call it an internal evolution.

meeting two friends from across the straits of johor was a night to remember: it’s been a hell of a long time since i had a smile on my face when driving back home. our discussions are secret, of course, but i assure you, Subterranean Rats were discussed, as was the spectre of invasion of one’s privacy after death.

a word or two on that. luthien’s talked about it over here and here. we discussed this that Saturday night, and i agree completely with what she said:

sometimes, i wonder how smart these Tomorrow.sg editors are. some of them are simply too egotistical for their own good. a memoriam in the form of a book for her family to read - wasn’t this against her wishes? fighting a losing battle in the hospital, S had more things to worry about than her blog. she didn’t have time to inform her friends of her condition, much less log on to the Internet to shut down her site. maybe she wanted to, maybe she didn’t. we will never know.

the reason for going ahead with the printing, despite some protests, was a lame “we have spoken to her family and at this moment, we intent (should be intend) to fulfill our promises to them”. first mistake, you let the cat out of the bag. second mistake, you make a promise without thinking of the consequences. and the third mistake, you’re going to print that book. which is the worse evil here: to break a promise to her family or to print her diary (that she mentioned before was unknown to the family)? keep in mind that her family members are still alive, so you can still negotiate with them, but she, on the other hand, is dead.


book-burningi had this weird image of a soon-to-be-dead patient rolling dice with the devil, with her own privacy as the prize. the fact that her blog was “public domain” shouldn’t be an excuse, much less a reason, for personal grandstanding. that’s what it is: you want to publish her diary without her permission as a way to “remember her” when it’s actually your own selfish way to find closure.

next, when you do present her parents with a copy of her blog entries, you don’t really know if she wanted to share her thoughts with her parents, of all people.

but privacy and anonymity has a new meaning now, christened by singapore’s own cowboycaleb.

I told the Cowboy Barflies today that in case I die, they were to inform my family about who I was, what I stood for and why I did what I did. A family has a right to know. We both didn’t want our families to know about our blogging, but of course we both realized that really wasn’t true - we want them to know but just not as yet.

Probably the only people who might not want their families to know, even after they pass from this world, are those who maintained a daily journal of self-deceit and lies.

that’s an explicit desire, to be sure, to let his family know. that’s his prerogative, but it would do him well, however, not to project his own wishes onto the wishes of a dead friend, who can now neither confirm nor deny his sentiment.

what caught my breath was the declaration that private journals - private to one’s family at least - are journals of ’self-deceit and lies’. a forceful declaration to be sure, but misguided: anonymity to one’s family, or anonymity in general, creates so much more opportunities to be honest rather than dishonest.

there is a certain kind of freedom in writing while no one knows you: it’s a wild freedom, an unfettered freedom and, some would say, an irresponsible freedom. i suppose some would call the kind of honesty issuing forth from behind a wall of anonymity the honesty of cowards.

But really, truth or honesty from under whichever guise remains the same untainted; charges of ‘cowardice’ are usually the final resorts of persons unable to match honesty with yet more honesty. that, i think, is an unfortunate truth.

as kundera remarks in “testaments betrayed”, sometimes a friend is one who stands at the door, saying to interlopers, “you shall not enter”. a friend is one who stands guard over one’s own secrets. maybe it’s time all those clamouring to immortalize her in the brutal light of print and paper to be friends who stand guard over her secrets.

updated

i’ve had more time to think about it, and more time to clean up my post. the more i think about it, the more i feel strongly about it: one’s legacy should be the province of one’s own self. sure, blogging is narcissistic, but that’s no reason for publicizing her blog in a way that just cheapens everything about the experience. this is just another instance of public mourning i talked about earlier, only this time, the masses seem hell-bent on making her known. either that, or they’re hell-bent on ensuring she lives a kind of life after death on cyberspace.

this isn’t new. if you check out esr’s webby, for example, he’s explicitly stated that he wants his web to go on after his own death, and he’s made arrangements for it. so much for his desire for immortality, but that again is his own prerogative. what about those who haven’t made provisions, or haven’t even thought about it?

it behooves us to be even more circumspect, i feel, about maintaining a web page beyond the natural life of its owner. i hope the editors think clearly about this.