Black Spring

From a newly discovered blog, Black Spring Check it out. Some good stuff there.

This last one is particularly apt: I am sure that I am not alone in the fact that I have spent oodles of money and years “knowing myself,” as Socrates would have encouraged, via “psychotherapy” and the value I place on that kind of “exploration,” “insight forming,” “change-processing,” what-have-you, is immense. Now, here’s the kicker, what one “tells” his/her therapist/analyst/change-agent and technique used to facilitate the “process,” investigations, intimacy are in some ways similar, but generally profoundly different than what literary artists try to do. No, that’s not the kicker, either. Maybe this is: I cannot “relate” to a therapist/change-agent the same stuff that I relate as a writer. No, that isn’t it, exactly, either. Maybe it’s this: Psychotherapy is all about (1)”feelings”/World-“others”-view-approach-relations;(2)Discovery of these;(3)Interpretation of these;(4)Re=digestion of, including on-going, and Nourishment from these. Frankly, in my experience, it’s radically more “open,” “open-ended,” “depth-accessing,” “generative,” “World-making,” “self-determining,” and such. Nope, I cannot seem to “make my point” or quite discover what it is that I need to get at. (I do know this: There’s experience, including “verbal experience” that can be had in a therapist’s office, that cannot be had via writing or reading. And the very best psychotherapists have limited regard/interest in what “difficult poets” do/write/say, I think. What I don’t know is why the two worlds are so far apart. I don’t know why I view the psychotherapy world as far freer and open, the writing world as far more “intellectualizing” of “the World” and far less “open” to “experience that supercedes or transcends or encompasses “mere” verbal experience.

No, I still don’t know what I’m trying to get at, precisely, but I’ll have to pause and come back to the subject fresh. Here’s another angle and sub-topic, though. Writing that truly wanted to “change conditions” political and social would NOT locate itself in “literary” endeavors, venues, objectives, or careers. It would be essentially “detournement” and NOT present itself as “literature” or artifact or commodity at all. It would engage “the world” directly and aggressively, mostly in the form of highly “illegal” acts that most governments would use their legal systems to prohibit, thwart, punish, forbid. For example, documents, films, recordings would be used with the highest precision and artistry to (“destroy”) expose sociopathic government officials and reveal inhumane government acts. Most everything would be written anonymously, of course. Literary traditions shun this kind of encouragement of “propaganda” (and for very good reasons). Who are “the good guys” and who are “the bad guys?” “Artistic genius” and great artistic effort would naturally “be used” by “good” artists” and “bad,” alike. “But isn’t that already the case?” Menno asks, though I have not been able to include him in the new Google blog here, yet... Or, the other end of it, or one other end of it – okay, say that indeed any/all true literary production that endeavors to be “used” for political change doesn’t deserve to be called literary in the first place. Okay, yeah, but isn’t most all literary production used to “make a living” (mostly via university jobs) today, anyhow? Why is that any less “political” than...