The Essential Narcissism

I wonder if you ran an analysis of every blog—let’s go way back, xanga and wordpress and blogspot and all the others. Every angsty teenager or established professional. I’d bet the most common blog post out there is, “I’m starting my blog up. Again. But for real this time.” Followed by one or two posts, no greater blogosphere interaction, and a lull of 6-18 months. So in the great spirit of the social conscious, I, too, am starting my blog again.

I’ve sort of had this love-hate relationship with bloggers. Particularly with amateur bloggers. It has always seemed particularly narcissistic to think that, of all the nodes of information commerce on the internet, someone would actually care to land on and engage with mine. So I’ve dabbled but never committed, because of the scathing internal critique I had for myself in my declaration as a “blogger.”

But that changed. Actually, that hasn’t necessarily changed, but my perspective on it has shifted a bit. I’m reading this book by Tad DeLay (God is Unconscious) which is (brace yourself, this gets weird) a theological treatment of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The mass appeal is pretty obvious. But one of the fundamental ideas that I’m reading is the differentiation between the Imaginary (which is our ego, our conscious) the Symbolic (our unconscious) and the Real, which is a sort of indefinable concept of that which breaks into our Imaginary and Symbolic worlds and holds us to some sort of account—which then changes/shapes our new Imaginary and Symbolic approaches to thought and or unthought. Subthought? (I’m not a psychiatrist. My language may not be technically correct. I’m simply a nerd who likes reading hard stuff.)

So if this is true, that we all live in the Imaginary, then our experience with the world is, unavoidably, narcissistic. We can only identify the real as a function of our combined conscious and unconscious thought; everything is subjective, everything is filtered through experience, and everyone is without fail narcissistic. To deny narcissism would be to deny the sum of our experience, culture, family, upbringing, belief sets, etc. Essentially to deny narcissism would be to deny existence itself.

So here I am. Just another narcissistic asshole with a blog. I’m not sure what kind of market there is out there for a guy who like, among other things, fringe theological thought, psychoanalysis, sports, books, writing cathartic (which usually means bad) poetry, and now, apparently, blogging. But I’m writing again. And Seth Godin tells me that art without an audience isn’t art, just a journal. And odds are this will remain simply a journal, but in that odd chance that it connects with someone—as DeLay says, indirectly, which is the only way to connect truly—then good. If it doesn’t…well, I’m a narcissist. And an optimist. With that combination, I'm sure it will be heartfelt and meaningful and transform lives. Right?