alman is dead
in the roland barthes sense, that is. it is risky business, unraveling yourself to the public the way a web log does. keeping a journal on the internet is not unlike undressing in a display window of a mall on a very busy pedestrian sidewalk. and the people who happen to pass by, intentionally or otherwise, may tend to draw conclusions based on what they see. in my case, once you let fly a particular combination of words, the mad scramble to associate what has been written to an event, an emotion, a person, is almost certain to go awry. what is clear is that despite encasing myself in glass cage, what people see is just the surface. no one, save myself, is truly privy to my thoughts, the inner workings of my brain. people may try to figure me out, and those who think they have are the first to fail. the only ones who succeed, i think, are those that don’t even try.
now returning to barthes’s theory, i -- my thoughts -- am separate from the text that i produce. they are merely an approximation of what goes on inside me. while what i write on the blog is generally not fiction, but autobiographical narratives, the text itself is merely a dramatization -- a fictionalization, if you will -- of actual feelings, thoughts, and things that have taken place. alman, as author, truly is dead, and his conscientious reader ought not say: “alman must’ve meant...” or “alman must feel...” or “alman must be thinking...” remove the author -- which is me -- in any of those sentences, and the reader would be in a better position to understand what has just been written.
note to self: intellectual masturbation assumes, first, that you are an intellectual. don’t do it again. it’s rather painful.
now returning to barthes’s theory, i -- my thoughts -- am separate from the text that i produce. they are merely an approximation of what goes on inside me. while what i write on the blog is generally not fiction, but autobiographical narratives, the text itself is merely a dramatization -- a fictionalization, if you will -- of actual feelings, thoughts, and things that have taken place. alman, as author, truly is dead, and his conscientious reader ought not say: “alman must’ve meant...” or “alman must feel...” or “alman must be thinking...” remove the author -- which is me -- in any of those sentences, and the reader would be in a better position to understand what has just been written.
note to self: intellectual masturbation assumes, first, that you are an intellectual. don’t do it again. it’s rather painful.