Why Write a Blog

I write because I enjoy writing and to educate myself.  It helps my own understanding of my cranky pet subjects as I try to convey my enthusiasms to my non-existent audience.

It is highly probable that I will never make a cent out of it but then I find commerce, salesmen and “busy-ness” so indescribably sordid I’m not sure I care. Especially at my age.  Sure, it would be nice to generate some revenue – nothing wrong with that. But advertising and aggressively pushing product is somehow so utterly vulgar and distasteful.

So I have taken a different course.  If there are books or films I have read and enjoyed I feel no guilt or embarrassment about adding a link to Amazon.com but I certainly don’t want to promote any old tat or to cover my blog with vulgar and thoroughly irritating commerce.

Equally I feel pretty ambivalent on choosing content for an “audience”:  I will write exactly what I want to write, no more no less. If anybody wants to read it, fine. If they do not – well that’s equally fine. I do not imagine there are hordes of the faithful wishing to hear my cranky and often rather obscure or bad tempered thoughts.

Self education and self awareness are an important part of it for me. I have been searching for answers to difficult questions my entire life and those answers will come, if at all, by a relentless and dedicated search for truths.

I am aware that I very often get carried away by what I can only describe as mysticism.  I get carried away by a feeling of awe when I finally understand harmony, or meditate on a mountain or in a lonely Norman Church.

But my awe is not a religious one. Yes, in a broad sense it is certainly spiritual but not in the sense of some religious nutter or new age fanatic. I would indeed love to hear the voice of god but my god is a very different one. Awe and wonder are to be found in excess in the natural physical world and I believe the universe is strange and wonderful enough without the need to imagine forces any more mysterious than we can discover by rational scientific enquiry.

Those forces are numinous enough and it is my strongly held conviction that conscious beings will eventually achieve powers and knowledge which would make them godlike anyway.

So yes, I am writing about subjects which interest me and its largely “scientific” enquiry by an ignorant laymen into the wonders of the universe.  If that sounds arrogant and intolerant – well it probably is. At heart I’m a grumpy old hermit who has lost any desire to “fit in” with what most people would call “normality”.