Why keep blogging?

On occasion I must ask myself that question. After all, what does my little "niche" blog achieves? Am I getting any close to have Chavez out? Are people sending me fat checks for the good work I do? Would the people that despise my words be happier if I were to stop or if I kept writing?

And then there is also the simple exhaustion of blogging day in and day out. Yes, with time I have become much faster at writing, if not better. Now, with a little bit of inspiration I can whip up a post in around an hour, research included. I can spend less than half the time I used to spend writing because during day time I have learned as a second nature to process the data accumulated during the walking hours and only sit down when the idea comes. Then it is just a matter of stringing up words. Nothing that any regular writer does not know. And blogger's block is not something that is likely to happen in Venezuela as almost everyday we are hit with the unspeakable, the weird, the odd, rarely the sublime.

But sometimes I get tired, I wonder, I think whether spending my blogging time at the gym would be better for me in the long run. Then again I am reminded that blogging is also the mental exercise that allows me to make sense of what is going on, and to help at least some people along the way. Not that I am the bearer of wisdom, but I have received enough words of encouragement, and thank you notes, and I have met enough interesting people through more than two years of blogging that I can say that it has been exceedingly rewarding.

So why this introspection today?

Last Thursday op-ed of Milagros Socorro was particularly brilliant. I will not translate it as it relates too much to the feel of the country, and because it touched me rather than being informative for the average reader. This piece is really a meditation on what is our relation with our country and I just retained the end for translation:

[The nation] will remain here when we will be gone too. And it is destined to get better; either because we will effect its recovery or we will not effect it being, as we are, in the darkest corner of our republican destiny. The country will be better, some day, when we Venezuelans will make it happen. And we will die of something else (hopefully more than 80 years old, and if it is not too much to ask, at the hands of a lover with reasons to be jealous) but we will not die of Venezuela. That is certain. What is left to us is to struggle, to try to see things with intelligence, without letting ourselves be carried with preconceived notions that have proven to take us out of reality instead of helping us penetrate it.

And if things get thorny, if there are days when you think that you can't help it anymore, that you are going to die of country, chose partial exile, in reading, in contemplation, in the heart of someone.

This passage is rather remarkable since a few months ago Milagros Socorro wrote, a few days after the fateful August day, an article where she was considering the option of "internal exile". Not really for her, but for many people. Curiously it seems that today she is closer from that internal exile. She might have found a way to justify it on occasion, to make it work. Some of her words then [rather prophetic if you ask me as they were written in August 17 at the latest]:

In front of the opposition defeat and the rage that the possibility of fraud produces, many Venezuelans have fallen in the temptation of internal exile, an asylum which has two faces: 1) not to think, not to make the effort to penetrate the reality going through appearance, to accept that interpretation [of fraud] which, even as it generates frustration and rage, tranquilizes because it does not require much scrutiny; and 2) to take the decision never again to vote and to hell with the regional elections.

Visibly Milagros Socorro is of the group that does not think that electoral fraud in August 15 was enough to explain Chavez victory. Elsewhere is her dismayed reaction as to how come our countrymen could chose such an abomination for a few handouts, but that is another story. What is more interesting is to detect that she was not going to let herself go and today she actually considers means for provisional retreat. I can sympathize a lot these days as we are perhaps in the bleakest hours of hope since all morality is collapsing around us, and yet the regime is basically unchallenged. We need to protect our soul from such degradation.

To conclude, these two articles made me seek another article from these post referendum traumatic days. This time it is from Ibsen Martinez, one of my favorites, but basically untranslatable as too ethereal and opaque for non Venezuelan audiences. There Martinez discusses the ketman, a concept advanced a few decades ago by Ceslaw Milosz (through unpalatable Gobinau), Poland's poet laureate, who had to survive the hopeless years of the communist regime of his country.

The ketman is dissimulation accompanied by a feeling or moral superiority of the oppressed vis a vis the oppressor. [...] The ketman as an internal conduct, is a complex operation, more emotional than rational, and it plays on many and unforeseen directions.

This of course is applicable under totalitarian regimes, as a way to survive internally while externally participating, compromising, in all that is required by the oppressor; just to sink this one in an even viler position as the moral superiority of the oppressed prospers, even if secretly.

Ibsen Martinez had Cubans in mind when he wrote this article last year, but when I read Milagros Socorro last week, I could not help but think as to what some of us are starting to do, without even realizing it. Not that we need to go into ketman already, by any means we are far from a totalitarian state. However the vulgarity of those that rule us, their constant abuses and insults to our intelligence require that we verify more and more regularly that we are the ones holding the moral truth, the rational spirit.

Thus we prepare ourselves for the worse if the worse is to come. As long as we will retain our ability to sense outrage, as we refuse to accept what is imposed to us, we will remain morally superior, even if we are the only ones thinking so, even if on occasion we must retreat some. But we will survive.


This post is of course dedicated to Milagros Socorro and Ibsen Martinez.
Written while listeneing mostly to the sound track of "Monsoon Wedding".