Blogging

Most often, I use this blog as a filing cabinet. It is just a place to store quotes, facts, articles, and links that I find interesting, so that I can refer to them in the future. My job keeps me around the computer most of the time, so I have ample opportunity to stumble upon interesting information and move it over to D'Eleaneaux. I've been very happy with this function of the blog.

More recently, I've started using the blog to express more of my own thoughts, generally about once or twice a week. I never intend to write full, five-paragraph essays, but sometimes that is what those posts turn into. In these cases, D'Eleaneaux transcends its original purpose as a filing cabinet and becomes a workshop. An ideas workshop.

You know those moments when things seem to come together and you understand something you didn't understand previously? Usually for me they are such minor revelations that they are not even worth sharing with anybody. Sometimes it is even embarrassing that I needed a revelation to figure those things out. (For example, I had this revelation over Christmas break: You can be funny really easily just by drawing on a humorous catchphrase or a theme from earlier in the conversation. That will help me so much in the future!) I think about D'Eleaneaux as an opportunity to latch onto a revelation every now and then, and to put words to it before I forget about the revelation or before I become convinced that it was a flawed revelation. When they go on the blog, they are in a fledgling state and have barely begun to be analyzed. Some of them look better to me as time passes, and others look worse. But I don't really see a need to go through and weed out the ones that no longer please me. Seems to me there's something Whitman-like about standing up for one's own contradictions.

I recently rediscovered this Helene Cixous quotation that might serve as a fitting theme for my blog: "If she is a whole, it's a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects but a moving, limitlessly changing ensemble."