Thursday, July 23, 2009

Writing From The Heart. What Heart?



Hard to do. Sometimes I grind my teeth to powder just to be able to type those keys calmly and logically. Sometimes I want to tear my clothes and scatter ashes on my head and then dance the dance macabre. Sometimes I want to sleep a century or two.

Not even goddesses can survive all that emotion. Hence the need to type as if I'm a robot, as if my skull contains nothing but graduate level textbooks, as if none of all this shit ultimately matters. Hence the need to look over those schoolmarm glasses ohso innocently, to pretend that one is leading a class in simple recital. Cool. Dry. Collected. And never, never, lose your temper.


That's what I wrote the other day when I tried to post something on how to strike the right balance between information and fire in blogging. Not quite the thing, obviously, but it was one of those days. We all have them, the days when we feel that all our effort is like drops of water trying to melt down Mount Everest.

But let's be more general: What is blogging for? Is it to provide information, to have a debate, to share in some human experience, to fight to death? How much emotion should be revealed, hinted at, ridiculed? What makes the energy that we toss back and forth here meaningful, human, alive? What opens eyes and ears and hearts? There must be balance of some kind, but not the arbitrary silliness of the mainstream media. Dancing only for the god of the dark moon is not balance.

Neither is being the first horsewoman of the Apocalypse. (Which brings me right back to the invisibility of women, hah, even in our myth-making.)