This was a forced entry. As was the post immediately prior to this one. Somehow the joy went out of the act of writing like air leaving a punctured tire. Pfffft. And it was gone. All gone.

I sensed it at the time. I knew there was something wrong. I did not know what it was. I did not have enough sense of myself to react, or correct, or respond. I just went Pfffft.

Now I find I have two problems. The first problem is completing the blog post intended to accompany this Photography After image. I have the notes written somewhere. But it feels like dead text. Text written after the Pfffft.

The Photography Before post shares this same dead quality. And I in some way appear to have suffered my own petit mort. And this is the reason for the long interval between posts. I was, in effect, “dead to the world.” And that introduces the second problem.

I made a vow to my son and to myself that I would refrain from turning this blog into a narcissistic journal, a record of the trivial and ephemeral aspects of lived experience, facile issues that matter to no one, ultimately not even the author. This is the navel gazing meme. I want to avoid it. At the same time there exists an offsetting commitment to what I would inadequately describe as Orwellian honesty.

When I write of Orwellian honesty, I refer not to the dystopia experienced by Winston Smith but to the descriptions of lived experience found in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. In these, and other of his works, Orwell sought to introduce the reader to a lived experience that was unknown and unshared, a form of dark secret lying at the heart of industrial society, something that was there in front of you but about which no one was to know anything. About which no one spoke.

So there exists a tension between writing another chunk of lifeless prose on some arcane aspect of photographic imagery in order to complete this two post suite, or shifting gears and trying to honour my commitment to Mr Blair’s ghost and introduce a complete description of the lived experience of TBI. In the presentation of that lived experience I run the danger of falling into a “woe is me” navel gazing mode in which I break my commitment to myself, my son, and to the other member of my audience.

I have not yet settled on an appropriate course of action.

And, to be brutally honest, I should note that this text was entered on July 8th not on the posting date automatically entered by the blog software. I missed a few days due to problems.