Is blogging, the need to write blogs and to read them, a question of sharing, of what can be shared – of shared interests, pursuits and experience? – As if the words of the blog were the general equivalent which establishes the value of all experience, which allows it to become measurable, commensurable. Or is it the impossibility of such an equivalent that is celebrated, not the language that would allow us to speak of something held in common, but the opposite: a language which attests to the dispersal of author and reader even as both appear to be gathered in the happiness of sharing their experiences?
A blog can be a shelter, a way of keeping out of the rain. When the rain passes, you go on your way. Or a blog is a record of one who has journeyed ahead of you, leaving messages in the manner of the wandering poets of old Japan (but I also think of the enigmatic traveller of Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth whom we never meet until his grave is discovered, the one who was always ahead and carved his name on the rocks). Or a blog can be a companion, the one who travels beside you, with you.
Common or uncommon to all these experiences: the unilateral gift of writing and reading, which is to say, the peculiar way in which the blog speaks its reader (you recognise the experience) and from far away (it comes from without, from the other side of the world) and the way, for its author, the words receive tributes from readers he does not know (how pleasant that there are such people). With, not alone – to write as you travel is not to travel alone. And to read as you shelter is to know that there are others who travel ahead of you, a long way ahead, perhaps, but travelling nonetheless. But in the end, to read, to write, is not to enjoy reciprocity or exchange. Words always come from afar, from the other side of the day or the night, which is to say, unexpectedly.
Lars Iyer's Blog 