Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2009

Ludica

November 20, 2003 at 10:50 am | In yulelogStories | 12 Comments

Thanks to wood’s lot for the pointer to Netwoman’s interview with Jeneane Sessum. What Jeneane says here in response to the question, “What has been your biggest challenge in the Blogosphere?”, made me pause more than anything for the way it rings true:

Not letting it take over my entire life, because if I could, I think I would live inside my blog. That is, except for the weeks that I despise it. (rest of interview here…)

The weird way that blogging can pattern your day-to-day life is akin to an obsession, or even a martial art. If you’re not very good, you can hurt yourself — sort of like a Ninja getting whacked by her own sword, or like an Animal Slave scratching at hives for others’ amusement. There is artistry in this, and it’s not easy to learn. I don’t have it down at all: my blog has been out of control (to my mind) and too much in control (of my mind?), as seen from where I’m sitting. I think of it this way: that there are the control freak bloggers who make the A-lists, the Aces of Mastery; and there are “the voices” who spend a lot of time digging into materiality (typically their own flesh) for the right pitch. Crazies, dreamers, desirous of unclassifiability because they write in part from pain, and who wish to kick against the pricks. Wanting to escape the web of preformed meaning. And sometimes playing with very sharp blades. You start to blog, sometimes making sense because you sound like everybody else does, sometimes making no sense at all because, while flesh is flesh indeed, yours is still different from mine.

Perhaps it’s love and passion that shows the way, though. If you write about the things that spark your sense of love and wonder more than about those that spark your anger or outrage and fury, perhaps you can find a pitch to work with. To do so wouldn’t mean condemning yourself only to “fluffy bunny” posts, since love can be fierce. And there’s no reason to stay consistent at all times: if something really “picks your ass” (as they used to say in one of my old junior high schools — it was a very picturesque place…), let it rip. Passion is good. However, my response to self-diagnostic tests, for example, which I despise because I see them as so many little strings in the preformed web of meaning — and I’m just paranoid enough to resent even imagining anyone having control of those strings — was informed at least as much by furious resentment of the instruments of control as by a passionate faith in diatribe facilitating escape from the web. And at a certain point — when furious resentment gets the upper hand — play, the natural expression of love, is pushed under. As a writer, the game is to facilitate a different reality. Liberation comes in many bodies, shapes, and forms. A “thing-in-itself” essentialist pseudo-reality, on the other hand, never changes shape, which is why it comforts the authoritarian soul, and drives the rest of us crazy. In the essentialist scheme of things, there is a telos, a kind of purpose or “natural” trajectory, however, which to me looks like a human-constructed belief system designed to keep everyone in line. Imperialists of political and psychic stripe want you to believe in essential realities, never questioning the layers of relationship and meaning, because they rely on the telos** to cut through everything as it streaks toward its goal. Hence my attraction to the absurd and the ludicrous, and my allergy to fundamentalism, theology, and “big picture” explanations.

And anger. There’s so much to get pissed off about, and we have so many ways of amplifying the GPO (”Get Pissed Off”) factor so that we can GPO even more. I even GPO over the counter-forces to GPO, all the ameliorating pablum, the advertising that tells us that the next gadget will fix everything, the idiotic political speeches: all of it. I GPO to the point where I work myself up into a spiral of self-inflicted hives. And what, I’d like to know, is the point of that? Like, on my deathbed will I say, “I wish I’d worked harder,” or, “I wish I’d worked myself up even more”? Or will I say, “I wish I’d played more,” as in, “Man, that was a great game”? Authoritarians will tell you that the game has an essence, summed up as, “the name of the game is winning.” But that’s not true. We all end up in the same place, in the end.

[** this link, a Sam Vaknin page, does an interesting job of talking about the differences between teleological vs scientific approaches to explaining the world. But I strongly feel that his error lies in raising both to ontological status. Both approaches have to be contextualised, otherwise you're once again back to Plato and his noumenous forms. And miles from play or love.]

[And apologies to Jeneane & Netwoman for hijacking a perfectly wonderful interview; you'd think I was a pilot for Skyhigh.... ]