In My Craft or Sullen Art

"I read your blog when I want to read something not written by an asshole."
--A Cherish'd Reader

What? It doesn't sound like the highest praise?

I knew what he meant...instant publication begets instant opinion, nearly always idiotic or half-baked. You go on Technorati or somewhere and enter your favorite subject in the search box...see what you get. Likely a liquid-crystal tsunami of insecurities, prejudices, misinformation, knee-jerk speechifyin', and plenty of links to other, similar streams of "thought." Same thing with most e-zines. It isn't that thousands of Internet writers really are assholes (so goes my theory), it's that their writing lacks the polish and self-awareness that--most assholes also lack.

It is probably an example of my obsessiveness and perfectionism (like you need another one!) that, for every post you read on WiHW, at least one other never sees the light of day, residing in digital oblivion until it's deleted from my "Edit posts" folder. Not that the posts laid out before you--like some smorgasbord of devotional confession--confessional devotion??--represent the pinnacle of artistic achievement...

and I don't mean to sound arrogant...

I just don't want my posts to suck.

The fact is, because I'm dealing in this airy realm of spirituality, this intuitive, potentially mucho-BS-freighted area of the unseen and half-heard, of the dreamt and dot-connected-- the burden is on me to provide language that is as concrete as possible. So I have to take the time to subtly shape and shade what I really mean, to craft lies that tell the truth. I don't make stuff up, you understand--

well, Fiorenza didn't say that the POW painter had used ash for paint. (But it made sense in the post: Orpheus and his Beloved fleeing--Hell? Ash? POW? War? Destruction? Ash? The subtext of my own death and rebirth...the phoenix and all that? you get it...) The POW did use a screwdriver as a brush...or my name isn't Kalibhakta.

Well--it's my true name. The name my parents gave me, as much as I like it and as much as it "sounds like" a writer's name or Southern gentleman's name--this legally accepted and "real" name doesn't refer to who I really (think I) am, a child of the Divine Mother. "Kalibhakta" --"Devotee of Kali"--does.

OK.

Wait.

You're saying--that you need to keep it real-- so you make it fake?? "subtly shape and shade"???

Oh, no...this is all real-- I haven't even blogged the most mind-boggling stuff, but don't worry, it's all "authentic," as they love to say in the Ur-fake mass media. It's as real as a bomb-nose camera's image of fall, the instant before oblivion: the explosion rendered as static--it can't explode truthfully, because the camera becomes white-hot fragments as its journey ends...and yes, you gotta admit those smart-bomb cameras don't deliver Panavision...the fake explosions of Hollywood do seem more real... so I guess we can call a blog a docudrama, a Bowling for Columbine or Fog of War to record the fireworks of the heart.