20131230.0736

In the run-up to the new year, there is a tendency to do retrospective work, to look back over the year that is passing and assess it for what it has brought about, for good and for ill.  Any ending, any new beginning, prompts the same, really, whether the ending of an arbitrary and largely-agreed-upon-for-convenience-as-a-way-to-negotiate-colonial-and-imperial-legacies "solar" calendar or a term of instruction or a series of terms of instruction meant to culminate in the formal presentation of credentials that once purportedly indicated a particular level of achievement and broad-based expertise but now serve as entry-level certification that may yet be disregarded.

Offering such a retrospective today or tomorrow would be easy.  It is expected, certainly; the tendency far predates this webspace or its writer.  But it would be to no purpose.  The year has been amply recorded already, and not only by me.  Those records are available broadly and openly, and those who want to see them will simply look upon them; those who do not will be attracted for a moment to the noted retrospection, their eyes passing easily over content they have seen before, taking a brief pleasure in being reminded of that thing that they saw that one time, and moving on to the next spectacle.  Little will be learned from it, if anything at all.

I therefore have no intention of offering the usual retrospective of the year.  Since the end of April, I have worked to put such images of my thoughts and understandings as I can out into the ether of the internet; they are there to be seen by those who want to see them, and if I do refer to them (perhaps too frequently, as may be thought), I do so to explain ideas further or to provide additional reference rather than to look back upon things and think "See how good it has been!"  While some of it has been good--the news of my coming child is perhaps the most notable example--most has been...less good, and I would put most of it behind me.

That I would raises the question of why, then, I write of things?  For writing is in part remembering outside the self and more durably than in the frail fleshy bits between the ears; writing the pieces I write means that they are there, in the world and in some senses embodied, that they may come back to me again and again.  But writing is also in part the externalization of the internal, the pushing-out of that which is within; by writing, I am able in some measure to get out of me what would otherwise remain within me and would fester to corruption did I not expel it from myself and flush it away.  And I retain the frail hope that what I do send out will be collected somewhere and what vitality it has left will be extracted for the benefit of others.

Again, there is a metaphor in that.  Again, I would tend to think so.