RAMH@14.005479: In Search of Stasis

In a typical week, whiskey river offers me at least one solid tie-in to something I’ve been thinking about. This week, a bonus: it floated two selections my way appropriate to the post’s theme. First:

The Mountain

My students look at me expectantly.
I explain to them that the life of art is a life
of endless labor. Their expressions
hardly change; they need to know
a little more about endless labor.
So I tell them the story of Sisyphus,
how he was doomed to push
a rock up a mountain, knowing nothing
would come of this effort
but that he would repeat it
indefinitely. I tell them
there is joy in this, in the artist’s life,
that one eludes
judgment, and as I speak
I am secretly pushing a rock myself,
slyly pushing it up the steep
face of a mountain.
Why do I lie
to these children? They aren’t listening,
they aren’t deceived, their fingers
tapping at the wooden desks—
So I retract
the myth; I tell them it occurs
in hell, and that the artist lies
because he is obsessed with attainment,
that he perceives the summit
as that place where he will live forever,
a place about to be
transformed by his burden: with every breath,
I am standing at the top of the mountain.
Both my hands are free. And the rock has added
height to the mountain.

(Louise Glück [source])

… and then there’s this:

Rising in Perilous Hope

What can I hold in my hands this morning
that will not flow through my fingers?
What words can I say that will catch
in your mind like burrs, chiggers that burrow?
If my touch could heal, I would lay my hands
on your bent head and bellow prayers.
If my words could change the weather
or the government or the way the world
twists and guts us, fast or slow,
what could I do but what I do now?
I fit words together and say them;
it is a given like the color of my eyes.
I hope it makes a small difference, as
I hope the drought will break and the morning
come rising out of the ocean wearing
a cloak of clean sweet mist and swirling terns.

(Marge Piercy [source])

Aside from the fact of, well, duh, Friday, today’s post has one other raison d’être, as I hinted a week ago: today is the 14th anniversary (plus a couple days, hence the nerd-jokey post title) of my first post at Running After My Hat.

Some statistics, since then:

• 1,667 posts, or about 119 posts a year (1,805 total, counting those I haven’t actually published for one reason or another)
• 104 pages (120 total)
• 7,176 comments (2,645 of which have been mine; plus 12 “in moderation”)

…and some thoughts about those statistics:

119 posts a year — two to three every week — sounds weirdly inflated even to me. But that’s only because I, and almost certainly you, have gotten used to the Fridays-only tempo around here. There was a time (he said, propping up his feet on a cracker barrel and lifting a harmonica to his lips to maximize the nostalgic moment) when I was determined to write a post every single day — and for a brief while actually did so. What happened? Just the usual: the world moves on, and we move on with it… especially online, when today’s Hot Tech (e.g., blogging) becomes tomorrow’s Quaint Handicraft. Maybe we need an Etsy just for blogs.

The “pages” count is probably about right, although I’ve never tried to verify it. A page is WordPress’s version of an undated diary entry. The top menu here shows you, apart from the “Home” link, links to four such pages:

The fact that you can see only four there points out a distinguishing feature of pages vs. posts: the former can be “found” pretty much only if the blogger has chosen to link to them. The pages themselves may lead you to other pages and/or to actual posts — you can see examples of both by clicking on that About Running After My Hat link at the top of the blog.

So what about the other 116 “pages”? What’s on them?

Some are private — scratchpad-type things, notes to myself (especially about the blog) and so on; you can’t find them by searching the Web, say. Some are password-protected, meaning I’ve shared them with other parties for particular reason(s) — you might be able to find links/references to one in a Web search, but without the proper password you couldn’t actually read the contents. (A good example: a series of pages I used while participating in an online writer’s workshop about six years ago — taking apart and reassembling a novel in which I’ve invested a lot of time and energy. Other workshop participants could read those pages because I’d shared the password with them.) Back in 2012, I wrote The Propagational Library, a science-fiction novella (sort of) by posting one chapter a week, in “real time” (meaning, the chapters as posted were first drafts, posted the day I wrote them) — and indexed them all, with some general commentary, on a single “table of contents” sort of page.

The rest? I’m not sure how to characterize them… You’ll just have to find them the same way I did a moment ago: by poking around to see where the hyperlinks lead you. (The links to actual posts here look like this: https://johnesimpson.com/blog/[yyyy]/[mm]/[title, in compact form] — if a link directs you to a RAMH resource which has no [yyyy] or [mm] component, you can bet it’s a page and not a post; the posts are always dated.)

Anyway, about today’s post’s title: yes, I’m getting a bit restless. But it’s a peculiar sort of restlessness — I’m wanting to, well, be parked somewhere for a while — somewhere I can think of as “home,” physically, really, geographically. (We’ve been parked with The Stepson since mid-December, but that’s only a borrowed, temporary resting spot, good only until we hit the road again in a few weeks; I’m restless, that is, to really come to rest.)

In a bloggish sense, though, I’m equally restless. I can’t recapture the “feel” of blogging in the early 2000s, when loose groups of a few dozen people who didn’t even know one another in real life would chance to gather (not in so many words) and “listen to” one another, round-robin style, and then to “talk” for a little while about the monologue they’d just read. These days, the choices seem to be:

• Quick one- or two-paragraph (if that) pronouncements of one kind or another, which may or may not draw anyone else into a conversation;
• “influencer”-focused long-form writings, via the likes of Substack, Medium, etc., in which Big Names craft professional essays upon which their audiences may comment but not really in the form of conversation (it’s like the sotto-voce muttering during a theatrical intermission); and
• maybe — maybe — podcasts, to which I will never adapt because, y’know, hearing (and also because these are really just audio versions of the long-form Substack/Medium essays, with the additional option of including more than one “influencer” at a time, in conversation).

But I don’t despair. I think I can find value in writing regularly again, even if no one ever reads it — just because, by posting it in the open, I’ve exposed myself to the danger opportunity mere chance that someone might drop in…

In the meantime, I thank you — whoever you are, however (in)frequent a visitor you might be — for visiting Running After My Hat. I appreciate knowing you might be out there!