The Diary/Journal/Blog

A private thing, the writing of a diary.  Like the proverbial young girl, I began mine when I was 10 or 11 years old.  We’d been given a school assignment in geography to write letters home from the countries we studied. I took to the exercise naturally and enjoyed this so much I continue to do it today.  Travelling and writing home about my travels.  The letters were once to my mother but she’s now dead though forever alive in my heart and soul.  

 The diaries became journals which really are just a more respectable mature diary.   Mine became  actual expeditionary journals at one point kept as required by law and for reference.  Those were the sailing ship days.  

The diaries though were one’s thoughts, feelings and observations.  The stealing of the girl’s journal was always about finding ‘truth’ behind the public face, what Dr. Carl Jung called the ‘persona’. So the boy wanted to know what his girlfriend really thought.  The Queen would have to be diplomatic but in her journal would write her thoughts about the visiting king of another country being such an awful bore.  

The racy journals of the courtesans and escorts promised not only titillating information and intimacy and mechanics but also even the possibility of the state secrets of the ‘honey pot’ spy variety.  It was never a thing of the manual labourer or the uneducated.  History was ever written by the educated and those who worked with their minds more than their bodies.  It took a range of writers to give voice to the lives of the commoners when such an interest became an entertainment for upper classes as it remains today.  

 George Orwell began his writing career, disguising his posh roots as best he could and  infiltrating the working man’s world and writing stories of the conditions. Later Black Like Me would be written by John Griffin, a white journalist who  having disguised himself as an American negro in the 60’s and wrote the conditions he encountered.  Today Transexuals like the economist Deirdre McCloskey have written their observations from the inside of the previous ‘opposite’ sex.  

These are all diaries and journals which more often than not in the past gathered dust in cardboard boxes to be burnt or found in future garbage bins. The enterprising have kept the journals of those whose fame made the study and writing of them the grist for countless phd’s and biographies of varying truth and slant. 

 Today we have the blog.  The penchant for the photographic ‘selfie’, the stuff of jokes in the present age, even a Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau,  ridiculed for his addiction to seeing pretty boy self, is paralleled by the blogger who records his life almost clinically reporting with detail the composition of meals and daily activities , sometimes including toiletting information, which really often would only appeal to a mother. Yet the world now knows if they are interested. 

Blogs by the millions fill the internet and we can look into the private world and thoughts of almost any person of whatever geographical background, field of study, occupation or lifestyle preference.  Artists are encouraged to provide much scintillating detail of their lives to woo their fans. Today we have the phenomena of the Kardashian’s ,the epitome of vacuous hedonism self reported ad infinitismally. Such self reflection has been described as ‘never before has a generation had so much to say about so little’.  

But the ‘media is the message’ according to Canadian Marshal McLuhan.  As Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living.   Social media of which the blog is but a part is the message of these times.   This process of communication has brought us closer together individully and collectively. In its own peculiar way it challenges the alienation which had been capitalized upon by those who controlled information for their own personal gain.  

To the chagrin of the state today I know that Prime Ministers take directions from dead mothers and dogs named Spot. We used to learn of such from diaries released upon death of the individual but today are increasingly in the present.  Even presidents ‘tweet’, a kind of haiku version of the Blog. Time is altered and the very landscape of reality as we thought we knew it is being challenged by encounters with the raw data not the spin doctored ‘official’ version.  

Diaries and later blogs and now tweets all might deserve editing as many pundits feel that life should be. But that’s not what Marshal McLuhan was saying. Freud himself spoke to the ‘Freudian slips’ and the deeper communication that included the often times humorous observations of zoologist Desmond Morris’ Naked Ape.   Jordan Peterson referenced this to the war between chaos and order. 

We have seen the wars as between totalitarian structures, dictatorships, communist, fascist and religious, the draft of diary, to the polished finished work, or what Leonard Cohen described as a ‘war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones’ who say there isn’t’ .  All this contrasts with the messiness of peace and life unfolding as it does.  There is a dirty line in the water where the change of tides are seen.  Such is reality.  The young say life is not an audition.  I sometimes think of my own as a blog accompanied by a kazoo.