Blogging – Martine Pagé

Writing about my life

Is this because people are generally willing to nod and smile while a young person regales them with the details of her life but don’t really want to hear about a middle-aged person, least of all a middle-aged woman? Perhaps in part. But, more than that, I think my reluctance to write about myself comes from what may be the primary difference between the young and the old(er). When you’re young, you think that everything you’re experiencing has never been experienced by anyone before, ever. […] It’s because finding something unique to say about the situation, finding something that wouldn’t be drowned out by what everyone else was saying, would require me to assume a position that suggested no one else had seen quite what I had seen. […] And if there’s anything I’ve learned from growing older, it’s that usually everyone is walking down the street in exactly the same way: preoccupied with their own problems and, nowadays, engrossed in their phones.
I’m tool old to write about my life by Megan Daum.

Une voix sans voix off

Sur son blogue, Beth offre une réflexion très intéressante sur l’écriture du journal intime. En référence à Thomas Merton, elle dit :

He had left the academic world of New York in order to seek God and some sort of personal overhaul. He was aiming at authenticity, transparency, honesty, directness, egolessness… and yet he learned how the very act of writing — which he couldn’t help, couldn’t give up completely — became a trap for the ego. He talks about it a lot. This was his huge struggle: the need to say what he saw and felt out of the depths of his contemplative experience, to communicate it to others, and to try to make a difference in a broken world, but how writing can become performance that addictively seeks something else entirely: admiration, praise, fame.

Ça m’a fait penser à un texte de l’autrice Helen Garner que j’ai lu récemment dans The Guardian. Elle raconte l’expérience pénible de replonger dans ses vieux journaux intimes :

A few years ago I had a huge bonfire in my backyard and burned all my diaries up to the point where Yellow Notebook begins. I did this because when I went through the cartons of exercise books one day, looking for what I’d written around the time of the dramatic dismissal of the Whitlam government, I found to my astonishment that I hadn’t even mentioned it.
That day, crouching over the crates in the laundry, I was soon so bored with my younger self and her droning sentimental concerns that there was nothing for it – this shit had to go.

Elle a quand même fini par y trouver du matériel qui avait une certaine valeur de partage, mais le travail d’édition des écrits en question n’a pas été facile. Je n’ai pas (encore) lu le résultat publié, mais les réflexions qu’elle tire de ce travail sont d’une pertinence cinglante :

And of course I soon found myself, day after day, strapped into the straitjacket that is the very nature of a diary: it’s got a voice, it’s entirely composed of voice, but it has no voiceover. It exists in an eternal present.

Drôles de choses

Allô? Il y a quelqu’un?

Inspirée par le blogue de Karl que je retrouve avec grand plaisir ces jours-ci, et stimulée par le concept du 100 Days To Offload, il me reprend des envies de publier ici… J’aurais cependant envie d’une publication à l’accès plus limité qu’à l’époque de l’âge d’or des blogues. J’ai envie de retrouver plusieurs d’entre vous, mais sans pour autant m’ouvrir « au monde ». Vous comprenez ce que je veux dire? Illusoire? Une newsletter serait plus appropriée?

Pardonnez-moi. Je réfléchis tout haut. La pandémie nous fait faire de bien drôles de choses.