I'm starting this blog on a typically chilly gray day in this northern city of exile. I still don't know exactly how I'll construct this virtual world – thinking of my own journals, my own writings, other blogs, even the whole elaborate ecosystem of the blogsphere – but, as in everything, jumping in is the only way to find out.
My uncertainty, which is characteristic of my life these days (and intermittently of my life since about 1977, when, in my personal version of my story, things started to go off track) is not unusual in beginning blogs. I could try to carefully construct a First Post, as did a colleague of mine – but that would go against what I need to do in this blog: to just have a space to write, and to somehow link up the too splintered worlds of writing, computers, and personal communications. If it expands to something more interesting, and with a more coherent core, that would be fine – but for now I need to be willing to just write, and see what happens.
While trying out Typepad and Blogger, I'm also sketching out a new Web page that will include published and unpublished writings, and my actual name on it. Although from a distance these various web attempts seem distinct, I'm still trying to figure out the exact differences for me – especially the problems of being private in public, of organizing anonymity, and of personas. Lord knows I don't need any more personas - it would probably be better if I could integrate some of the too-many identities I've assembled over the years - but I need to play with it all for a while and see what happens.
Well that's a start. I'll pause for some peppermint tea - the peppermint dried from a roadside bush in Crete last year, while visiting G– and K– at their house there. Such indulgences of smell (rich spices, incense, bath oils) and taste (chocolate, herbs) have become characteristic of my home life in the past three years – they are how I deal with the cold climate, with living alone. And they are how I give my rather dulled body a sense of aliveness: it may seem odd that peppermint, and chili oil, would be a response to illness, medication, and aging - but it is my response in any case.
As I said at the end of a poem in the early 1990s: "it will be / white cinnamon, / sweet aloes."
Okay, let's have this tea, and get ready for the graduate student coming by to do an interview...
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