March 23, Post 5

I've encountered a problem, which, given the experience recounted by Jacques Revel in Passing Time, I should have foreseen. Somehow I still thought it wouldn't happen to me, and I'm not sure if that's because I didn't trust the fiction to ring true in "real life" or because I didn't expect it to happen to me, though whether that's because, pragmatically, I thought my approach would avoid the problem or because I have a lingering sense of youthful invincibility, I don't know (or don't want to know). It's probably a mix of all of the above. Anyway, I've failed to establish a clear line of thought and I've come too far now, I think, to properly fix it.

When I began this blog, I already had something like 8-10 journal entries which I'd written in a Microsoft Word document and which I intended to copy into posts as soon as I could establish the blog. I wrote the first post explaining my endeavor and copied my first journal entry into the second, where I expanded on those ideas and published. Just in explaining the project, however, I synthesized material it took me a week to work through in my journal. Consequently, those original journal entries are reductive to the more cohesive product I published. I recognized what I was doing as I wrote, but thought that, as long as I allowed two timelines to be evident in each post, I could avoid the complete confusion Revel created in his cyclical journaling. So, I wrote the date on which the material was written (for example, the date of the first post is later than that of the second, as the second was taken from a journal entry I'd written before the commencement of the blog project), and allowed the Post # to reflect the order of publication, which was supposed to represent the forward flow of time.

But I've fallen behind. Or, rather that really falling behind, I've spent too much time editing and adding to the journal entries so that they would be fit for another person to read. The blog format helps me because it holds me accountable to what I write, but it is problematic since it causes this desire to be both journalist and editor simultaneously, which, I've found, is a paralyzing endeavor.  Revel's theory of simply tracking the progression of ideas with an ever-lengthening time-stamp, as I myself have tried to do, is functional, in theory. However, there are now so many ideas subsumed in what I've written (what I keep writing - I've only stopped working on a long post now because I needed reexamine my goals), that reading and understanding the blog from the order of its publishing would really be impossible, or at least would be a more difficult post-modern-type of task than I, as a reader, would willfully undertake.

The problem, I think, is that I can't decide whether or not I want the blog to be a true reflection of my process or if I want to be able to read it without being embarrassed by its fragmentation.

I'm not sure how to proceed.

Hospital Cafeteria, TN - 23 March 2013.