Feeding My Ignorance

I've started on my newest online creation - partially inspired by the making memories series of posts here - to create a bit of a "life history" - a treasure trove of memories (probably real and imagined if you have read some of my previous writing on the subject) - a pot-pourri of little highlights (and possibly some lowlights) of my life.

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I had the idea of doing this a while back and one of the things that stopped me was simply knowing where to start! Faced with a blank page it is difficult to know what should be written down - and in this case that extended to not just the content but the subject. I could hardly start with my birth - don't remember much of that to be honest!!

Anyway, I was in this "stuck" position for a few days - and then suddenly found the way out - and it brought to mind a lesson I learned a long time ago - but one which is too easy to overlook when you need it.

Robert Pirsig's book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" is (as I've said elsewhere) one of the few books that I can claim to have read more than once. Even though after the first time you are prepared for the "journey" that the book takes you on - there are always things that either jump out new at you or that you suddenly think "yes - I remember reading that last time - but it had slipped my memory".

One fragment that had always stuck in my mind is a passage where a student is tasked with writing a 500 word essay on the USA. Wow - that must be easy - only five hundred words and a big topic that everyone knows about. The story progresses as the student struggles to complete the assigment. Write about Bozeman she is told - your home town, should be easy - but it still doesn't work. Eventually the block is loosened when her focus is brought down to a subject sufficiently small.

I had the same experience - couldn't think what to write - then chose a quite specific subject and wrote reams on it (with perhaps more to come) and it was stretching back over 45 years into my memories - so not a 'recent' topic!!

Anyway, I have decided to have a mixed blog/wiki format - the blog will record entries into the wiki (I know the wiki does that anyway, but its less obvious (and less flexible as well) whilst the wiki allows me to cross link much more easily and also to categorise in a number of different ways.

Each topic I have chosen to write about so far has unlocked a bit of a stream of memories - I just hope that through time these begin to come together as a whole rather than being just a series of disjoint essays. Already I am being triggered into writing much shorter entries - almost as asides on the topic of choice. What I am certainly proving is that the "stuckness" that was described by Pirsig is a very real thing - and focussing on a specific is a great way to catalyse the thinking and creative processes.

Once the project has properly taken shape it will become part of this 'family' of little websites and the blog will be linked from here. For the present I am still experimenting with some aspects - so I'll keep it "under wraps" for a while!!