the carrier bag
in my last post i was looking for a language that could describe my creative drive and find connections between my creations. i found it in craft practice. in the post before that i was looking for a language to explain why my creations are small, well tended to, and insurgent things connecting rhizomatically. in this post i am looking for something a little different: a language for care. for the hope that what i tend and make and print and write might nourish my future self and whoever else finds it, wherever it goes, and in whatever bag that happens to be carrying it.
i want to make a small argument about weblogs in particular.
we treat blog posts like arrows, pointed things fired at a single target, read once, forgotten, and the feed keeps us scrolling on so long as we are fed. each post is supposed to be a weapon, it should have a thesis, a conclusion, and a thing it does. you write it, you post it, you move on. it's the hero's narrative, start to finish, and thok🎯 goes the thought.
but i don't think that's what a weblog actually is or should be. when you stop treating it like a feed and start treating it a little differently.
ursula k. le guin's carrier bag theory of fiction starts with a small provocation: before we made weapons, we made containers. the basket, the net, the medicine bundle, and the bag. these are tools that bring energy home. she writes:
with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.
the mammoth hunters got the cave paintings and the heroic story arch, but the gleaners and gatherers picking wild plants, putting seeds into bags, watching the fauna, listening to jokes and songs are the ones who actually kept everyone alive.
she applies this to fiction. the novel, she argues, is not an arrow but a bag. it holds things in relation to one another. it has no obligation to resolve, only to gather and save.
i think a weblog is a sort of carrier bag.
not a single post, but the whole thing, as accumulated seeds over time. a weblog gathers and holds. it is a place you return to, add to, revise implicitly by writing the next thing. the post you write today changes the meaning of the post you wrote six months ago, not by editing it but by standing next to it, showing your evolution ( 🦠 → 🐟 → 🦎 → 🐭 → 🐒 → 🙋🏽 → 🧟♀️ → 🤖 ). i don't like my weblog being treated as a feed. it is a garden of plots, tended to until something is ready to be picked and carried somewhere else by someone else.
wynter's plot grows what the plantation cannot account for. le guin's bag holds what the hero's story cannot contain. they are two halves of the same practice: you tend the plot, and then you gather from it, and then you carry what you gathered somewhere else. the reader comes with their own bag. they take what they need from the plot and go. i don't know what they pick or where it ends up. that's the whole thing.
bpNichol's martyrology is a carrier bag. a lifelong poem begun in 1967 and still unresolved at his death in 1988, accumulating, beginning again, and holding things in relation to each other without demanding that they resolve. never demanding linearality, you can arrive to any plot any time, and take something delicious home in your carrier bad. gurtrude stein's continuous present from my last log also contains carrier bag logic: beginning again and again, each sentence adding to the whole without pointing at a conclusion, always and absolutely present. i have baggage from bp and stein and i carry it into each log, zine, letterpress print, or shell script i create. they become their own plots ready to be gleaned from and placed in other people's bags.
what i am trying to say is: you do not need to treat anyone's blog like a content strategy being fed to you post by post. you do not need a hook, a throughline, a call to action, a conclusion that wraps everything up. you are allowed to watch the wildlife and flowers blow in the wind for a while. you are allowed to glean and put edible treats in your bag and go home and put the bag down and come back tomorrow and add more from elsewhere. a blog works better as a bag or container than as a weapon.
the weblog as carrier bag means: it is okay to be mid-thought. it is okay to circle back, and it is okay if this post does not make a single clear point, because the point is the accumulation, the gathering, the sharing, and the practice of returning and adding and holding or going out on my own to glean from other plots that are not my own.
i have three connected posts now: the plot, the craft, and now the carrying bag. none of them are finished; instead, all of them are in another bag together. that is the point. a head can store only so much, so give something to the bag.
le guin ends her essay in a way i love:
still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.
the plot is where it starts, tended to by the craft, and the bag is where it goes. somewhere into the infinite. so keep tending, keep gathering, and keep carrying. carrying is sharing and sharing caring. i think that is something we can all easily stand for.
facio ergo sum.