Recently, I’ve been writing on WordPress using the Jetpack application installed on my cell phone and tablet, deprived of a real keyboard and downsized to essentials, but able to pull out the tool and continue playing around with a post throughout the day, adding, subtracting, dividing, etc., on the go (to the extent I ever am on the go these days, where go might look very much like stop). Writing is a disappearing act.
The laptop, my usual tool for developing and publishing posts, as get up and go as the laptop is, is not as flexible and doesn’t travel as easily as the phone or tablet (for one thing, the laptop batteries are down to a trickle, and it must be left plugged in to work). I thought the recent posts from the cell and tablet were displaying wysiwyg (what you see is what you get), but a couple of faithful readers let me know not so. Yesterday’s post, for example, a short poem titled “A Bout,” apparently appeared on their reading devices in a pale white font on a fog colored background, difficult, but not quite impossible, to read. By Jove, I thought, that format (if that’s what it’s called) accurately describes the theme of the poem, but it was unintentional. And the pale white font on fog colored paper was an improvement – posts previous to that one had not appeared at all, those same readers had informed me; under the title, on their devices, the post was blank.
I assumed the problem was user error, and set out to discover how I’d messed things up so, and in the process found (under a three dot dropdown menu at the far top right of the WordPress screen) “Options,” one of which is labeled “Distraction free: write with calmness.” In other words, we have a choice: write, and consider yourself a writer, or fall down the convoluted rabbit hole of blocks, styles, editor this and that, and things Jetpack related – a dichotomy that is of course distorted, unfair, and entirely inaccurate. Well, maybe not entirely. Like the guitarist who trades in the acoustic classical guitar for an electric guitar and a panel of guitar pedals, the writer who incorporates a full spectrum of technological gimmicks or tools, as opposed, say, to simply using pencil on paper – um, one senses a loss of calmness. And yes, I know I just split an infinitive, but I do so in perfect calmness. It’s impossible to split an infinitive in Latin, which is where the absurd rule comes from, but this isn’t Latin class. Well, maybe that last bit is not so calm, after all.
And the point of writing is to becalm. If you find writing does not invite calmness, you may not be actually writing, but are engaged in some other method of spending time – not to say any one way has more value than another. Writing usually has some purpose, which is to say occasion, argument, intended audience, none of which would seem to invite calmness. Still, the act of writing, if one is to find the sweet spot, is a path toward calmness, invites calmness – because once under way, all else falls off. One becomes, indeed, free from distraction.
Swā, this post is being written on the laptop, as an experiment to see if the problems don’t correct themselves on the readers’ devices, thus isolating the cause to Jetpack on the cell and tablet. Let me know in comments below, if you’d like, what you see, or don’t see. But remain clam. I mean, calm.
The Coming of the Toads 