JONTILLMAN.COM | part of the problem since 1976

One of the things that has suprised me when comparing this blog to my previous (private, paper) journals, is how much more difficult it is to write a blog entry than it is to write a journal entry. At first I thought that it was a function of having an audience (however small) and wanting to present myself and my thoughts in a particular light to that audience, and that journal entries were easier to write because I could let my guard down and simply “be myself” without pretension or artifice, since a personal journal, by definition, has no audience.

As I have been discovering about a lot of things recently, it turns out that the opposite of what I thought was happening was what was actually going on. Journal entries are not easier for me to write than blog entries because they have no artifice to them and are more “real” or “honest”. They are easier to write because they have no audience, and having no audience, do not have to explain anything. Journals are a form of emotional shorthand written in longhand, a way for me to jot down psycho-emotional trigger phrases that serve as reference pointers to what I am beginning to call “thoughts without words”.

Blog entires do not provide me with that luxury. The fact of having an audience necessitates that I actually put the thoughts into words, explain the concepts, and “define my terms”, so to speak. Blogging demands that I actually think about and give syntactic and pragmatic weight to the seemingly unordered jumble of my private semantics (more on this in part II).

As a result of that demand for explanation, something interesting has been happening. I have begun to rely less and less on that internal shorthand. All of a sudden, I have to actually turn all these gut feelings into sentences, paragraphs, logical structures. It is no longer enough to have the idea; it must be expressed. My private journals, I realize now, are without expression - they do not contain anything that could be called thought. They are more akin to icons, especially in the religious sense. They are meant to evoke a complete response by their presence, but they do not tell a story.

Carrying the Eastern Orthodox analogy farther, I suppose you could say that I am becoming an iconoclast. I am seeking to overthrow my traditional method of writing, to do away with the sacred relics of my own private church of thought.