Better warn you. I am not all about the pictures, so you will only find a few, carefully selected specimens here if any, to intrigue and entice, to pull at subtle heartstrings and brainstrings and gutstrings, but not as the main event. Rather, I am about the words, delicious words, rich, dense and heavy with meaning like moist, soft, fudgey dark chocolate brownies which yielding texture, intense flavour and reassuring weight deliver a world of sensations, images and emotions; words with baggage, bursting with memories, thoughts and visions, ready to create and manifest and propel us into the future; quiescent, available, clever words, waiting to do our bidding between the pages of the dictionary and bend to our will, until they are not. This is why I am writing a blog and not curating an Instagram story, no matter how backward, unfashionable or quaint it may seem, no matter how much more effort it will require any (hypothetical) reader to expand in order to reap the benefits. "Wait without Hope" says TS Eliot, for "hope is in the waiting" and so I would add, write without hope, for hope is in the writing.
Why? Simply put, because I believe words can change the world. There. "Use your words!" Captain Fantastic urges his son Rellian as he longs for a traditional Christmas while his family derides his conformist aspirations and merrily celebrates Noam Chomsky's birthday. Words have a power all of their own, witness the inane, incendiary, hate-filled warblings of semi-senile narcissistic, psychopathic, mythomaniac kings of the world and would-be kings of the world. Still, I don't have a stage and a megaphone to project my words across the ether, I don't own my own social network to ride the world wide web, and I revile the very idea of wading in any way into the social media swamp. So I have to resort to the written variety of communication which benefits from AND encourages the slow maturation of thought. Now, the finicky and pedantic among us will no doubt point out that a blog uses the very technology I scorn, the technology which encourages not the slow maturation of thought but the rapid decay of intelligent reflection and critical thinking and creative imagination. Well, my book, my physical ink on paper book, has so far, not unlike Dermot Hoggins’ Knuckle Sandwich, “failed to connect with its audience”[1], or more prosaically, to attract the interest of any literary agent, let alone any actual publisher, but the desire to let my words be read has by no means diminished and one must make allowances: this is as low key and low tech as it goes.
Having set the stage, I am launching into yet another blogging adventure this time from the comfort of my office (rather than from the high seas, please check out https://cherryripe-and-the-pitts.skipperblogs.com/ for those), and hoping to change the world, one word at a time, because I can’t think of any other way to do it, and because, paraphrasing Jane Eyre’s most immortal words, if you think “because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless, you think wrong!—I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart!” And plenty to say besides. I intend to make the most of the freedom this tool offers, to use it rather than let it use me, to unleash my wanderings, wonderings, and other meanderings with complete disregard for common sense, logic, reason and short sentences: I will follow my whims, my moods and my fancy tempered by a modicum of grammatical correctness.
And therapy? This is Writing for Wellbeing in Action. So pick up your pen, or your keyboard, and start writing.
[1] In Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
