Hello personal blog. Long time no see, huh? I don’t really know what’s going on between us. I feel like I’ve been very busy lately though it’s hard to point to exactly what is keeping me so preoccupied. Oh, there’s the art caper, certainly. A maddening affair. Sometimes it’s fun, sometime’s arduous and painful. I want to discern my experience into some sort of thesis on the subject of creativity. Only… the more I delve into it all, the less certain I am of anything. But it is a very physical undertaking, the act of painting, and I love the physicality of it even when I’m floundering in the murky, bewildering waters of amateur beginnings.
And there’s the preoccupation with listening to African-American spiritual music. I downloaded a heap of recordings from Florida Memory and they have fascinated me in a myriad of ways. There’s something sincere and heartfelt in the performances. I experience a kind of energy from listening to these recordings and it’s infectious and I want to be imbued by that energy. This seems like a funny thing to say, especially since I’m agnostic at best. But, somehow, embracing that sort of agonisticism opened myself up to all of this stuff – these ideas, these artefacts, these songs, these stories, these paintings. I can appreciate them on a whole new level. Indeed on a level I don’t think I could have when I was still raging against the disgruntled parental figure deity who lived in my childhood and even later within my psyche. I think Richard Holloway articulated what I had long suspected. Namely that:
… religion is a work of the human imagination, it is a work of art…
So I guess in some ways I’m trying to distill some kernel of truth regarding religion in the same way I’m trying to distill some kernel of truth when it comes to creativity. I guess when it comes to religion I suspect that kernel might be found in the mystical traditions more than the minutia of literal verse or tribalistic custom. But even this is something I want to delve more deeply into on another ocassion.
And then there are all those blog entries that never quite seem to see the light of day. They stay forever drafts. Infact sometimes I’ll have to go back and check if something was written or published before I make reference to it (or if I just spent so much time thinking about it I assume it was written). I don’t know why they don’t materialise properly. Certainly sometimes things don’t ‘feel’ right. Sometimes I aspire to greatness and get things I don’t feel proud of. Blogging is one of those things that I find infinitely rewarding when I’m doing it (and after it’s done), but bringing myself to do it sometimes is a real battle. But then that might be true of anything that is important to me.
Anyway… what’s new with you?
