Jumping the track of stale sweat to make a train of meaning
January 3rd, 2010 by adminToday, which is the third day the new year, The ever-aspiring-and-always-failing-to-be Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words gets a fresh start by meandering for a bit. I might have a point, but chances are I don’t. I have a hunk of junk muddle of notions to dig through, a scrap box of imaginings to plunder, a kitchen full of half baked ideas to serve. I wanted to start the new year off with a bang of writing right on the first day. But life has been complicated, full of the quotidian odds and ends, Sturm und Drang drama and hours and hours and hours over the past month and a half busting ass on a major project while feeling guilty about not working on this and other projects.
After much frantic activity last summer, The Daily Dose rested for a bit. I did write a little, small scribbles, but I didn’t post them here. I’d like to think it was marinating, soaking up some delicious sauciness that will make your mouths water, but it might have been stewing in its own juices- six mouths of stale sweat. I will let y’all taste it and decide.
I needed to re-evaluate what it is I am doing with this particular practice of musings and scriptural interpretation. As I have mentioned before, I define scripture broadly and find inspiration where and when I can. Admittedly, I got frustrated because it seemed that only spambots read my writing, writing I spent a mighty long time on. Hours and hours and hours. People who were supposed to care or dare I say were obligated by the nature of their relationship to me and this practice didn’t read my writing. I know all the complicated reasons why my words were not read but is wounding. Being an adult means I get to suck it up. I hope to follow Badiou’s adage to “keep going” despite the difficulties, despite the various responses, including the lack of response, despite my insecurity about the usefulness or skillfulness of my work.
I finally installed the plugins that should rid me of the spambots’ pesky pestilence, but with their absence, I have to confront my sometimes overwhelming uncertainty about what it means to send out these eMissions (the writings, the Vermons, the live online events) to save the whole wide world and little old you into an electronic landscape mired, bogged, swamped, flooded, drowning in text and images and ideas and emotions. I am not assured that the world needs my works of words.
I keep doing this project because every once in a while, people will tell me how much it means and what it means to them. They may respond emotionally or intellectually or somehow a mix of both-ly, but it did something for them that they appreciated.
A part of me really does want to save the whole wide world and little old you, but because I realize that my vision for a better world is as imperfect as the next, I content myself with more the bittersweet pleasure- the joy of putting words together on a page or stage (live or electronic) to make a train of meaning, which may very well jump the track and crash, but also occasionally makes people feel less lonely in their emotional, intellectual, social, political, economic, artistic, religious, theoretical, psychological skins, now and again.