The Truth of Human Experience

It has recently come to my attention that I'm not really much of a blogger. "Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty," writes Sarah Boxer in an article in the NY Review of Books. Almost none of these adjectives could be used to describe my blog, but then again I've never been much for id. My own is a bit like this dog: put-upon, aggravated, squeezed into a costume that doesn't really fit for the dubious amusement of someone else.

I didn't start this log to express myself or define myself or to rant or whine or vent; I didn't start it to titillate or to provide the constant window into my consciousness that I'm sure no one wants because most of my consciousness is sort of like the fight between the dog in the chair and the photographer. I started it to practice an entirely different kind of writing, namely, the personal essay, in a space I thought would be more encouraging than the notebooks I have always filled and rarely gone back to read. It's public enough to be motivating, anonymous enough to be safe. Like therapy.

But I can't help noticing just how much writing is out there, most of it not only recent but instant, new information becoming available every minute, a steady current within the ever-roaring stream of opinion and critique. Why add my voice to the river of others? Or, more to the point, what makes writing worth reading to someone who didn't write it?

This is the train of thought that led me to start throwing around this rather weighty phrase "The Truth of Human Experience." I like how it scans; the rhythm is right. I wonder if maybe I've heard it somewhere before. It sounds a bit like something I would have railed against in college, and I'm not sure I quite believe in it now. I certainly don't use it to imply that the human experience is singular or in any way reducible to a clutch of morals, or that meaning can be extracted like syrup from the business of living. Instead, I like to picture an ore the earth is rich with, that runs in veins beneath mountains waiting for someone with a pick-ax and a stick of dynamite to take on the backbreaking task of hauling it out into the light. It would be crude, craggly, no two chunks the same, each heavy as a soaked collie. Still, it could power factories, light cities for days.

Anyway, that's what I'm looking for. I'll let you know what I find.