The age of indifference

It might take seven years before a human being can die on a technicality, but a year of absence seems like a fair period of time before declaring a blog officially deceased. Like dog years, I will contract time in a sense of fairness for something shorter-lived, although as free as I am with my time-scale all measurements have the same end; increments toward being late.

So now I can declare this blog late, and its death is somewhat liberating. Now, it is not as though this blog’s comment sections were ever teaming with vociferous fans demanding regular and coherently themed instalments. No, nothing like it, really. However, it seems truly reasonable now to draw a line, and think about doing something new here. Although I say new, I am actually leaning toward using this space to do something very old indeed; creative writing and essay writing. Having surely shaken off any readers this blog may have accrued and subsequently freeing myself from any sense of responsibility, I feel tempted to use this place simply to keep my writing muscles (be they in my head, or just my hands) exercised.

In this case, a little soul-searching is in order (perhaps creative writing is well described as soul-searching in public, in any case.) I am forced to ask myself a question, and any writer owes it to this universe to ask the same question before he picks up a pen, do I actually have anything to write? The answer is not quite the comfortably resounding yes one might hope for. Certainly, there is a collection of half-formed scrawling from this past year, but only a shockingly small amount looks worth cleaning up and displaying. As for writing new material from here out, the truth of the matter is, I find myself back in England this year something of a stranger in my own land, and with very little in the way of plans and direction; not a position particularly conducive for writing, really.

Yet, it feels very important to me that I cajole myself back into writing. It often seems as though I am a member of the post-everything generation, we who have become bored by religion, existentialism, romanticism, socialism, capitalism; a generation that recognises its own inability to be impressed yet would sneer at the naiveté of anyone engaged in critical thought unless their conclusion is to embrace the vapid purposelessness of being young and alive today. This does not make us a generation of ‘angry young men’ – give us an mp3 player and cheap booze and very few see anything to be angry about in modern life. Nor is this a generation of stupidity; as everyone is fully aware of the situation. Sometimes it would appear that we have reached an ‘age of indifference’, and surely art is our only potential respite. So keeping myself writing may be synonymous with keeping myself hoping.