This blog is taking over my life.
This blog is taking over my life. I hate it (because it’s taking over my life) and I love it (because it’s making art possible out of life).
It’s been 4 months since November 4 when I started this blog, and already I feel so occupied by it. It is starting to take over. My life, my mind, my dreams, my sleep. Over the last few years, I had made efforts to gradually stop being so serious, walking around always thinking of something— and now this blog is turning me serious, as if I wasn’t still serious enough in spite of my efforts against it. I had made efforts to gradually stop thinking so much— and now I’m thinking more than sleeping, so much so that I’m thinking while dreaming and making notes of my dreams.
It’s quite annoying, to be honest, to live like this. It’s so lame.
When I think of the blog taking control of me, I think of these lines from Morning Bird Songs, one of my most favourite poems, by Tomas Tranströmer:
Like Tranströmer’s poem,
my blog is getting bigger, it’s taking my place,
it’s pressing against me.
It is shoving me out of the nest.
Though, unlike his poem, the blog is not finished yet.
The blog is everywhere. When I look at the ceiling while resting, I see it crawling around—ultramarine blue lines on a white canvas. When I stare at the mountains outside my home, it forces me to think of something beautiful, something new to say about the mountains, even if it’s vulgarly mundane. It is making me go back in time and dig up old wounds and other things I had forgotten. It is sitting on my shoulders like a cat, watching me churn out posts like an attentive potter. Against my will, it wants me to create draft posts even when I have nothing to say.
Now I can’t think of anything without thinking of whether I can blog it. I can’t dream normal dreams.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Artistic pursuits are consuming. It can destroy without destroying. The dilemma of my rebel self and my desire for expression echoes perfectly in the words of Albert Camus:
There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.
I can’t wait to be done with this blog, I can’t wait until it’s no longer a blog but a book, a blue book in my hands. Until then, I won’t sleep, I won’t live freely. Until then, may it burn and with it I burn too.
Burn but with a fine balance. Balance the two imbalances, the two chief confusions of life, as keenly noted by the great Frank Herbert:
To observe everything that happens:
Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life.
To let everything happen and not confine myself to observing:
Some people never observe anything. Life just happens to them.