20190601.0430

With a new month beginning, it is time for me to think again about what I'll write for the month. I did have a good experience with the month just ended, getting enough of a buffer built up that I was able to spend a fair bit of time working on other projects without much encumbrance. (Indeed, I invite you who read this to read one of them, here.) But keeping on with that line of work doesn't suggest itself as a good thing at present. Nor yet does returning to my hymns against the stupid god, nor still does going back to my LinkedIN commentaries or to more general responses to readings I might do. (This is partly because my outside readings are still not what I would like them to be, even if I am making some use of my need to work to get some reading done that I flatly want to do.)
A couple of ideas do suggest themselves. (Another rereading series is one of them, but that seems like it would not work out well for me. I'm not the reader I used to be.) One of them is to return to the random short essay that I've done in past months. It has the advantage of being flexible, to be sure; there is freedom in being able to range across topics as I will. At the same time, there is the problem of lack of direction; having structure helps to channel energies, and directed energies penetrate deeper and uncover more than those energies flung out into the void to fall where they may in the hope that enough fall together in a place easily seen that something can be done with them. I am not so bright a light as to give my luminescence freely and expect that others will be able to see to steer themselves thereby, if I may make an overly florid metaphor.
Another occurs to me after looking back over this webspace. I've been posting in it for more than nine years, now, after having made several other attempts at keeping a blog on other services. There's a fair bit of material on which I can look back, a fair amount of writing that I have some distance from at this point; it might well behoove me to reflect upon that writing and mark changes to my experience of the world since then (with varying definitions of then, to be sure). I am a medievalist by training, even if I probably ought to have been a fantasist (if that can be called a word); looking at the work of the past is something that appeals to me, even if it is not so deep a past as might be thought attractive. Yet I am not the sort of scholar who would have lived in the long-ago then I study; I am glad to live in the time I live in and not a much earlier one. And I am happy to be in a position to look back on the words I have written--so much so that I think that is the direction I will take.
An occasional bit of retrospection can be healthy. Too, I would not be averse to having some of my older stuff receive attention again (if it ever did, which I know is bold of me to assume).