Scattershot posts always haunt me, is all.
So that's a question for ya. Is self-censorship (retroactive or otherwise) healthy? Do you suppose such decisions hamper a person's self-expression?
[A bit of context re: the first part, in case you’re reading along. What follows is a reply to a question/reply to a reply to a reply to something I wrote to fictionz. Got it? No? Doesn’t matter.]
Wow. Jeez. Way to strike a chord that’s been reverberating with a particular significance lately and which—for that very reason, no doubt—is going to elicit a tangle of haphazard non-answer-answers. Because even the short answer would be yes and no. And yes and no. (And I should stop now but you started it so now there’s no stopping me, but of course you’re free to stop whenever you’d like.)
First off, I suppose I should say that I myself am a(n all too?) frequent practitioner of self-censorship. I’ve never met a paragraph that I didn’t want to revise, and I’m not exactly skilled when it comes to the whole “urge-resistance” thing. I delete posts all the time. Sometimes it’s because they no longer seem to matter; sometimes it’s because they matter too much. And sometimes I erase posts because someone I know in “real” life has found me here and I’ve written something that—whether it’s about him or her or not—I find I’m not brave enough to share.
Clearly, I’m no model against which the health of anyone’s habits should be judged. But everything I’m about to blurt out is absolutely sincere, muddled as it may be.
Self-censorship is a form of self-expression. The things we erase matter just as much as the things we write; the act of deleting matters just as much as its opposite. To choose not to speak at all is a way of expressing oneself. Whether or not this is healthy is another matter. Is it a creative act? Righteous protest? Passive aggression? An expression of one’s self, a self that—it just so happens—may not be so terribly brave after all?
Self-censorship can be healthy and it cannot. And it can also be a shame. It’s easy enough to find examples on my dashboard. A few days ago, luckypaperstars wrote about having just deleted a number of her posts, about how good it felt “to put down old baggage.” I’m relying on her word, of course, but this sounds pretty damn healthy to me. A day later, Meaghano posted a humorous, painful, poignant reply to a distressed teen, which turned on journal entries she herself had written at age 17. Oh my God. This is so much more than unlocking Pandora’s Book of Humiliation. (M-Y-D-I-A-R-Y) (the combination was M-A.) (for every one of us.) (every single one.) To unlock it and read without matches in hand is enough… but to share it? And to make use of it? I was awestruck. I am awestruck, still.
We never know how the histories will be written but we all want to be victors so we do what we can to stack the deck. Think of all the artists who’ve destroyed their own work (Martin, Cézanne, Bacon, Morisot, O’Keeffe, Watteau, and on and on and on to the point that I feel like I shouldn’t have named names because everyone did it everyone does it, everyone) because they thought it wasn’t good enough. It didn’t fit. It was a failure. But oh oh oh how easily we forget the importance of failure!! In some ways, it’s all we have.
So now I’m going to do a little self-censoring of my own. Because seriously (and I get the sense that you’re getting this), I could write a book or two or twelve on the subject of failure. (Not that they’d be any good.) (But I could write them.) (The volumes, by the way, will comprise LIFE WORK # 2. I’ll get on that project right after I finish writing the one about how modernism is all about light bulbs and water.) (Yes.) (I am totally serious.) (Sort of.) Maybe I’d start with why El Lissitzky—surely no virtuoso, not most of the time—is so damn good. And then there’d be Duchamp’s “art coefficient” and maybe the whole thing would end up somewhere around Silvia Kolbowski’s An Inadequate History of Conceptual Art. Maybe these will become posts of their own, at least. But at the moment, another example is pressing its way through to the keyboard.
Tacita Dean. FLOH. Pretty much the Best. Book. Ever. FLOH is “flow” is “flea” is made up of photographs Dean picked up at flea markets, photographs that range from enthralling to utterly banal, photographs that have been arranged in accordance with a logic that seems to shift with each viewing. (I’ll post some of the spreads above in just a bit. Promise.) There is so much to mine, but what matters just now is what these photographs have in common. For one, they are anonymous. But more importantly (for our purposes… or my purposes, at least), they have been thrown away or lost (and found). And they are analog.
It is no coincidence that FLOH appears at the moment that the digital makes the death of print seem unavoidable. Dean herself is forthcoming about this. FLOH is rich with another man’s treasures, cast off images cut free from the homes and histories that didn’t want them, free now to mean everything and nothing all at once. We can hardly help but be touched; their distance from their origins and their proximity to one another, to us, is part of it. Yet while we may find a certain strain of beauty here, we cannot help but admit that someone judged these to be failures. The criteria is known to us, even. Someone blinks or looks away just as the shutter clicks. He couldn’t hold still long enough, squirming, so we are left with a blur. Oh God, I hate how I look in that picture. Someone tried to lose these photographs but they were found.
How much of that possibility remains in a world gone digital? These are the images that we are now free to lose forever with ease. How long does it take to press a button?
Erase.
Delete.
