All Mediocre Things Must Come to an End: My Last Blog Post

Last updated on: January 1, 2015 at 3:54 pm by Sam Rocha

All Mediocre Things Must Come to an End: My Last Blog Post 2015-01-01T15:54:34-06:00 Sam Rocha

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The digital problem of problems multiplies itself in multiples of seventy-seven daily diminishing returns. Every tweet, like, share, and short-term superlative comment feed a smoky back room appetite for page views, digested by algorithmic marketing muscle acids, and gasoline controversy fumes erupt into a few dollars — a small price for hurt feelings and cheap thrill therapy.

In my case, most of this is self-inflicted. I started blogging in the summer of 2005 and have been through a half dozen experiments, the last two — Vox Nova and Patheos — being the most productive and rewarding. My main motivation was that I needed to learn how to write. Not just the need to express myself, what I needed was to figure out how writing works and how to do it with some verve and technique, both of which I sorely lacked and was not getting in graduate school. Blogging helped me acquire the habit of daily writing and the public ritual of posting channeled enough shame to force me to edit my prose to degrees I didn’t do elsewhere.

As with most crafts, the more I grew as a writer the less I liked what I produced, but I knew that I needed to practice in bulk. With the ability to genuinely hate what I wrote grew a grave and serious confidence. But irony easily descends into self-parody, on the one hand, and too much self-awareness becomes melodramatic, leading to paralysis or satire, on the other. From time to time, I would fool myself into thinking that I was actually doing something between journalism and activism, usually in the form of a blistering review or social critique.

I was trying to grind the axe of culture warrior axe-grinding in the way that a bully bullies a bully. As you can see, it makes little to no sense.

I don’t feel bad or guilty about that, it just took a lot of time that I needed to take, to figure out how to compose ideas into prose not too infected by academese and my penchant for sentimentalism. I’m not even close to “there” yet, but I am at a place where the habitus of writing is mostly set in and the work that needs the most attention resides elsewhere.

All public, first-person writing takes on a confessional dimension, but I’ve grown less and less inclined to perform a public tell-all form of blogging. Most of my real struggles are absent here, or at least hidden between the lines. The most obvious one is my struggle to become a husband and father worthy of the name. Where blogging once justified itself in the time and effort to hone my crafts, and bring my wares to market, it is now a debit on the quantity and quality of my presence at home. So I’m getting rid of it to make room for better and more focused future work, but also to address my very marginal skill set within own my family.

The virtues of perfect husbandry and parenting are as artificial in my experience as model trains: tiny miniatures, with no soot or smoke and no danger of getting anyone killed. So don’t confuse this with a self-help inspirational column. Don’t make an example out of this. The bare fact is that time is a vulgar and unforgiving calculus, less flexible than money because it offer no loans or low interest rates. My time has slowly found its way into a more humane and less self destructive formula, but that is hardly anything to be proud of by comparison to what preceded it. I’d like to see if it is true that mental and spiritual hygiene are not as scary and soul-neutering as I’ve imagined them to be.

I’ve often joked that if Marc Barnes is the “Bad Catholic” of the Catholic blogosphere then my blog should be named “Worst Catholic.” There is nothing funny or cute about that, really. And as much as being a Catholic artist is something I am comfortable with, it does not imply that I take the label to be a normative or axiomatic endorsement. For me, my Catholicism is a descriptive and inescapable state of being. Call it ontological, if you like. As much as I can get all riled up over liturgy fights, Pope Francis, modesty and sexuality, and the rest of the stale stream of constant posts that chase the news like an ambulance or regurgitate and redraw the lines every month or so for the two-hundred people who are keeping close keyboard score — as much as that sort of abortion, politics, and clerical superheroism commentary interests and excites me — my metabolism is slowing down and cannot digest it so easily anymore. I am finding myself more and more detached from this topical Catholicism.

The writers doing the work at Patheos today are quite good. Deacon Greg’s journalistic feed is sober and sourced, Elizabeth Scalia’s thoughtful shepherding is only outdone by the brilliance of her pen, Artur Rosman’s erudition is a reliable intellectual feast. The mommy bloggers I love (Elizabeth Duffy, Calah Alexander, and Simcha Fisher), as I’ve said before, are doing the most serious work in terms of existential depth and humour. People like Frank Weathers, Katrina Fernandez, Tom McDonald, Rebecca Hamilton, Leah Libresco, PEG, and Jennifer Fitz know how to get weird with it, Catholic style. Mark Shea is a dogged scallywag of a blogger, who has become a pesky conscience on some important issues of the day. Joanne McPortland can just flat out write, with stores of obscurity and beauty. David Mills and other newer additions are already must-reads.

For all talent at the Catholic Patheos portal, these people are also real human beings who treat each other that way. None of them are doing this to get rich and no one generates a living wage on blogging alone. Most do it for next to nothing. They all struggle. The community I’ve found there, as odd as it may seem to say this about virtual reality, is the most authentically Catholic family I’ve been a part of. I will miss being one of them.

I will also feel like there is very little lost in my absence. I’ll keep writing, of course, and will soon debut a new central website (the address will remain www.samrocha.com) for all my academic, Catholic, and musical works. I will also begin to archive old posts, so if you have any ones you’d like to see preserved do let me know here.

One of the most important books for me was Ray Monk’s biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius. The basic idea of the book, beyond describing the life of Wittgenstein, is about the art of living and the rigour of investing one’s life into that which has the potential for a rich and full sense of “genius.” The book is a manifesto against mediocrity.

I never understood what blogging is, exactly, despite my best of intentions, and I never felt that what I was becoming here would ever amount to much more than an amateur essayist. Mediocrity looms large and menacing, online and at home.

The key difference I have found between the amateur and the elder writer is that the latter does not work alone. After self-publishing three books and running my own blog for ten years, I’ve found that there are severe limits to self-edited, atomistic online writing; the external editorial process and feedback loop is essential for me, in large part due to my limited skills as a writer. We are losing much of the slow and editorial word in this era of free and open access, and that concerns me. A total reversal is not the solution either, and I only speak here for myself.

I will keep the Twitter and YouTube experiment alive, but the blogging test is now over.

For your generous and overwhelming support as readers and patrons of my work, I can only thank you and ask for your prayers. I will not forget you all and what you’ve done for me and my work. I wish you and yours a wonderful new year, and hope to keep in touch with many of you online or even in person down the road.

Gracias mil,

Sam Rocha

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