The first blog is a daunting thing. You research the questions it should answer about its existence. Questions like, How did your passion come about? Who are you attracting to this site? What’s your message? This isn’t a blog about how to sign up and register for WordPress. This is about the struggle to make all your posts about something that is 80% authentic you (you gotta leave some things back). This is about how to let go from what you know and see where it takes you. This post is about asking those important questions and to trust in the process, or hard work if trust doesn’t work out.
Looking back on how I got to the words you are now reading, I followed the following steps:
1. Sketching
2. Analyzing what the sketch represents
3. Questioning what I wrote
4. Going deep into the answers
5. Reflecting on what the process gave me
Sketching:
I begin with the question: What should my blog be about? How should I best represent my love of creating? How do I find joy in the process of creation?
It starts with a scribble. I use the Paper app on my iPad. Scribble, Scribble, this is what a poster should have. A central image and space all around. Maybe something profound at the bottom. I’ll just greek it for now with a dash of “lorem ipsum…”
Analysis:
What does it mean to greek something with lorem ipsum? I often ask myself that question when I encounter Engrish at some shop or restaurant in Japan. There must be something in that gibberish of latin phrasing so muddied with greek lettering that it all looks greek to me. (Yes, that is where the expression comes from.)
Lorem Ipsum refers to any text you would place on a printable surface to show what it would look like. In the 15th century a printmaker used Cicero’s De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (“On the Extremes of Good and Evil”) as a guide using just enough Greek text to garble the message.
You may encounter the Bacon Ipsum equivalent, or seen it rendered in the immortal motherfucking words of Samuel L. Jackson. Before Adobe renamed it, Aldus PageMaker brought greeking to the Digital Age, just like the french company Letraset did in the 1960s with their popular dry-transfer lettering sheets. In either case the developers and typesetters have the same goal: They make you see the potential your words have by limiting your ability to read the text.
Questioning what I wrote:
What did Cicero say that could be recalled by some typesetter more than a millenia later? And why not something from the Holy Bible? To answer your second question first: It was sacrilegious to do so. But the words of a roman philosopher from 1B.C. seemed fair game. Latin was the hip-hop of the 1500s, you could recall passages to set in type the way I can recall the lyrics of Beastie Boy’s Paul Revere.
The original passage and the entire story of how lorem ipsum came to be can be found here.
Going deeper:
The main passage most commonly thought to be the origin of it is found in this passage:
“Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem.”
sections 1.10.32–33 of Cicero’s work
A 1914 English translation by Harris Rackham reads:
“Nor is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.”
Cicero, Marcus Tullius; Rackham, H. (1914). De finibus bonorum et malorum (in Latin and English). New York: Macmillan Co. p. 36 (Book I ix 32).
Reflecting on the process:
Cicero says that perhaps it is best that we not interfere with someone’s passionate pursuit of pleasure even if we know it can lead to pain. There is some potential to learn from the experience that will further a person’s development. In this sense, even if I’m totally wrong about starting a blog, it is something I am passionate about sharing. Create on the empty page. Discover. Wonder. Question. Go deeper. Reflect. Trust in the time you choose to be creative in whichever sense that means.
Today, I struggled through the pain of not knowing what to blog about. Now I have some sense of what people can find on this blog:
Convalis Semper Risus
In the absence of meaning, man will fill the void with story
Convalis Semper Risus
In the gibberish that is Loren Ipsum, I discovered a beautiful line of text in both Latin and English: Convalis Semper Risus (or “an enclosed valley’s always a laugh”) As you walk through the valley in sad shadow of artistic imposter syndrome, you can always find something here to laugh about.
If you want to___
Learn about Greeking:
https://loremipsum.io/
Learn about the history of Making Pages in the Digital Age:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070709042131/http://www.makingpages.org/pagemaker/history/
Learn how to Greek like Samuel L. Jackson:
https://slipsum.com/
Learn how to Greek like Snoop Dogg:
http://lorizzle.nl/?feed=1