Why Blog?

My Catty Corner page explains why I started blogging. Now I’ve been doing it for a while I’ve found out a few things.

I have to face the fact. I can’t be a real artist or poet; I can only use techniques of painting and verse to imitate real art or poetry. The reason is simple: my skin is too thick. I lack that essential but agonising sensitivity – what the French call “avoir les nerfs à fleur de peau” – that screams for artistic expression as a matter of life or death, or plunges a person into mental illness. Sometimes both. The more I have to do with real poets and artists, the more I am aware of it.

Logically, this awareness should make me less prolific, it should depress me, make me even more critical. However, my thick skin protects me from potential dismay: I’m grateful to be a pachyderm. I don’t want a nervous breakdown, thank you very much, and so I plod on, scribbling as I have always done ever since I could hold a pencil.

(I was six when I did this:)

I have no great thoughts or insights of my own to convey, and little originality although I am sincere and do try to express myself as well as I can.  I am a Philistine, then. A chatterbox child making mud pies and singing ditties.

Nobody is likely to pay good money for anything I produce, or queue up in the wind and rain for a peek at my masterpieces. That’s where a blog is a blessing: I can fill my pages and blissfully publish them without the approval of some supreme arbiter, and if there are folk out there who think my stuff is quite interesting, thought-provoking, funny or weird but worth wasting a passing moment on, I’m content.

And if they don’t like it, they needn’t bother coming again. AND it saves my poor friends from a great deal of unnecessary ear bending.

Does that answer your question about why I blog?