Why this library? Why insert ruminations, poetry, and outright juvenilia among the pornographic rhymes and pundits on the Net?
At first, it did not seem to me clear that a justification was needed. Writing was self-exposure to me long before I knew what such a term would mean. It was the point. Some kind of sublimation of that which was inside into that which can be eternally outside. The immortalization of the inward.
But with email from assorted strangers, I started to wonder: to what extent was my previous characterization of writing justified? That is, what was being embalmed in the immortalization via the written word? "Get thee a son," wrote Shakespeare to his imagined or real young lover. And yet the sonnets themselves are dedicated to an "onlie begetter." What of the begetter is in the sonnet? What of Shakespeare's?
John Rawls has suggested in the political-philosophical realm that persons of talent are not really in possession -- in strict property terms, at least -- of their own talents. That their luck in the gene pool entails a certain communalization of their gifts. Not in any moral-obligation sense. Phil Spector does not "owe us" another record. But in the functioning of a liberal state with distributive justice aims, there must be some redistribution of talent-profit as well.
Of course, the primary effect of such discourse in my view is probably to legitimate the unprofitable work of public interest lawyering, and to elevate such work over the obviously- valued corporate variety.
But if we remove the self-aggrandizing qualifier of "talent," Rawls' argument seems to me to have a useful literary corollary. What am I revealing when I use this medium of exposure? Given that the constructed modern self is only a little more than a convenient conjunction of the brain's illusions and modernity's pretensions, there is no "inner self" being bared on these "pages." There is only the data of the world processed through a number of strangely aligned lenses. The refractions, whether kaleidoscopic or just blurred, are unique because of the way those lenses are set in place. But surely it is anachronistic to say they have some unique Essence.
As such, nothing is revealed -- as the young boy says at the end of Bob Dylan's Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest. Nothing, that is, that would be new under the sun. There is a different arrangement of this time, that place. But as Trilling punctuated the phrase, "what does it matter."
It matters only to the extent that it is not irreducible subjectivity but some sort of trans-subjective aesthetic or rational material that may be resown by an interested reader. And to that same extent, it is an indulgence of ego to "keep it all in."
I sensed a remarkable freedom of spirit when I first put up these pages, as if now the burden had been shifted; now I could no longer be indicted of privacy. The lack of knowledge of 'me' was now the reader's fault for lack of interest, not my own for lack of openness. Relief!
Thus these pages combine a recognition that nothing is new with a disclosure of all the cards arranged in my hand.
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