Thomas Merton’s Smartphone

What was blogging before blogging?

Odd question as now we’re pretty much living in a post-blog world. Sure, there are people with their own personal bloggy websites: those with a continual axe to grind, or in possession of some small corner of the mind-share market. But for the bulk of us with something to vent about, some screed or minor manifesto to unleash, a lengthy Facebook post will do just fine. You might even get some Likes!, and thus have irrefutable proof of “engagement,” the poor relation of “reading”, and a horribly sad proxy for “understanding.”

I had my ‘board waxed up and ready to ride when the blog tide rolled through the late aughts, but I couldn’t seem to catch a wave. Turns out that churning out regular posts worth reading requires measurable skill matched with professional discipline. That’s the sort of thing that people used to pay for. It was termed “journalism.”

But the urge to spill ink is as old as civilization, and a million brilliant minds have left us little but journal stacks and undiscovered spiral-bound tracts. I am sure there are attics a-plenty filled with yellowed pages of remarkable tales, bone-chilling confessions, insights predating patents, and enough hand-scratched ephemera to re-write half of what we hold dear.

Fortunately, some of it found a publisher here and there. I submit as evidence Thomas Merton’s essay “Rain and the Rhinoceros,” to be found in the New Directions paperback collection Raids On The Unspeakable.

Thomas scampers across some slippery thoughts in the dozen or so pages here. He threads connections between ancient texts and bomb tests, walks a mental tightrope to claim that his cabin-life in the woods is more vital and more real than his earlier urban existence. Believing that, as a near-hermit free from concrete and steel, he is more engaged in and with his fellow man, finally alive and true-born having breached society’s needy “womb of collective illusion.”

He happily takes the loose mental leaps that are forgivable in conversation, very necessary in poetry. He’s content to play with ideas, pick up thoughts and then let them fall where they may. In other words, it’s much like a blog post.

If it were written today, if Thomas Merton were thumbing out the same thoughts on a smartphone with a sketchy signal somewhere in the woods, it all would have surely ended up online. He’d have posted them in real-time to some version of thomas-merton.com, “…a virtual community, a digital hub of connection and contemplation…” having missed the typesetter’s error-checking eyes and the editor’s tempering pen.

Would it have been as good? Would the words be as rich and precise without a few of the old barriers to publication? How long would it last, bouncing around the cloud from server to server? Would it be re-read and resurrected in fifty years by a post-grad reading group a thousand miles away? (As it was for me.)

There’s something to be said for yellowed pages. And also for these our PDF print-outs, creased and soaked guilt-free with yellow highlighting.

And for me here today, typing away. Blog now written. Text engaged. Progress made.