Idea Cartography
2025-11-06
I've been putting off writing today's entry because I am starting to feel a bit of fatigue with writing, but I feel that it's important to keep going in spite of this fatigue so that I can build my creative resilience and keep my momentum. We all have something to say; the complication is in having the guts to let go and not let self-consciousness dictate the medium we speak through. For me, there's a great level of importance I place on style and making sure that my syntax is clear, my diction is precise, and my control of my thoughts and ideas remains lucid.
I didn't publish anything in Cogito for over a year. I initially kept this project to myself so that I could refine my voice on my own and cultivate the discipline of daily writing before I put myself on a stage of any kind. This has helped me process my emotions, but also to develop my skills and my voice through consistency. These days, everyone is a writer. Literacy rates are higher than they've ever been and the platform for expressing ourselves through writing is more decentralized than ever. This has created new paradigms of thought and experience, but writing as a vocation still remains the same in many ways.
Though the landscape of expression through writing has become more decentralized, one thing that remains consistent in the vocation is constraints. The most important constraint that a writer contends with is their audience. As a writer, we write not for our own amusement or pleasure. We write so that our words will be read; we want our ideas to be metabolized and incite action. Whether it be through fiction or non-fiction, there is always a message to be found in a work of writing. Whether that message is explicit and clear or implicit and koan-like, the fact remains that there is still always something to be communicated.
It's an interesting thing—I remember reading this Baudrillard quote:
The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it.
I think that writing is something that has exhibited this notion for as long as it has been revealed to us. Once we found the ability to become cartographers of ideas, the cartography itself became the way in which we navigate them. If it can't be written, it does not exist. Thought no longer remains an uncharted ephemera, but is now constantly recorded and preserved. This is why I find writing, whether it be for myself or for my readers, to be a matter of utmost importance. I'm reminded of Shakespeare's 18th sonnet, the one where he compares his love to a summer's day, of its last lines:
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Even back in the 17th century, there was an awareness of the importance of recording and preserving thought. There's a chance for us to take the beauty inside of our heads and make it real so that those things can live on beyond the trappings of our constantly buzzing minds.
Well, at least I hope there's something beautiful inside my head. I'll just have to keep writing to find out.