Why I blog

To the satyr Pan, life is a never-ending search for new and powerful experiences. After more than eight hundred years of travel and adventure, Pan has explored Greece and beyond, seeking adventure, knowledge, and challenge.

Why I blog? I don’t know. Not entirely. Maybe I’ve given into the narcissism of this age. The most trivial moments of my life documented in size 12 New Roman on the net gives such an uber posh…significance. My thoughts given lead above all else. But perhaps this is too generic to be the real answer.

Maybe writing accords me the privilege of holidaying from my life. Maybe it is the camaraderie of being in this exclusive and rather curious occupation of writing. The search for the great novel…every writer’s predilection. The stopping at time to throw yourself in this imaginary world which at times is the only real thing. The love for the people you create. It makes you prod those who are really real. Makes you cold and cynical at times. There is a piece of ice in every writer’s heart, say Nabokov. And it rings true. But man is just man in the end…no better no worse.

Perhaps anonymity gives me Dutch courage. I can be honest with the world and myself…behind a mask. Shedding inhibitions and all that poetic mush.
Or maybe I need an audience. A cat would be, while serving the purpose, unresponsive which while charming in its own way, gets old fast. A man would be a catastrophic defeating of the purpose.

One in every two Kenyans will suffer from mental illness. Whatever ‘’it’’ is, I can’t be sure that I’m not losing it. Maybe I already have. There are such days when I’m sure that I am mad and others when I feel certain that I am Hamlet and the world is going mad in some insidiously orchestrated and nonchalant way. And all these are good days. Maybe writing is therapeutic, makes me lucid.

Maybe I have lofty aspirations of being a voice. Not a black voice, because we have “overcome”. Nor a female voice nor a young voice nor African or ethnic, simply human. I wanted to speak for Jonathan Nkosi and the Jews, the Serbs and the refugees and the girl in a thatch hut with an empty stomach and a heart full of dreams and the boy on the plains tending cattle. And her heart and his cattle must be exchanged, each for each. At the next rains.

Maybe writing is the only way I know to extend myself to the world…I don’t know any other way. I write therefore I am? Perhaps it is all these things and something above and beyond them. I grow up every time I write. And I reach for Charles Bukowski and Borges and Shakespeare and Hardy and Dylan and all these men that I have secretly and diligently loved.

And I can’t help but write. I can’t. About pedestrians on pavements as my bus pulls off the roadside. About Elizabeth in the AIDs wing who has buried two sons, mourned a husband, lost a daughter, and raised two grand kids…she has been wounded by life and hurt by the sun. And she smiles and isn’t ready to give anything back. Because she takes life as it is meant to be taken…seriously. As if she had read Nazim Hikmet’s soul word for word. For she knows, none so well, that she’s going to die. Not just that she may die or can die but that she will die. Soon. But she still makes a case for a loving god in her wretchedness, and she isn’t angered by our youth or good health…a sort of anger-inspiring oddity in the AIDs ward where a young girl of sixteen looks almost forty, creased and emaciated and stuck in this state by her paralysis. There is no bitterness in her at all. Elizabeth lives ‘’beyond the walls’’

I write because I can. Because I must tell it all. Because all of this will fade. It is also purely selfish, merely that it pleases me. Or maybe I too, like Fitzgerald, am a moralist who wants to preach and condescend to the world.

Life’s most unspeakable cruelty is that it urges us on. It demands to be lived. Like a slave master who feeds slaves on a slave ship. We need a break from this paradox. That isn’t to say that a paradox isn’t a good thing.

And I must tell you about the madman I saw on the streets. Dry cracked skin from an overexposure to the elements, muddied tattered clothes. He stood before a small group at a bus stop and came to a pool of rainwater by it. After a somewhat casual examination, circling it as if looking for something in it, he bent down and drank it. And no one so much as blinked.

When you’re young you want to save the world. As you grow up that goes away maybe from the realization that there are six billion of us with equally well meaning intentions, and this proves …chaotic or retrogressive. The horror of each moment fades and we live in this permanent ‘’There-go-I-but-for-the-grace-of-God’’ trance. A passiveness that entails a dedication to the few incidental ideals of life. Mechanical living.

I need to be horrified not for the man, but for the moment. And I need you to be horrified with me. I need company in my misery and blindness.
I must tell you about Christine Samba, a girl in my year who died not from a robber’s bullet but… (wretched irony) under police fire. A bullet to the neck at eighteen, trying to save her family. ‘’Old hand bury the dead’’. Death is at time without meaning, yes of course but can it be pointless as well? You must know about her as I did. Know that she liked reading novels, a staunch catholic, hated her hips…was pretty as a picture. You must remember her when I forget. I write because I do not want to forget these faces.

Maybe I do, against my own better judgment want to save the world. One sentence after the next. Vain ambition. Presumptuous, pompous and silly but true. Frighteningly true.

I must also tell you silly things. Like there’s nothing like the smell of rain on dry earth. That no one should die before seeing the sun set over Limuru…so lovely it makes you think of God. And that I will never be twenty again walking the streets at night on a Good Friday, my waist clasped in huge firm hands. Carefree. What else is life about? His name is Kenneth, and he’s perfect…’like the weather’. And that I pity those who fear the sun’s darkening embrace. For I would not give up this black skin of mine for forty acres or a mule.

So here we all are in this moment capsule of living and I must tell you that nothing has been surrendered. Nothing taken. And I’m not sure to what extent that is a victory. I have danced the Salome dance. I have shed the seven veils. There have been no hopes for a prize…because the prize is living. If I have failed at being human it is because that failure is a prerequisite for this condition. The Human condition. If I have lied, cheated, stolen or bled…it is because these were necessary. Simply it is that I write, not to be alone

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