the slavery of words

Words are... a ripoff.

They promise so much and deliver so much; but it's almost never what you expect. And all the while the world spins on its axis, tracing its long ellipses around the sun as you go on dying by the moment... usually unaware.

Can you imagine what that might be like? To be aware. I mean, truly, and completely aware, each second, that this was one less second of your life. A second that is gone, now, forever. The clock ticks, and you are born. It tocks, and you say goodbye.

You see what I just did, there?

I promised you an essay about words, then dragged you with me for twenty seconds (I timed it) as I slid on down into thoughts of mortality. Like I said -- a ripoff. The sort of ripoff that philosophers have the audacity to make their creed. "Live always with your death before your eyes," they say, as though our deaths were not already always before the eyes of our souls... as if practically everything we did was not already, in some way, an effort to pull the wool over our own eyes, so that we might not have to look at this... this... philosophical thing.

I have a confession to make: I am tired of ripping you off.

I am tired of ripping myself off, too. Tired of the false promises of my words -- of the way I pander and poke and pretend that here, on this blog, you'll find insight, wisdom, and glimpses of the truth. Sure, all that might have happened, here and there; but in the interstices, I've chased words down the years of this blog hoping for "enough" positive response to make it all worthwhile, and I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as enough. 

Dr. Richard Beck, over at Experimental Theology, has written a mass-long series about The Slavery of Death that's totally worth your time, but let me just sum it all up to say that perhaps the whole point of the whole Christianity thing I'm theoretically hitching my horse to is that death is effin' defeated, and I can stop being afraid and start to live.


I don't know how to do that. 

I do know, however, that I am tired of telling you my opinions and hoping you'll agree with them. Or not agree. Or... just... something. I am tired of frantically pumping at this corroded, leaking bicycle-pump of a blog in an attempt to keep my ego inflated and death at bay.

If there is a point to my ramble it is this: that Love is found not in opining, but in making. And while I'll no doubt forget my resolve tomorrow, I want you to know that today, I am resolved to spend less of my vanishing moments whining about what's wrong with the world (and it is -- it really, really is) and more trying to actually do something about it by being the dude I believe I'm born to be... a Maker.

I don't wanna die wailing for the world's wrong, if it means I'll grow forever more bitter and unable to sing, with joy, for the world's right. Or rather, I want to use my words to make promises of beauty, and to weave into that beauty an understanding of ugliness, so that together we can yearn for something more.

Blah, blah, blah.  Words, words, words.

The gist: I hope to post more photographs. More bits of visual art I've made. More stories. More reviews and links and comments about art I've loved.  I hope to make more Love, more stories, and more Love.

Now, if you could all just do me the solid of ignoring the irony inherent in the fact that I wrote all this with words.