Sharing the tick

If you learn what a thing consists of, what parts make it up, you will come to understand the more complex whole. If you can't explain something simply, you don't know it well enough; you haven't studied the parts closely enough. An investigator gathers and sorts parts until the big picture materializes. Some children like to take things apart. Why? To find out what makes the thing tick. Often they are not so keen on putting them back together. Why? Because they have already discovered what makes the thing tick and putting it back together is redundant; it doesn't further their inquiry.

To be helpful, though, the gathered and sorted parts must have conclusions drawn from them, and, to be worth anything, those conclusions must be shared with others, usually by publishing. Research shouldn't be simply about personal edification. What good is that to the world? Helpful research is done by people who not only discover what makes it tick, but who explain it and leave a record. If this note-taking and journal-keeping is done as you go, and restated and interpreted as you go, then there will not be a big book to write at the end; it is already complete. I think too many books go unpublished because writing them is redundant for the researcher who already knows the material. He is like the child who learns what makes a thing tick, but doesn't share that knowledge. Do it as you go. Write daily. Take notes as you take things apart, not down the road.

Some people go through life trying to find out what makes things tick.

Why do you blog?

This subject has been brought up many times in the past, and you have probably already read a post or two about it, or maybe even written about it yourself. Usually, the question elicits lists of possible reasons why people blog. Such a list might look something like this:

To keep a diary or journal

To make money

To make friends

To express yourself

To generate interest in a project

To talk to yourself

To publicize (or analyze) some subject you care about

To interact; to discuss things; to debate things

There are more, of course. These just come to my mind. I don't know why YOU blog, so this post is an analysis of why I blog. I hope, though, in the comments, you will talk about why YOU blog as well as make observations about why I blog.

In addition to liking to write, I also like to take photos and collect music (mostly old music.)

One time I was on a photography forum and the question was posed to photographers, "Why do you like to take pictures?" The first answer that popped into my head was the same as it would be if the question had been about writing or collecting music. All three things bring me joy.

If I dig deeper though, and ask WHY those things bring me joy, then I get a better idea of why I do them. I'm not sure I can tell you why I enjoy collecting music. One the one hand, it has the same attraction as collecting coins or stamps or butterflies or anything else: to own examples of each variety and variation.

On the other hand, music satisfies a larger need in me that collecting coins probably couldn't satisfy: listing to it stimulates memories and invites dreaming. I have read that if you expose your young child to Mozart, he will do better in mathematics. I don't know: I really like Mozart, but I am not good at (or even particularly interested in) the higher mathematics. I do know that when I am alone and listening to music (in the background, so to speak) I am aware that I seem to get greater clarity and more original ideas. I must admit I am not talking about rap or hip hop music here.

This is not necessarily true with writing or with photography. Of course photography can be used to document examples of varieties and variations. Before photography, Audubon painted beautiful pictures of all the varieties of birds he could find. He documented them. His paintings often show even more idealized detail than a photograph would have.

You can buy reference books on many subjects. A reference book on trees, for example, would have photos of many varieties of trees, with close ups of their leaves and their seeds and their fruit.

So, one reason people take photographs, or write, is to document things; to tell what a thing consists of, either by describing it in writing or by taking a photograph of it.

Another reason, I think, is to represent a larger meaning than may be immediately evident; to try and convey some larger purpose by taking a photograph or creating a painting. Often paintings are created from the inside out in that respect. When you look at something like Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Night", you just KNOW you are looking at more than a rather primitive, even hurried,  picture of a dark night with stars in the sky. It might take you a few moments to contemplate what that "something" is, but you FEEL something inside when you look at it. Suddenly it becomes very personal indeed. Even if you are never able to explain it to others with words, you somehow KNOW what it means to you. You, in some weird way, are able to connect your own life experiences with Vincent's, and identify with him for a brief moment.

This can be accomplished with skilled photography as well, although I don't think you see that many great photographs like you used to see with the so-called masters of early photography. This, I think, is because in its infancy photography was STILL almost like painting. Painting with light. It is still that today, but most people now use it to simply capture a scene which they want to later share with others. There is not nearly as much artistic effort made to create photo essays or photo collages or photo series which together carry a larger meaning. Using a series of photos to expose a social injustice (such as child labor, or the plight of immigrants) is almost becoming a lost art.

So I return to my original premise of why I blog and why I take photographs and restate that the reasons, for me, are the same: I want to explain things clearly. I want to present the larger makeup of things through the unique filter of my own eyes and my own life experiences.

Some of us have an uncontrollable urge to find out the inner meaning, or, at least, the TRUE meaning of things, if we can. Some of us spend our entire life as investigators, as lifelong learners. Like the child who takes things apart to see what makes them tick, we have never grown up in that respect. We are not always so interested in putting them back together again once we learn their secrets.

We soon learn, however, that there is not much money to be made with learning more and more information to the point of being walking encyclopedias. No, the only way such people as we can earn a living is by SHARING what we have learned. So, long ago, I have learned to be an interpreter by trade, not just a gatherer of facts for my own delight. I share by writing stories and analyses; I share by documenting the facets of things - exposing their essential makeup; describing with words and describing with photographs.

The urge inside me that I cannot shake is the will to translate life as I pass through it, and so I write and I think and I document the makeup of things with photographs and even more writing, and sometimes with musical backgrounds to those things.

And I blog.