Downloading on the heart-disk

Now that I am back to my blog after a long absence thanks to a generous summer vacation that is unique to the teaching profession, I find asking myself: Why blog at all? I know for certain that when I last did some blogposts enthusiastically, I did feel a bit relieved, not because my thoughts are perhaps being read by some anonymous people out there but because it helped me to organise my own thoughts and come to terms with myself in some way. So many things happen to us - news items that animate us, films that make thoughts and feelings racing through our heads,travels to far-off places where unusual things happen, books that urge us to share them with someone, thoughts that fleetingly pass through our heads in the middle of traffic jams, memories that make us wonder why we banished them from our conscious mind in the first place. Companionship in its different varieties, does fulfill some of these needs and yet not fully, ever. Perhaps there is a need to dialogue with an abstract entity somewhere who would be the perfect listener to our ramblings and can occasionally talk back to us. Blogging is basically a way of organising our own minds in the name of sharing. It is a kind of (self-conscious) documentation of our 'postmodern' selves. In a way, we download our lives and "Save as"...!

And yet though the private aspires towards the public, the private persona that we put up for others is only a small part of the authentically private. A large part of us has to remain preserved with the intimacy of confidentiality and can enter into a process of sharing with others only through its transmutation as fiction. Autobiographies and biographies (official or otherwise) are all works of fiction. Life is not what we actually live but what we remember of having lived.

Borges once wrote beautifully: << Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face...>>