Looking back now at my time at Gaia I see two things were happening. The first was that I really enjoyed interacting with other bloggers. It was very easy to comment on other blogs and to keep track of those comments.
I also really like discussions on forums, but the way you can have discussions, debates and just interactions with other bloggers was even so much more exciting. I did not know why exactly but somehow it was different and I liked it a lot.
But the other thing that was happening was that I became totally spellbound by music. Music in general, but especially by the music of Camel, a progressive rockband that I had always liked a lot. But I lost track of them years ago when I got interested in classical music.
But with all the new found videos on Youtube I could just not stop listening to them. There was something about their music that really did connect on a very deep level.
Just before that, I found a video on Youtube of Leonard Bernstein where he gave a lecture about how music is a metaphorical language. I uploaded that video (on my Gaia blog and copied it later on my Developmentals blog in a post called Metaphorical Language) and wrote down what he said. And he concludes with the following:
“Metaphor accomplishes the supremely difficult task of providing a name for everything. And by everything he obviously meant our interior lives. The things that can’t be named otherwise. Our psychic landscapes and actions. And it is thus that poetry and music, but especially music, through its specific and far reaching metaphorical powers, can and does name the unnameable. And communicate the unknowableâ€.
I very clearly felt that this was happening with the music of Camel at that time. And I really wanted to write about that.
But first there was just listening and more listening. So I opened a new WordPress blog (CamelLive videos) where I could easy upload all their videos I found on Youtube. And at the same time I could categorise all the videos. They made a lot of albums, and played many live concerts over more than 30 years and, although one better than the other, they all had some magic over it that was just amazing.
So this blog became a sort of catalog where I had all their history in one place. But then I wanted to start writing about it and opened another blog, a selfhosted one this time.