Presistence of thought

    Every now and then, I look at the stats page of my blog and depress over the number of page views on it. Why, why is no one reading my blog? After enough times doing that, and going in circles, I finally identified it as a problem to solve. I framed it as a problem and started thinking about not only the reason for it, but also how I can fix it.

    I had already tried sharing my posts on social media in the past, and it would get a bump here and there but not a lot. I googled and found some platforms that provide critiques and other pointers to increase readership. By the way, at this point I should mention that this post isn't really about all of this problem and solutions. It's about another thought that had come out of this. So, moving on to the real point...

    One of the things I did was that I started analyzing my posts to classify the blog into a 'category' so that I could figure out my target demographic. I thought, "philosophy maybe?". But then everything can be called philosophy — badly written long redundant sentences, gibberish about nothing, misplaced punctuation and so on. I thought of and looked up other categories but none fit. You know, I had emailed an author once (on a whim), a well-published author, I had emailed him a link to one of my posts, and he had responded with an appreciation for my 'literary' blog. I reminisced about it for a bit, first about the compliment, but then about his exaggerated politeness. Eventually with much brooding, I realized the real category for all the stuff that I write.

    Forget about, for a moment, all the worldly things and all the words and their meanings. Forget about all the context that is associated with the word 'writing'. Once you have done that, think about novels, articles, reports, history, academics, these are all things that are meant to be read. But if you think about what writing really is, in its essence it has nothing to do with reading, or put another way, it has nothing to do with others reading what you wrote. 

    Because of this implicit meaning of the word 'writing' as 'something-that-is-read', I had understood writing as something that is read. So, if my that-is-read is not getting read, that is, of course, an aberration, a problem to be solved. Something that is not in a steady state, something not resolved, and is restless, something which requires an action to bring it to how it should be.

    Once I realized this essence of writing, that it has nothing to do with reading, that writing exists as its own — a persistence of a thought, or at least, a persistence of a translation of a thought — that persistence, in what that is an insanely transient existence, and of what that is an insanely fleeting thing, that realization brought about an understanding, that some writings do exist without reading, that they can be at rest in itself. That brought peace to my mind. And that is the category of my blog.