A strange thing about keeping this diary, a thing that's happened many times over the years, is that I sometimes become vividly aware of the way in which my online body of time (and this representation is, in some way, extra-bodily, though it is also extra-unbodied) does not match the body of time in the physical world. That is: thoughts days, weeks, or months apart in the physical world jut up against one another here. The labels they all now have, where you can look at everything I've labeled "being dumb" or "early modern" all together make that even more apparent. And there is a way in which that troubles me. My thoughts in life are very much sequential. I dwell on and in the process of thinking, processing, decision-making. I need to be able to track the movements of my mind. And I can do that here, but the distanced is collapsed. Like a map not to scale, the diary seems to sometimes to deform the space of my thoughts -- or, and this is the real fear, to make my thoughts appear deformed.
And so, this buffer entry. I've done it several times before. I write about something very weighty, very sad, very important. I leave it there for, giving it space in the physical world. But when I come back -- whenever I come back -- it will seem smashed irreligiously, uncouthly, against whatever comes next. There is good no way to dismiss, or rather, to move on, without seeming callous. This is true, of course, of dreadful things in general. They are dreadful precisely because they refuse to come or go gracefully. One of the thoughts that has (maybe oddly) provided the most comfort to me in recent years is the idea that death is rude. It refuses to call ahead, to announce itself, to enter by the front door and come at the appointed time.
This sounds like I'm trivializing -- and maybe I am -- but what I mean to be pointing out is that life and death are both troublingly messy and uncouth. That part of the way we live is to try and neaten them up, and that that is right. I guess I find it comforting to think that grieving can in some sense be thought of as straightening up -- as if a wild and unwelcome intruder has tracked mud around, knocked things over, disarranged. Because, then, you see, it's in your power eventually to put things back in some semblance of order. Not, probably, the order they were before, but some order.
I don't know. Maybe this thought isn't comforting to anyone else. But it goes to explain why I want this buffer entry here, as I have before in this weblog. It is a way of neatening things up. Not of containing the terribleness or the grief of the last entry -- that's not the right thing to do with it -- but of beginning the process, at least, of straightening up after it. (A process which of course is easier for me than for those more directly affected by it.) So that's what this is doing here. It's a marker, a placeholder, a space to give the last entry room. I hope it works.
And so, this buffer entry. I've done it several times before. I write about something very weighty, very sad, very important. I leave it there for, giving it space in the physical world. But when I come back -- whenever I come back -- it will seem smashed irreligiously, uncouthly, against whatever comes next. There is good no way to dismiss, or rather, to move on, without seeming callous. This is true, of course, of dreadful things in general. They are dreadful precisely because they refuse to come or go gracefully. One of the thoughts that has (maybe oddly) provided the most comfort to me in recent years is the idea that death is rude. It refuses to call ahead, to announce itself, to enter by the front door and come at the appointed time.
This sounds like I'm trivializing -- and maybe I am -- but what I mean to be pointing out is that life and death are both troublingly messy and uncouth. That part of the way we live is to try and neaten them up, and that that is right. I guess I find it comforting to think that grieving can in some sense be thought of as straightening up -- as if a wild and unwelcome intruder has tracked mud around, knocked things over, disarranged. Because, then, you see, it's in your power eventually to put things back in some semblance of order. Not, probably, the order they were before, but some order.
I don't know. Maybe this thought isn't comforting to anyone else. But it goes to explain why I want this buffer entry here, as I have before in this weblog. It is a way of neatening things up. Not of containing the terribleness or the grief of the last entry -- that's not the right thing to do with it -- but of beginning the process, at least, of straightening up after it. (A process which of course is easier for me than for those more directly affected by it.) So that's what this is doing here. It's a marker, a placeholder, a space to give the last entry room. I hope it works.
Labels: death/mourning/corpses, representation, web, writing
0 Responses to “buffer”
Post a Comment