privacy & exposure

[I'm on vacation. This was originally posted Tuesday, 27 January 2004 ~ one of my first posts]

This process of building websites, and doing an online notebook, raises for me issues of privacy and exposure – how much to reveal? What really is the interest of the (unknown) audience? & when may I name names, and when may I not?

Is the reader knowledgeable enough to realize that poetry is fiction, that the poet is only sometimes the speaker, and sometimes not?

Putting it all out for the whole world to see, even if the world is not looking. Does one want the world to look?

Feeling the need to justify, to explain. After so many years of cautious aloofness (or perhaps shyness; it looks different from different vantage points) to set out my inner life on colors that add light instead of diminish it.

& so much an internal life – short on adventure and anecdote. Who but me cares that the falcon was in the garden today; the flicker at the feeder? Filling up my tiny garden with their large bird selves. Or that I am up in the night, needy for sleep, but unable to track it. Listening to my dog chew his bone.

No light in the sky tonight – first quarter moon, they say, but I can't find that, either.

Building a life from pain and small-moon nights; from sparrows and finches and box elder bugs. The things one notices in the day, and in the wide night hours.

Looking for the dark (or the light) that will fold one in. 

Comments

[Stray]

Interesting thoughts sb. The whole public / private fudging that is inherent in semi-anonymous blogging doesn't always sit easy with me either - as both writer and reader there are times when I crave a solid connection, but I know that I would regret giving up the freedom that not-naming people and places allows.

I don't feel your lack of grand adventures or dramatic twists and turns detracts - I can get those things from any hollywood movie or thriller novel. I read these collections of thought and creativity, yours especially, because the detail and the real human experiences are a more nourishing alternative the other distractions available to me. I know my own small thrill at the tiny adventures my dog shares with me, at the ever appearing flowers I am just beginning to learn to name, at the swarming of butterflies in the rubarb patch ... and so I smile when I read of your smiles at those things.

And I do care that you are up in the night. Because there are others who are up in the night as well, and if this medium isn't as much about reading, and seeing connections, as about writing, and creating opportunities for them ... I'm not sure what it would be for.

My life is 'interesting' at the moment. There are struggles and the victories are small, though sweet. There are days when I am unable to find words to understand what it is that I need. Well, there were, until I read your final sentence : Looking for the dark (or the light) that will fold one in.

Yes. Thanks.

[tigger]

Yes, we do very much care about those critters in your life! And all those internal things that are actually far more intriguing than external adventures.

I blog pretty openly, very much "out there", and don't really care anymore who knows what. I went through a period of everyone learning my personal business before I started blogging through being gossipped about on the grape vine, and found out who my true friends were. After that, nothing much mattered about who knew what about me anymore.

I find it freeing to not care who knows what. But that's just me.