Mar 28, 2006

So I’ve been reading over my own weblog, and I’m unnerved at how many posts are pretty pissed-off. Not that I take anything back. But do I only write when I have something to criticize?

This blog was called “erosdiscordia” with an eye towards reporting both the “eros” and the “discord”, the creative thrust and the critical insight. I feel I’ve focused pretty heavily on the latter. Sure, there’s a lot to criticize right now, and some things are unjustly underrepresented on our collective shit-list. I try to fix that. But I also wanted to write about other things, things I know in my head and heart are more important. Eros, and everything I mean when I type that word. Sex, creativity, desire, lust for life and adventure, what the Frenchies call “joie de vivre”. The God found in movement and striving, the something one can make out of nothing. Our gift as human beings.

And it’s nothing so simple as “focusing more on the positive”. I think it’s idiotic to divide the world into “positive” and “negative”, especially when referring to viewpoints or states of mind. Any artist knows, there are those secret times when you smack the clay head off your unfinished sculpture, or delete whole paragraphs. Is that “negative”, even if done in frustration? Or does it clear space for something truer?

But one must put the sword away sooner or later; as useful as anger may be in pruning away the unhelpful or unnecessary, nobody’s ever built anything with it, and never will. I know what I want to build, have always known. I know what I can see, and what I love most. The heart of everything. The generative force. Maybe I got lucky, and my lifelong creativity just kept me close to this energy, where most people grow out of it after adolescent hormones subside. Maybe I’ve taken too much acid, I don’t know. Whatever it really is, and however I perceive it, it’s my favorite thing, and I’ll try to represent it more in this blog.

It will be interesting to figure out how to do that. There’s a whole language of judgment, and a time-honored tradition of journalistic criticism. But the other side of the coin? What do we have besides religious texts, self-help books, and The Joy of Sex? What do I have to add? And the language–how do I talk about Spirit without sounding like a woo-woo, or joy without sounding like a life coach, or sex without sounding like a self-absorbed erotic neurotic or an amateur-porn website wannabe? Landmines, landmines everywhere…

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