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My Heart Laid Bare | Dec 14 2001

My beginning as a legally recognized individual occurred on June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia, in the Bluefield Sanatarium, a hospital that no longer exists.

So begins the brief autobiography John Nash wrote for the Nobel committee after winning the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics (thanks rileydog). It’s a weird sentence, don’t you think? Particularly, it seems to me, in this context: an economist’s Nobel autobiography.

I’ve been thinking a lot about weirdness. Four months ago I did a good thing: I removed all of my business-related information from this site and put it on a separate website (read about that decision in a funny piece I wrote at that time). This simple maneuver freed me, in my own mind at least, to write whatever I wanted, or rather more of what of whatever wanted, whereas previously I felt constrained by what I imagined that people (read: clients) would think. Oblivio has changed considerably since then, as I’ve tested the limits of this new freedom.

Its limits, I should say, are considerable. There are many things I still don’t say and can’t imagine ever saying.

Long ago, as I remember it, although I’m not totally certain this happened, I read a quote from Baudelaire in which he said that if a person (he said a man) could write a book exposing the truth of his or her experience, that that book would by necessity be a masterpiece. My Heart Laid Bare.

Deep down I agree with Baudelaire, although I balk at the price that one would pay for such a work, masterpiece or not. One would lose a lot more than clients. Or I would, at least. Or at least I think would, at least.

Mark Pilgrim might disagree. This is old news to some, but two months ago Mark was fired from his programming job for publishing a weblog in which he posted a rather personal piece about addiction. His boss was concerned that one of their company’s clients might discover Mark’s writing and think the wrong thing, whatever the wrong is, so Mark was told to shut down the site. He refused and was fired. Mark and I exchanged some emails yesterday, and he wrote something that struck me. He wrote that he has thought long and hard about what he might have done to short-circuit the chain of events that led to his firing, and that all he has been able to think of is this: be someone else.

I am a person who feels compelled to be someone else, for fear of the consequences, real or imagined, of being himself. Or this describes the person I have been, to a degree.

I feel this changing, though. And Oblivio has been a significant catalyst. Here, in this place, which isn’t a place at all but just me in front of my computer thinking of what to say and how to say it, I’ve found the courage, now and then, to say a thing I wouldn’t have said before.

A thoughtful young man in Denmark recently wrote to me and said that he had spent an hour reading the site and wanted to thank me for my honesty. My honesty. I nearly cried.

And two weeks after he was fired, Mark Pilgrim landed a new and better job.

So there may be some room to maneuver—room, even, to reveal one’s perversions and rages, provided one keeps it, you know, entertaining and engaging.

I intend to try.