Blogs: The Publishability of Thoughts

Internet did not radically alter the form of writing. You still had to choose between a report, an article, an opinion piece, or a narrative. All it did was to make cross-referencing easy and accessible through hyperlinks.

But the blog has opened up a whole new form of writing, with the publishability of brief pieces. Before the arrival of blogs, no one would have ever thought of publishing a 100-word piece on a topic (however relevant it was) except when it was written as a letter to the editor in the print world or as a comment on an article (or as a response to a question) on a website. Otherwise, you had to wait until you had enough number of short pieces written around a theme to publish them in a book form.

But the blog has changed all that. Now, no thought need to go unpublished for fear of non-extensibility.

A blog is a monolog and a dialog at the same time. And I’m not extending this argument any further.

Nuclear Bombs: Representation and Use

The maker of an object may have many intentions about it. But the object in itself has no intention. It has either a use value or a representative value.

It is the representative value that problematizes the conception of a nuclear bomb. Journalists, academics, and national leaders mostly lose sleep over the multi-representative nature of a nuclear bomb, with Power Over/Subservience To the nuclear non-proliferation treaty being the most widely discussed. These representations are only interpretative and, if language is all about interpretations, they have their place in language.

There is another representation of bomb, which is aesthetic and which is a consequence of its use: the terrible beauty of explosion, fireworks in the sky, radioactive bodies, red and brown earth, the excitement of breaking news, screaming headlines, address by national leaders, and material for future history books and the next Steven Spielberg film (if he is alive to make it and we are all alive to see it).

As for use value, a bomb has only one: it kills. I'm sorry, I forgot the Spielberg film.

Thought, Context and Expression

Is it possible to think without a context? It’s one thing to express a thought without context and another to think without one. By context, I mean a local/recurring event or an act or a behavior or a picture—the perceivable/showable thing.

Even the most abstract of concepts is unthinkable without a context. How do you think the concept of number? Is there such a thing as pure abstraction in thought? Therefore, the answer to the first question: probably not.

On the other hand, there is no compulsion to express a thought in context. However, when one attempts to do that, one risks being misunderstood or misappropriated. Then again, misunderstanding and misappropriation can happen only when statements become private property – mine, yours, and theirs. In its barest state, a sentence means only one thing: a sentence with a beginning and an end (regardless of whether the sentence is grammatically incomplete or whether there was an ellipsis at the beginning or the end). Do you see it now?

Structure

Why do we have this preference for all things structured? Is it that somewhere along the evolutionary chain we lost our sense of structure and so we are constantly forced to look for it and keep on reinventing what we’ve lost? There’s a sense of structure and predictability in the so-called non-rational world of animals. National Geographic will probably vouch for this. So, does that mean rational beings are compelled to articulate structures, build consensus, codify them, and make sure that everyone else is more or less following them because pure reason is rooted in non-structure?

In Truth

In truth, there are no words. Writing and speaking carry the germs of untruth in them all the time. So, what should one do? Remain silent. Or become a fox.

I write. Therfore, I am untrue.

Vision, Mission, and Values

Vision

Stir a few hornets’ nests
and pass by unnoticed
feeling neither good nor bad.

Mission

Walk on the edge.
Defiantly dream.
Create meanings.


Values

Now that truth is dead,
continue to speak the truth
through graceful lies.

Silence and Intolerance

Silence is an effective weapon against mediocrity, but not against intolerance. Ironically, intolerance springs from mediocrity (except the intolerance to mediocrity and to intolerance itself).