Dreaming the Future Closer

I’ve not been posting much.  There seem to be cycles of not posting for me, often having to do with just how much time I have available to sit and write out my thoughts. This feels a little different than that, though.  I have become, of late, less and less enamored with writing.  It’s not that I’ve given up on it, but I am less sanguine about it.

I am more keenly aware of the limits of my own writing, the difficulty of expressing spiritual truths and attitudes in words.  Words, no matter how precise, make sense only in reference to a broader network of experiences that they illuminate.  Without that experience, the words lose a lot of their life.

Now, I know from personal experience that clear words can have a profound impact when the person coming to them has the right sort of experience and not quite the right words for it.  Even that, though, occurs only with a certain deference of the reader to the words.

Are my words that clearly articulated to provide that?  I don’t know.  Even if they were, are there those with the sort of interest in my words to really work their way through them?  Again, I don’t know.

Much written here has served as a bit of propadeutic, as something to think through, and having been thought through, now needs to be released and stepped beyond.  It has been a way for me to think myself out of a very think-y headspace.  It has been an effort to direct my thoughts, again and again, toward the experience of spirit, in its diversity and openness.  I feel more comfortable just living in that space, so I’m not sure where writing turns into falling back into bad habits.

I have thought about trying to take this blog in a personal direction, empasizing aspects of my life and experience over the think-heavy talk.  I have rarely seen that carried off well, though.  The best life stories are powerful to me because they reveal the particularity of a person’s experience, its individuality, and how difficult it is to derive from life experience any sort of general rule or moral.

Good (by which I mean the sort I care about) autobiography strips away pretensions to authority.

Most life stories, however, end up being self-justifying, wanting to transform that particularity or ally it with some more universal claim.  Even those tha manage to portray a life just so, are rarely appreciated for that.  More often, others come to them with the desire to find in them a universality, a moral, a simple statement to carry away.  It’s often subtle, a simple, “oh, I understand that so well, it’s like this…”

Do I have the capacity to portray my life as a life and not as a claim or example to be staked?  I kind of doubt it.

None of this is to say that I am giving up on words or this blog.  I just want to make clear that my attitude toward these words is changing, present-tense, and some of that is showing up here as less posting.  I’m feeling my way along, just so you know.

Foucault once said something to the effect that some people read his work as saying something akin to “power is bad; psychology is bad; prisons are bad.”  This is, he says, wrong-headed.  It isn’t that these things are bad, but that they are dangerous, that “everything is dangerous.”  You can’t eliminate the danger, he says, but you can be aware of it and thus better prepared to avoid the worst of it.

Right now, I’m just more keenly aware of the danger of words and I am not quite sure of how to manage that danger.