for it is clearly not so today. But I thought, back then, living in a deluge of the visual that often leaves us very little room for imagination, let alone aneasthetises, through its reproducibility and repetition, our ability to empathise with the sufferings of another or react to horror - I thought it heroic.
What does it matter now. This project began at the very beginning of the decade when the world was much smaller than it is now. In the careless sort of way the topic is brought about over drinks one night, we dug into the decade as asked for cultural significance and achievement. Colleagues and friends, older than I am, were not convinced that there was anything new nor original with which the past ten years could be summarily framed within. The answer was quite obvious, the internet changed us, even as this platform is receding towards irrelevance.
Someone said, I guess I hadn't notice because these things didn't really impact on me. For the rest of us, who grew up with the internet, have our world expanded by the possibilities of its endless horizon, it is a terrifying fontier-like landscape verging on sublimity. To look back and see when wikipedia became a daily bread, youtube for staple entertainment, facebook for communication, and then consider the magnificent ruin that is livejournal, sitting today at the precipice, when it was once close to the epicentre of our cultural life in the early years of the Noughties.
I write less now. I write less for pleasure, for reflection. Little did I know that the style I was keen on developing in my journal would have an august precedence - the Chinese literary genre of shan wen, or short, concise, excursive essays that meander and observe. Yet, writing less, writing in a space that has become irrelevant, I am afforded some freedom once more, ironically - free from the constraints of testing words against readers.
I never write for myself. Umberto Eco once wrote quite delightfully that those who believe so are atheists. Rightly so. But there is a part in journal keeping that is aimed towards self-cultivation. They are like the little strings knotted on one's pinky, serving as a reminder that one's personhood can be magnified by writing. When we write, we transcend. We become a bigger person, a much more magnanimous person. Our writings tell us that we have the ability to absorb and see the world in much more ways than where we stand in our current position. Our present smallness is compensated with this rich and complex entity that we can become aware of in our writing - our own personal complexity that make us full and rich and perhaps, meaningful.
I think Susan Sontag wrote something to that effect. When we encounter our own writing, we see ourselves as being capable of so much more. This, then, partially explains my endeavour.
In a week or so, the decade closes. We look for clues, events, cues that would on the long run come to explain what the beginning of the 21st century is. Nothing much has changed to be honest. Great ideas ran out of steam by the eighties at least. We just take it all in and throw it out to the further reaches of the earth, opening the floodgates, granting access to the inaccessible, so that somethings may return in the future at some importune moment when we need them - a poem, a video, a sonnet, a photograph, a passage, a song - and they may be some source of endless strength. Proliferated, endlessly.
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