Making my thoughts visible again
I’m writing this from a narrow hotel room near King’s Cross. There’s a single bed, a television on the wall and, most importantly, a decent space to write. The room I had last week was a tiny square that was mostly bed. This one has enough room for a desk and a thought to stretch...
’m writing this from a narrow hotel room near King’s Cross. There’s a single bed, a television on the wall and, most importantly, a decent space to write. The room I had last week was a tiny square that was mostly bed. This one has enough room for a desk and a thought to stretch out.
I’m in London to deliver a workshop tomorrow. It’s been a while since I’ve run this particular workshop, so I’m looking forward to it, though I can feel that familiar flicker of nerves. I like the variety of working with different clients, although I sometimes miss the ease of walking into a room filled with people I’ve trained for years. With people you know, you can skip the early work of establishing rapport and credibility. You already know the personalities in the room. You can settle into the work.
Going in cold asks something else of me. I have to build the connection in real time. I suppose that is also the proof of the thing. If the material I’m teaching has any life in it, I should be able to use it there in the room, with these particular people, rather than merely tell them that it works.
This morning, before the train, I found myself thinking about the blog and the parts of me I’ve stopped bringing to it.
Over time, I’ve swung the pendulum towards the intellectual. I write about big themes and persistent questions: identity, becoming, existentialism, technology, attention, freedom, the post-human. They are real interests. But somewhere along the way, I began leaving out the small stuff, the texture of an ordinary day, the things that weigh on ordinary people’s lives. I say “ordinary people” as though I’m standing elsewhere. I’m not. I’m as ordinary as they come.
I want some of that everyday life back in the writing.
I keep returning to my Dorothy Wordsworth idea: the journal as a record of attention, a life caught in passing detail before anyone knows which details will matter. I don’t want every breakfast, train ride and hotel room to become content. That would be another way of failing to live. But personal blogging once made room for a person to appear gradually. You read someone over time and you begin to feel like you know them. That is closer to what I want: a conversation with myself and with the internet.
There is still plenty to discover on the internet, although the big platforms can make it feel as if there isn’t. Finding the gems takes more work now. A lot of writers abandoned Twitter and Facebook and sought refuge in Substack, which has built a walled garden of its own. The voices are still out there, but the paths between them feel less visible. I miss following a link from a strange little blog to another strange little blog and realising, an hour later, that I have wandered far beyond whatever I originally came online to find.
Maybe personal blogging is a way of putting some of those paths back.
Writers often say they write in order to discover what they think. I’ve said versions of it myself, but lately I’ve wondered how often we are simply repeating something the writer before us said. It reminds me of asking people to share their takeaways at the end of a training session. By the time you reach the fifth or sixth person, you start hearing, “Like Bob said…” The room begins dittoing itself.
Do I write to find out what I think?
I’m not sure. Sometimes I write to play with ideas. Sometimes I write to play with words. When I write in a stream like this, I may be doing something simpler: making my thoughts visible. Once they are on the page, I can see how much of my thinking is my own attention moving and how much is the noise of everything I have recently read, watched or heard.
I can also see how little time I give myself to think without immediately thinking about publishing it. A nascent thought appears, and I immediately begin packaging it for the internet. Could it be a tweet? A blog post? A line to feed into AI to see where the thought goes? I barely let the thought settle in my mind before trying to do something with it. Perhaps I need to slow down and just let my thoughts breathe.
There is an irony here. I want the blog to show more of me, but I have developed the habit of turning experience into a prospective object before I’ve fully had the experience. The answer can’t be to stop publishing. I’ve been blogging since 2004. The conversation with the web is part of how I live and think. I want to bring back some of the whimsical thoughts about nothing back to the blog.
Perhaps I need a column on the blog that is simply mine. Hermes has a column of its own. We have the pieces we make together. I want another space where the main work of AI is to catch typos and tidy grammar, leaving the thought in the shape it took when I was the one thinking it.
Morning pages for the open web: seven hundred and fifty words or so, written off the cuff to see what is banging around in my head. It doesn’t have to be therapeutic or improving. If something difficult is in my head that morning, then it may appear. If what’s there is a train journey, tomorrow’s workshop or a surprisingly decent hotel desk, that can be enough too.
I know there is a tension in this. Unlike some of the bloggers I follow, I’m trying to make a living from my words and my work. I can’t pretend the commercial side doesn’t exist. I need to promote what I do. I need to find the people who resonate with it. I want to develop the training, build online courses and workbooks, make useful things I can sell, and bring the old dream of being able to work from anywhere with an internet connection closer to reality.
The trouble begins when every piece of writing is made to report for duty.
For years, people have said that everyone is a media company. That phrase belonged to the social-media boom, when the platforms promised each of us an audience and quietly taught us to behave like small, anxious broadcasters. I wonder if we are moving into a post-social-media period now. If we are, I hope it brings back something more human than the endless stream: people tending their own sites, following their peculiar interests, writing from hotel rooms and train seats, making paths for one another through the wider web.
Earlier today, I was looking into building a Soulcruzer command-line tool so I could work on the blog entirely from inside Obsidian. That is a fairly geeky sentence. I never used to touch the terminal. I only started using it when I began messing around with AI, and somewhere along the way, I discovered that I quite like it. Now I’m imagining writing, editing and sending drafts to the blog without leaving the environment where the notes began.
Part of the attraction is practical. Less context switching may help me stay focused. I’m not much of a productivity person, but I do have a tendency to float like a butterfly from task to task. A single writing environment might give a thought long enough to become itself before I flit elsewhere.
I’m laughing as I write that because I’ve just remembered something I started earlier and never finished. I can already feel myself about to leave this draft and go looking for it.
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