What's to shout about?

I have just been on a quick trawl through blogland and come back feeling vaguely depressed. So many voices out there, saying so many different things, and yet in the end, all is silence. How can that be though, when silence is so very precisely what it's not? And what is silence after all, if not the echo that follows when somebody has opened his mouth and found that no-one‘s listening?

Communication is what it’s supposed to be about and suddenly, it seems everybody’s doing it. Communicating, that is: to greater, or lesser effect. Some have only to open their mouths and say the first thing which comes, for the whole world to seem to be listening. Others scream and shout in vain, and might do so until doomsday, for all the response it’s ever going to get. The trick seems to be to find the one spot in which to feel at home and settle comfortably in it, whether anyone’s listening or not.

Take me for example. Not because there’s any reason on earth why you should do – but simply because I am here and this is my particular spot. I wrote a piece about Henry James the other day. Full of hope I was, that somebody, somewhere , would write back to say Yes, yes, that’s right, I love him too. Books have been written on him, after all. Millions of words have been expended, so he must be a person who counts. Again though, only the echo of silence. Except for the one person who wrote in to say how much she disliked him, and to complain of his failure of ‘narrative grip’ . Now I’m not at all sure I know what narrative grip is – but it does seem as if Henry James, as a subject, is out.

It was the same thing when I wrote about Virginia Woolf and Dante, and not a murmur from anywhere did they evoke. Am I to conclude that the whole world has somehow moved on from people like Virginia Woolf and Dante – or was I simply shouting from the wrong treetop in the wrong place? Either way, it doesn’t seem to matter very much. Blogland is only a microcosm of the whole after all – and this particular blogspot only a microcosm of that. But since someone, somewhere must be talking about and listening to something, the trick (again) seems to be find out what it is.

Is it Kate Middleton, I wondered yesterday, when I saw a Mirror headline saying that she “blamed Charles” for the breakup? Was Charles responsible for the breakup of Kate’s relationship with William? And if he was, was he right – and if right, does anyone really care? Well, Kate cares, of course; and so, I daresay does William himself. Kate’s friends care, and Kate’s mother, and most of the readers of Hello. The same people, I’m sure, who care whether Richard Gere should go to court in India or not, over that rather foolish public kiss. What was Richard Gere doing grabbing Shilpa Shetty in public like that – and what, in the general scheme of things, does it matter anyway, whatever it was?

It might on the other hand be the question of Prince Harry that people are minding about today. Should he go to Iraq or shouldn’t he? The Queen says he should, the military top brass seem to disagree. Would one receive a spate of comments if one expressed an opinion, blogwise, on the future of Prince Harry’s army career, I wonder? Probably – but again, what’s to shout about? In the end he’ll go or he won’t go: it’s as simple, and finally un-newsworthy, as that.

Iraq itself remains intensely shoutable-about, sad to say. But after the war has been argued over, and won, and lost, and then won and lost all over again in an entirely unforeseeable way… after Saddam has been toppled, and shamed, and then achieved a kind of glory after all right at the moment of dying… after the shouting has been shrill, and then sombre, then shrill and sombre again, and still the brave young men die out there for no conceivable end………. the only question which seems left to ask is: should they stay, or should they come home? Sooner or later they will have to be brought home of course. It would seem better that it should happen now, while some at least of them are still alive.

It is not my intention to be flippant about Iraq though, for I care about it deeply, and always did. But then it’s not my place to talk about it either, since I am neither the Prime Minister, nor the Defence Secretary, nor even Bryan Appleyard. So the search is still on, for me, to find the thing that is mine to talk about. Better to stick to Henry James, perhaps? Or better still, find something really meaningful to shout about. On the whole, I think that one can only say the thing which comes, and go on hoping for the best.

For me, the next thing which comes will probably be the loneliness of the long-distance blogger. That, and the difficulties experienced by the first-person narrator, in fiction. Not mainstream blogging subjects either, I concede it. Especially since I’ll be taking people like Emily Bronte, and Evelyn Waugh, and Scott Fitzgerald as my models, not one of whom seems likely to raise much of a shout. There’s a good deal of re-reading to be done before I can attain to it, anyway; I shall have to go through Wuthering Heights again, for a start. So there’s still time to reconsider my position, and find something else that works.

But what is blogging if not an exploration of the art of the possible? One says the only thing one can, and if no more than one person listens, has it not at any rate still been said? There’s a whole world of blogging out there; and Harry will, or will not go to Iraq. The world will still turn, and sometime the brave and battered troops will actually come home. And when all has been said and done, and written about, and said and written about again - it’s still going to be pretty much as I said about it at the outset: what’s to shout about?

(Just a thought, that's all.)