Steve_Bamlett_blog

I started blogging as a requirement of a course I studied with tbe Open University, an MA in Online and Digital Teaching and Learning. Now, having gained that qualification, used it (often in the teeth of opposition from that contradictory organisation where I taught Psychology and Foundation Neuroscience), and retired as a teacher and social worker, the practical learning appears to have disappeared into that great wen where forgetting occurs. Once, before that course  I might have had some contempt for the blog as a genre in writing: ignorance is a great breeder of such pathetic contempt. But now I find I need to blog, well past questions of whether I use blogs as blogs are conventionally used and for some ought or must be used.

Yet sometimes I fall into despair about blogging, as I can do too with much else: in these states, I can see the justification for me continuing to blog, which others do to gain a readership and reputation.  I have to remind myself it never was to seek an audience that I blogged, so that not having one to speak of  (except for a few kindly lovely people of whom Joanne is exceptional) should not bother me or form a query to continuing with blogging.

It started to fulfil dual functions, this habit of blogging. These functions are rather locked in the cycles of self-maintenance, where sometimes you need to be able to review the things (skills, obsessions, and aptitudes) that must be used to survive as part of yourself. For me, this probably is mainly an issue related to reading published works, and to be sure that, for me, the reading I have done matters, and is more than an exercise in merely passing time. There seem to be two reasons this is the case.

First, reading is a complex set of processes using integrated if not necessarily always fully inter-connected, when they need to be, internal systems that regulate thought, feeling and sensation in us and relate them to each other, most of which rarely become fully conscious. It is only when I reflect on these semi-cloaked systems that they become more conscious and I truly know what I have read and the reflexive processes occurring at the time of reading, where emotion, sensation, and thought either battle with each other or find a temporary or more permanent sense of integration and sometimes, even, integrity. Writing a blog invites that talking to yourself about what has just occurred in your life.

Second, the process is, I hope, a strengthening exercise for the functions it uses; a means of keeping active and alive mental, emotional and sense-gathering functions,  like understanding or even gnosis in the fullest sense, in oneself, that if not used can be abused by forces outside your control or die altogether, within a sequence of dying that happens to us all from the day we hit our prime until we expire. Things die, or at best become latent, whether we noticed, or used to our and/or others’ benefit,  that primal optimal moment or not: or wasted it, as most of us do. Nevertheless, survival in our optimal form for each stage of the continuum of life, in that hopefully long duration while we still live at all, is still in our gift in a way it cannot be when we finally expire completely.

We only have that moment, as Keats might have thought in the most beautiful fragment of his that defines poetry for me, when life still lives in us. Thereafter we, and even he (‘poor boy’ or ‘Poor John’ as Dickens thought him) become dependent on readers that outlive us:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–
I hold it towards you.

It is not merely that the word ‘hand’ is a shortened version of the the thing we refer to as the handwritten, but that Keats knows that its life continues only in the gift of embodiment, and the blood flow that supports embodiment, that the reader lends to verse and make it alive, lest everything it was and could be forever ‘cold’ and in ‘the icy silence of the tomb’, writing that is never read dedicated to a body that has already, or is in the process of decaying. Poets often make a thing of surviving beyond their embodied life. My favourite expression of it is from Tennyson’s In Memoriam lyric 77.

What hope is here for modern rhyme
      To him, who turns a musing eye
      On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie
Foreshorten'd in the tract of time?

These mortal lullabies of pain
      May bind a book, may line a box,
      May serve to curl a maiden's locks;
Or when a thousand moons shall wane

A man upon a stall may find,
      And, passing, turn the page that tells
      A grief, then changed to something else,
Sung by a long-forgotten mind.

But what of that? My darken'd ways
      Shall ring with music all the same;
      To breathe my loss is more than fame,
To utter love more sweet than praise.

We can write what we like whilst we live, this great lyric says, but once dependent on the breath and blood of others to make it live, we ourselves may then be a ‘long-forgotten mind’, our poems, or blogs, if ever published in ‘hard copy’, as the modern parlance is to distinguish books from digital texts, merely used as a domestic apputrenance, though in our rich society maidens, or men, might prefer a plastic roller to using rolled up waste paper to curl their locks. Even if writing survives, it can only mean something that has ‘changed to something else’ than that for which it was intended to mean, or meant to most at the time of writing.

Without God and the notion of the importance of personal survival beyond death, even on earth for a short time, worrying about having an audience seems frankly magical thinking at its most childlike, or even childish, or at its worst, Trumpian. I don’t  care to entertain that thought. Yet Tennyson gets this right, and, to a certain extent, he had God in his life, or claimed he did sometimes:

But what of that? My darken'd ways
      Shall ring with music all the same;
      To breathe my loss is more than fame,
To utter love more sweet than praise.

There is an answer to why I write blogs buried here, although I don’t yet just ‘breathe my loss’ in blogs, though being a morbid sort, sometimes do. My amended version might be:

But what of that? My darken'd ways
      Might bring me hope new things to learn;
      Grow muscle with necessary burn,
To learn anew, more worth than praise.

I am not Tennyson obviously, but a poor, in both senses, versifier, though I note WordPress now calls what was its block for writing ‘Verse’ now a block for writing ‘Poetry’. I don’t aspire to that name at all in things that I write as blogs even in verse (it being more grandiose than other written forms of association in the words of Sir Philip Sydney and Percy Bysshe Shelley who both wrote glowing ‘defences’ and ‘aplogies’ for it that are neither defensive or apologetic given that they use the source meaning of those literary words) stuffed as it is with hopeless desire of immortality.

But I, even when not writing about reading per se, try to read the world in ways that allow me, if only me, to grow more conscious of having learned and of what I have learned. That’s why I write blogs!

With love

Steven xxxxxxx