Time for a Change

[poliphilo]

I'm thinking of changing the icon. The son of the sheik is beginning to bore me.
 


Pretentious git. Ah, but this blog started off as an exercise in pretentiousness...

...And concealment. It allowed me to be any age, any gender.

Let's come clean. I'm a middle-aged man, the product of a certain society and conditioning, of a certain time. All my life I've tried to transcend all that: the Home Counties, the 1950s, the public school upbringing, the conservatism.

Right now I'm doing it by writing stories. Every morning I sit down and spend an hour or two imagining the adventures of a pair of teenagers (one male, one female) in the mid 15th century. It's a kind of magic.

I tried traditional magic. I tried the lighting-a-load-of-candles-and-casting-a-circle type of magic and this other kind- this storytelling- is much stronger. I can bring dead worlds back into a kind of existence. I can walk among ghosts. I can be anyone I want to be.

But here in this Journal- if I can remember how it's done- I shall try to be myself.

Comments

[ajoyfulgirl.livejournal.com]

It always fascinates me when people write entries like this. Truly. Because so rarely is the person writing really pretending to be anyone else...at least, so far as I can tell. As you've said-- it's an exercise in concealment. But what is it you've concealed? If I can stretch my mind back to the Existentialism class...I think that the term is "present to hand". All that you've just mentioned is interesting, and can explain many things about you-- but it doesn't necessarily add up to being the truest version of you. The "ready to hand" does that (I might be mixing up those two). Your writing, your thoughts, the moment-to-moment without needing explination.

The sky is blue today, correct?

No, if you want to be technical-- it's just the way the light...etc, etc, etc.

But that's the technical, "present-to-hand" explination for the sky being blue, right? Blue is, in fact, the name we people have produced for that same series of reflections and equations, right?

Thus, unless you've been claiming lies, you've been yourself all along.

Right?

*b.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I like "present to hand". It's liberating. I'm not my history, I'm what I am now, minute by minute. Yeah; that's sweet.

I guess my idea when I started blogging was that it would be like a masked ball. I could put on a disguise and be anonymous and unknowable and- for a very little time- that was good fun. But now I'm bored with it. And- as you say- I reveal myself (my essential nature) in anything I write. I can call myself the Grand Duchess of Lichtenstein, but the marks I leave on the page will always give the game away. I can't escape from myself.

It's like that with fiction too. Every character in every story I write is an aspect of me. It's impossible for me to create one that isn't. My personality sets limits and I can't get beyond them.

I guess writing is a way of exploring those limits, of finding out just how far you can go before you slam into the glass wall.