I have made many blogs and eventually abandoned them. I won’t list the details of each, but I find it significant that the first half were hosted on a microblogging platform, and that the second half were made using a static site generator, with custom CSS and raw HTML. It has become necessary to exercise complete control over how the image and the text appear on the page. I need this to be beautiful.
Since I cannot expect to attain this goal of beauty in any stable fashion, my practice of building this site has quickly shifted from the desire to produce something “good” to a more soluble interest in representing the repetitive, domestic tasks to which I am bound. If this had to be framed as a research question, I’d say that I want to understand the relation between repetitive domesticity and the more public, masculine act of constructing a house. The inane and frustrating experience of wrangling with CSS and HTML is like washing dishes, I think, and my activity hear has nothing to do with architecture. But the result seems professional—it seems like I am building a monument for a public audience. This is a website after all, and I am dependent on so many elaborate structures for the hosting and deployment of what is otherwise just a bundle of text. Nevertheless, the website, when made for no one, is royal, and its creator is aristocratic; yet he “wastes” time that could be relegated to a servant, which he has at once chosen to be. I’ve always loved washing dishes and sweeping the floor and chopping vegetables, which has become for me a sort of aesthetic experience, as all experience is prone to becoming for me. I’d like to raise a child who sees this site as a sweeping and a tending more than an exercise of control or professionalism, but in the mean time I behave as if it’s the very plants I tend to whom could benefit from this site. See how I am here, running off into my tangential world of confessions. Can you tell that I’m not an architect, but some sort of a ruminant, ready to be yoked to a plow?
In practical terms, I started this site because I wanted to make an art of the cultivation of orchids. I wanted to write like a marketer about which orchids to buy, how to best cultivate them, what new infrastructure to construct or acquire, how to arrange them, what to do with them, and make this marketing-act a kind of ethnography, a kind of research. I was supposed to be writing my first book of poems, or otherwise working to advance my academic research on the poetics of the figure of the child. I did not want to write, or or even to read, at least not in the purposive way; instead I spent my way through various expenditures, from a purple wool blazer to several new shelving units for orchids, with vinyl sheeting meant to enclose humidity. I bought my first drill, I made holes in polycarbonate, an unfortunate ragged mix of melted plastic and flaked incisions. Only my grocery bill was significantly lower than usual, thanks to a fairly successful gardening season.
The reason I felt no desire to make anything was that the only thing I truly wanted to make was a baby. I came to know this desire largely through books. Certain writers had made the question and experience of motherhood, however difficult, take shape in ways that I felt were not just interesting, but intrinsic. My experience of literature was less based in epiphany than on the length it takes to chew on a thought, less the burning of love than the vague persistence of the memory of a body that cannot be touched. But I had to face the fact that I could not respond to these narratives myself without having a parallel experience of motherhood to speak of. Being a single graduate student, and a person who goes around as a man, someone for whom the “biological destiny” of motherhood was never imposed, it felt a little distant, or gratuitous, to think of becoming a mom. And it was pleasant enough to live day to day with my thoughts directed towards plants. There was little sense that the phased could be interrupted. This felt like dedication.
But it was equally the result of the feeling that I existed apart from those who might demand more of me. This was reinforced by the little contact I had with people. The time is (or was) the summer of 2021. I had visited a former close friend whom I hadn’t seen in four years, and reconciled with a friend whom I had not spoken to in a year. I spent time with my family, camping, in the remotest corners of the Pacific Northwest. None of these events produced a strong sense of narrative in my life, though they did coincide with several key readings.
During the very last weeks of the summer, the height of my orchid-mania, I finally became depressed. I had been brainfucked by the orchids which had made me increasingly sessile, inward, emotionally flat. I knew that I couldn’t spend every waking minute staring at enigmatic and faceless leaves. Feeling mediocre and lacking grievances, I had very little motivation to affect or be affected by the world. But I remembered how I had once loved sharing things with my close circle of email correspondents, and figured I would continue this practice only in a new way, directing the content towards a public medium, the blog. One very practical concern led me to go through with it: it’s extremely unwieldy to share the large photos I produce with the expensive camera (a Fujifilm X-T3) in a satisfactory way via email attachments or social media posts. Twitter is one platform that competently manages to display my images, but there are times when I want to share a truly huge photograph, and a truly huge text, while not feel like either are participating in the buzz of discourse. PDF files are my usual way of constructing longer form, book-like objects, but I had a nauseating relationship with this sort of thing, which always felt like it was trying too hard to become something serious and grand. I had expended too many manic hours and producing flawed “deliverables” in the past.
I was six when I began writing in my first notebook, in which I’d name and describe a thing I had recently encountered. These entries all came with illustrations. Sometimes I would articulate an attitude or desire I had towards that object, though I was often so rapt in describing the thing that it felt unnecessary to declare how I felt about it. I described my pet millipede, a toy parrot, a stuffed unicorn, pet hermit crabs, and a crystal which “I navre broot” to school. In some cases, the entries invoke narrative development, temporal deixis: “One day, Didi desided to be a pallid bat.” According to one entry, I “had” my sister. This is followed by an entry in which I am drawn standing at a blackboard, teaching her “basic math.” This entry, for whatever reason, isn’t included in the following PDF, but I swear it exists:
After a brief hiatus, I began writing in notebooks again, only this time for school. My third grade teacher would open class in the morning with a free-writing session. I ended up writing a lot of fiction, some of it nonsensical, involving anthropomorphized parts of speech. I briefly wrote my own, private entries in a separate notebook, about peers I enjoyed playing tag with, and descriptions of those whom I did not like. This practice ended as soon as I entered the fourth grade, during which I remember writing my first formal reports: a biographical essay on Glenn Gould, a prose poem on autumn. I do not recall writing anything private at that time, although I had begun to experience a strong attraction towards one of my classmates, which later became the subject of various journal entries and poems.
My longest train of journals began around that time, in fifth grade, and lasted until the final years of high school. They begin on a plaintive and critical note, as I lament the fact that somebody I wanted to be friends with did not seem as interested in me, and lambast the general public of children for being a fan of a teen pop idol whom I did not like. If I had to extract key themes, they would be (1) insecurities and (2) triumphs, both with respect to recess games, social desires, and playing the piano or cello. The core of my writing was on the traits of the boys I had crushes on, and on my own. Sometimes I would write in a more fictive style—a boy would be transformed into a noble animal, or would be placed in some vulnerable or compromised position, from which I’d save him. I believed I was unique and interesting, so it went unquestioned that logging the various things I wanted or did would be worthwhile, if not to someone else in the future, certainly to my future self. I only began to experience serious self-doubt in middle school, first with respect to my physical appearance and then with respect to my intellectual abilities. The former did not stop me from writing love letters and poems and even sending them out on several occasions. I was mostly unconcerned with the effects of my writing on the recipient; I recognized that by writing, I was becoming absorbed in my own power, and had thus expunged vulnerability. I never considered the possibility that I needed to develop the craft of writing, so I did not think of myself as a good or as an inferior writer. I simply wrote, applying my neuroses regarding innate ability and craft to playing the cello, learning math, picking out clothes, and looking at myself in the mirror.
Some time in early high school, I began taking photos of myself, constructing a repertoire of images that could tell me something about my increasingly alien physiognomy, though the variability and unsatisfactory nature of such photos kept me chasing after the truth. Then I started writing and posting images online. In ninth grade, the most anti-social year of my life up to that point, I started using a blogging platform. I’d make rectangular images of terse, melancholic statements rendered in the word processor on a black background, and collect photos of various musicians and writers whom I admired and found handsome. I restarted with a new blog the following year, in accordance with a change in temperament and in academic interests; at that point, I was fixated on math and computing and seized by aspirations to become an autodidact of sorts, and began to write at greater length about my personal life online. These were still smaller outbursts, but with the occasional essayistic reflection.
A few years later, I made a new blog and started to write concert reviews there, in an attempt to “professionalize” myself and take writing more seriously. But the private writings interest me more, and are inarguably better. I am curious now to see if I can describe the underground genres they participated in—for instance, “the discourse,” a bit like “hot take,” but linked to anti-capitalist or marxist ideology, and “shitposting,” a form of comedic citation, often ironic or deprecatory in nature. My personal writings may resemble the outbursts we now see on other microblogging sites, but I’d like to understand how they differ. I rarely doubted my language, but I did engage in a kind of experimentation—modifying the spellings of things, being attentive to sentence rhythm, incessantly rereading what I had written. Unlike the notebook page, the post took on the shape of its container—the container being the shape of a text field which would expand the more I typed, but which would keep itself compact if I had just a little to say. I was thus encouraged to write in short bursts, which accelerated the pace of my writing and reading and editing, and the transition from text field to rendered web page made me increasingly aware of the visual form of letters and the way they exist on a page.
The blog I produced then is one of the only repositories of my writing which I invariably enjoy reading. I became conscious of style through that effort, but not in a way that was inhibiting. The physical logic of the keyboard would perform its own alterations according to my mood, and I’d curate these raw ‘errors’ into a private language of violent spontaneity, aggressive cuteness. Everyone who participates in the quickly memeing culture of the Internet knows this. It’s a cultural universal, but whatever I did was mine. It was proof that I could be part of something but be different in a way that I felt conferred value upon me. I guess you could say that I felt “pretty.” I don’t know why I hate revisiting everything else I’ve written in the past, particularly academic writing and emails. They register to me as very elaborate lists of facts, registries of my sobreity and health but of nothing more. I guess I’m opposed to evaluating my own results because I want to preserve the memory of the process only. I want to remember that satisfaction at the cost of seeing my own mediocrity. But when I do read myself, I experience a blinding, intense dysphoria. I have spent so much time inhabiting bodies that aren’t mine, stitching together block quotes with commentary written in a derivative style. The pain of accumulating so many dissatisfactory images leads me to avoid the mirror.
Perhaps this means I will give up writing, but right now it sounds more like a call for new aesthetic directions. I currently fail to see the value in literature, though I know that the various authors I admire have managed to bypass the staleness of “literary” language. I suppose I am saying that I dislike the association between literature and prestige, and the way it colors my perception of literary texts during times like these—I can’t engage with literature as something truly new and organic, the way I can take pleasure in a late summer prune. I would like to believe my displeasure with expressive writing signals a desire for a kind of style that comes from the invisible slowness of arboreal computation. It’s not that I want to write what is automatic or boring; but I don’t know how to describe it as other than a negation of what exists. The writing I’d like to make is quite literally unimaginable.
So I see blogs as supremely hopeful entities, as blank plots of land on the internet space, empty frontiers for creation. I find it easier to maintain a type of writing on a blog than in a private document, because a webpage can be compulsively refreshed. I’m also hopeful about the kinds of vernacular writing that happen on the web, in posts and comments on internet forums and social media sites. These casual bits of writing capture a little bit of oral nature while demonstrating all the excrescent features of edited and written language. Sometimes I find pieces of writing which are enterprising and informative and clean. Most of the time, I’m disappointed by how repetitive and careless it all is. Yet I keep on coming back, hoping to come across wondrous exceptions. Perhaps this is my favorite “genre” of writing, of non-fiction at least, and perhaps this is because it is protean and heteroglossic and alive.
A blog goes dormant when the author fails to produce new content aligned with its history, or otherwise fails to renovate its design. Such a fate might befall this one. But I have one strong reason to believe otherwise: I started this website because I want to reject the notion that my time is better spent creating “deliverables,” to admit to myself that the clerical writing that goes alongside the task of orchid growing is actually what I do best and enjoy the most. I make cuts, but I don’t make a thing. I can’t imagine a day when I’ll stop growing orchids, and so long as writing here coexists with my maintenance of plants, this blog would have no shortage of regular content. And to maintain this correlation, the writing would surely have to be good—good enough to produce a certain pleasure in me. I wonder if it will stay this way? A blog simply dedicated to the private, custodial work of writing about orchids?