Tonight I had a friend tell me he'd written me a long, very important post that got "disappeared" somehow by the internet. He was heartbroken, of course. It seems silly, but when that happens, we are always heartbroken. One of the things I love about Blogger is that it saves me every minute or so. That is so damned helpful because otherwise, I would have probably lost a post or two by now.
In that strange emotionally-imaginative sympathetic way people can feel the pain of others, I feel the tinges of what he's going through. When you lose a post or a great reply or whatever, there is this moment of total loss and disappointment that flows into rage and the sense that life is completely fucked.
Some people are going to roll their eyes at that, thinking I'm being overly dramatic, but you just wait til you lose YOUR next post. Maybe you won't be Judgy McJudgytroll then.
So . . . where do all those lost posts go?
Do they waft off into space? Do they just disappear like they were never there? Do they end up in Dream's Library to be sorted by Lucian? To they get taken by Cyberspace Little People?
What bothers me is that any long, completed post represents real thoughts and ideas pulled together. There is an essence to it. And in the way that we intellectually "breath" life into anything we read, we do the same when we compose.
Maybe all the lost posts just drift away from us to their own little imaginary island. They sit there in their unfulfilled brilliance, marvelous and shimmering examples of the best of our ideas. They talk to each other and reflect on what they could have accomplished. They compliment each other on the depth of their prose.
They form cliques based on similar content. They begin to do the things cliques always do . . . wear their hair the same, collect the same themed silly bands, and talk about the other cliques. This leads to a lot of drama. Some lost posts even start stealing the boyfriends of other lost posts. Blood is shed. Eventually these groups form volleyball teams, because that kind of thing always seems to happen on islands.
Sometimes though, one of the posts will stand apart from its clique. These posts will get very still and silent. They will look up at the sky as if they can see something no one else can. The other posts leave them alone, because they're always mistrustful of this process.
The lone posts stand there for a few days, eyes shut, waiting. Then they begin to unravel. Their structure and sentences and ideas all swirl and pull apart, spiraling away from them and heading into the sky where after a while they fade.
Why does this happen? Ahh, that is because for every post we lose, we still have the genesis of those ideas inside us. We may rewrite the post, always lamenting how we lost the power of the original, but we never truly lose that power. The thrust behind the ideas of it stays with us, and eventually we find ourselves using them to create new writing, threading together those old ides with new ones to form new thought and new writing . . .
THAT hopefully will not also get its ass lost.
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