The Self-preservation Society...

I’ve been away from here, lost or at least struggling to make any progress. At times the webcounter flat-lined and I thought, well, there you are, it’s over. But there were occasional blips so I thought I might return, for a bit anyway, so you know that I’m still out there somewhere.

In my absence from this place, and considering the flat-lining of the webcounter, I got to thinking about how many weblogs are currently owned by the dead. I imagined a scenario where LittleMissKittyBlogger had posted just the most adorable picture of her tabby kitten peering out of a pink shoe box on her blog, Kittens R Gr8t! It really is a good picture, one of the best she’s posted and she knows her readers are going to get a kick out of it. Kittens really are the best things, like ever, she thinks. She heads out into the world, maybe to pick up yet more kitten-based paraphernalia, and there she is involved in a major road traffic accident. Does she think, as that articulated truck crosses over the central reservation and ploughs into her car: ‘I can’t post this on Kittens R Gr8t! This is too hard, too real, I’m going to have to start a whole new blog to cover this’, before her life ends? And maybe this life ends as suddenly as a camera’s shutter click or maybe it is drawn out over a few days to the accompaniment of the beep, beep, beep of the monitor but, either way, she doesn’t get back to her beloved blog.

Meanwhile, back at Kittens R Gr8t! people are posting such enthusiastic comments about that last picture and about the blog as a whole. Even though no replies are posted, comments keep on coming. After a couple of days some of the regular readers start posting “where are you?” comments, some are even a little grumpy that they haven’t received reciprocal praise for their blogs and the pictures they posted in response to that last cute kitty picture. By week three, visitors numbers trail off substantially. One regular posts that she hopes that LittleMissKittyBlogger’s absence isn’t an indicator that something bad has happened to her dear little kitten.

Then the weeks pass into months and the months, years. How long will Kittens R Gr8t! remain out there, a testimony to one person’s infatuation with a certain type of small fluffy carnivore? It becomes an attenuated continuation of her existential status and, to her readers, she becomes, somewhat fittingly, like Schrödinger’s cat.

This brings me onto my real point, here, in my quest to discover why we write or, more particularly, why I attempted to write. Is there some hope that, in writing, we achieve some level of immortality; some belief that our thoughts can live on, as our bodies rot and decay? Perhaps. If Milton is to be believed, “a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life”; and again he states, in his pamphlet opposing censorship: “who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but, he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself; kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye; he slays an immortality rather than a life”.

Milton is not alone in harbouring such views, great thinkers before and since would recognise those sentiments. Plato saw books as “…the immortal sons deifying their sires” and Woody Allen, though hoping for a different outcome, recognised the association also when he said “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying”.

Our written words are more closely us than, perhaps, anything else. They are the outward expression of our inner self. A reason, then, to write? Is this what really drives us, some desire for immortality, some attempt at creating a fossil record of our life that declares, “I was here!”?

We know that we will fade so quickly from the memories of others. Even those who knew us well will find our image losing focus over time, the details gone, conversations difficult to recall. Life moves on. Yet, in the written word we have something less ephemeral, less prone to being obscured by time.

If this is our true reason to write, then it draws other associations. If we are only to be preserved after death in the words that we leave behind, then we must consider carefully which words we choose to leave. This observation, in itself, can be more paralysing than it is energising. It seems as if too much is at stake. Perhaps I should dismiss such self-consciousness and rather take heart from T. J. Crabber who, in one of the very few extant letters, wrote the following in an irate reply to his father, a Kentish corn-chandler, who was asking him to give up his work on the Chronicle and pleading for his return to the family business:

"...We must strive in our writing to become much bigger than that. As individuals we are cast as equals, that is to say we are bastards and vagabonds and misfits and fools. But in turning to writing we presume to cast off the bondage of our individuality and our smallness and take on, instead, the mantle of all humanity so that we must at once attend to the concerns of the race both severally and in whole. It is here that we find our purpose and our meaning. And though, like the defenders at Thermopylae, we stand there knowing that we shall fail in our endeavour, that it will consume us entirely and leave us for dead, we know also, like them, that we may find in this struggle our immortality too in the wonder of our words, if not our actions speak, in our fight for the truth and disregard for the odds against success, an abdication of any regard for the concept of success. What matters only is that we take a stand and dismiss our desperate clinging to our mortality and our individuality and our fears."

But then he spent the rest of his life writing about figs.

Anyhow, the point is made and I think there is something in it, even though it may only be part of the answer. There does seem to be something in the appeal of writing to preserve ones thoughts beyond the grave. Who would have heard of Shakespeare if he had decided to make pots rather than write poetry and plays? Who would have heard of Hemmingway if he had decided to devote his life to achieving excellence on his PlayStation 3? Though there is, of course, no consolation in death that your words survive, there can be some consolation in life that you have produced something with greater permanence than yourself that reflects something of your uniqueness and your being. Something more apposite than a headstone’s blunt summary.