January 10, 2022
If the sun’s rays fall on the table, and nobody LIKES it, does the sun even shine?
I was explaining how important Instagram had become to me as a practice of paying attention, of noticing. “The way the sun falls across my kitchen table throughout the day.” And I was asked if I’d still be able to do that without posting, making me consider what it means to have an app as an intermediary between me and the world that I’m supposedly paying attention to. It’s interesting—why do I feel like I want to work everything out in public? A question I’ve never really known the answer to, or maybe I do and it’s somewhat self-indulgent. When I’m teaching writing via blogging, I put it down to the form’s epistolary origins. To blog (which, for many of us, is what Instagramming is) is to be asking, “Is anybody out there?” (Though is it also to be demanding, “Look at me?”?) What if, “Is anybody out there?” isn’t even the question I need to be asking anymore?
Last week, I felt like everything I read was a message to my wondering soul. Courtney E. Martin’s newsletter, and this post from artist Lisa Congdon about how, “Lately, though, I’ve been feeling like a don’t always have something to say that hasn’t already been said…” But/and then I listened to poet Maggie Smith on the JOMOcast (and immediately ordered her journal and new book, Keep Moving, from which the journal is inspired) and she was talking about the usefulness of working things out in public, about not having to feel like there is a divide between one’s public and private selves—and I get that. It’s everything to me.
And yet. I guess the idea of fashioning being into some kind of performance makes me tremendously uneasy right now. There is a certain self-consciousness to it that’s tripping me up, and it hasn’t always been this way, but maybe it’s just that I’m more conscious of all kinds of things than I’ve been in the past, my self just one item among them, and so it feels like a performance, whereas it didn’t used to?
Is hyper-conciousness a thing? Because maybe considering this is the beginning of articulating what I’m going through right now, picking up on all the vibes, and I’m looking for what’s real and solid instead of what’s trending, what’s distracting, what’s noise. On the sun on the table, I suppose, even when it’s not posted for everyone to see. On this blog, which is somewhat of a more private place.
What would happened if I really zoomed in, intent on focus? This day, this house, this moment. Right now?
