reinventing the wheel
I begin the blog with the gritty noise of screws screwing into the door hinge. Now the door can open and close.
(I'm reading Renee Gladman's Calamities and she begins each essay/poem with "I begin the day". Not "I began" but "I begin". The beginning is always present in the writing.)
I begin the evening with the question of what social media has given me and I decide it has given me something real, which is a love of images or a fixation on them, neither of which shape up to the love and fixation I know in my friends who live truly through images as I live through language. For this reason I've never imagined myself to be real about it – my love of images was not innate but has grown (sunlight) or been conditioned (salivating at the bell). Anyway all of it false anyway. No one is born with a camera in their hand, they are given one. And more, though I sometimes think I am born with my sense of language, it is only because I cannot place the gift of language as I can place the child who picked up the camera.
I begin my hunger by remembering the lie that I have always told myself that I, unlike another, could spend the rest of my life keeping to myself, without sharing myself. Anyone who knows me, or has met me for more than a minute, would laugh at this. Here I am now, sharing.
I begin the middle of a minute like water settling into the soil.
I begin sorting myself into bed by creating a list.
- blogging is one-to-many and one-to-one
- this image
- there must be some detail to this, a glimpse of a face, a parody of vulnerability if you are to continue believing it is me, specifically, behind this
- this writing will not be so careful and that will be the point
- you end up breathing in the thing you're burning
- does it sound too serious? must it be so serious?
I begin sorting myself out of distance and into a new kind of relation. I have little to show for it, and still I am trying to show it– perhaps to justify, perhaps to expose, perhaps to perform.
Must it be so serious? I am trying to do something else and tell a different story.
I begin the blog by beginning, saying hello, inviting you to stay around for a while.