A Million Words (and Counting)

Exactly 1,018,726, actually, plus whatever I add now. WordPress keeps statistics, and that’s how many words I’ve poured thus far into these Needlefish blogs since my start in 2017, which grand total doesn’t even include the text of the self-published books and various other pages also stored on this site. That feels like some sort of major milestone, doesn’t it? Worth celebrating, just a little?

Gotta admit, it only sort of feels that way.

It’s largely been an exercise in futility, truth to tell.

When I began the Needlefish, all starry-eyed and innocent, I wasn’t imagining it was going to be a rip-roaring success, or that I’d attract anything akin to a large following, or achieve some sort of notoriety, but I guess that subconsciously I harboured a residual hope that I might, somehow, make some sort of difference. I suspect that anybody who repeatedly throws his thoughts into the digital ether, where anybody on Earth might encounter them, feels the same. Every time, you can’t help but think that maybe this one will reach somebody. Every post is like dropping a rock down a well. You lean over the stone rim, peer down into the impenetrable darkness, and hope to hear a splash.

Sometimes there’s a faint little plop. Usually not.

Early on I wrote and I wrote, I wrote my little heart out, but it wasn’t long before it became obvious that any naive aspirations I’d entertained were never going to be realized. Now it’s several years later, and what do you know, I’m a million words down the road, and if only a few of them ever stirred any interest, well, it goes like it goes, and about like you’d expect, really. This is just an insignificant little blog, one of millions, heck, one of tens or probably more like hundreds of millions, amounting to little more than a raindrop in the middle of a tropical downpour. These days, if I get a few views, maybe a “like” or two on Facebook or Twitter, I’m thrilled.

So why persist?

Well, I guess on account of nothing more complicated than simple enjoyment. It turns out that I love writing. I love the art of it; I love articulating the thoughts, crafting the sentences, coming up with the synonyms and antonyms, making sure to mix short declarative sentences in with the longer, more flowery strings of clauses, avoiding repetition, letting it all flow like music. To me, writing and music composition have always seemed quite similar. Language can have a very musical sort of flow to it, a particular cadence, a mixture of highs and lows that lends a written piece many of the same attributes as a pretty song, and I suspect that good prose and good music act on the same parts of the brain (or of my brain, at least). I can’t write a soaring melody, or come up with a fascinating chord progression, sad to say, but I can take a stab at a nice turn a phrase. Or so I think; and when you suppose you’ve developed a certain proficiency at something, whatever it is, carpentry, portraiture, auto repair, landscaping, or making pottery, it doesn’t really matter – even if your self-appraisal is really just a happy self-delusion – it’s immensely satisfying to engage in it. We all find joy in doing something we imagine we do well, don’t you think? It doesn’t even have to be true, so long as too many others don’t offer unfavourable opinions sufficient to disabuse you of your illusions (as Prufrock warned, there’s always the danger that human voices will wake you, and you’ll drown).

So the stream of posts continues, a couple every week or so, ever since the summer of 2017. Along the way I’ve had the odd gratifying moment, giving me just a taste of what it might be like to know that others hear you. Early on, I wrote a sort of eulogy for John Clarke, the brilliant satirist from New Zealand who lampooned the foibles of politicians, bankers, industrialists, and everybody else who influences the way we live our lives, working for many years with his partner Brian Dawe in a series of bits on Australian television. They’re hilarious – look them up on YouTube, you can start with The Front Fell Off and go from there, you won’t be disappointed. I adored the man, and when he died unexpectedly from, I assume, a heart attack, it was as if I’d lost an old friend, and I felt compelled to put out a tribute on this site, lamenting his passing. Somehow, it was noticed by his daughter, all the way around the world in Australia, and she sent me a lovely thank-you note. I can’t express how much that meant to me.

More recently, the author of an article in The Guardian saw fit to embed a link to one of my Songs of the Day, which gave the Needlefish an immense, if short-lived, boost in traffic. For a couple of days there, it felt as if I’d arrived.

For the most part, though, I have to content myself with the average post garnering maybe a dozen views. The Songs of the Day series has proved to have lasting (though by internet standards minor) popularity, as have a few of my postings on Great Movie Scenes. The metrics gathered in by WordPress indicate this is because people search the song and movie titles on Google, and the relevant entries on the Needlefish are showing up in their results. That’s promising, and they must be clicking through the links and opening the posts, or else I wouldn’t be registering the views, but I wonder whether they ever read what comes up. It doesn’t seem like it. l almost never get a like, or a comment, or even an insult. I assume they open the posts, peruse a sentence or two, and then go back to their search results to find something better. Probably something shorter. My essays, averaging 1,200 words, are too long for contemporary attention spans. Unfortunately, that’s the only way I know how to write them.

Never mind. I’m going to keep at it. I think I would even if it could be proved that nobody ever reads a thing I write, not even a single thing. It still brings me a sort of solace, and it’s certainly more than worth my while if sometimes, among these million words and counting, I manage to include a few that reach somebody. Hey, it’s happened a couple of times. Maybe it will again.

Anyway, it’s nice to think so.

****************************************************************************

Post-script: I looked it up. There are currently over 600 million active blogs on the internet, 60 million of them hosted right here on WordPress alone.