It was exactly a year ago that I made my New Year’s resolution for 2011 to stop teasing myself about writing a blog and to actually do it. Admittedly I set the goal modestly at a post a week. (I also set the equally modest goal of losing 10 pounds…Mama didn’t raise no fools.) So here I am at the successful end of my resolve and as is the nature of such things, it is time to assess.
It has on the whole been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life—the reward most tangible in the growth of readership. A small, hearty band of half-dozen or so readers at the beginning has now become a fairly regular audience of 100 with some notable spikes along the way. Thanks to Google I’m able to track the growth and report on such eye-poppers as this: the June post about Patti Davis posing nude has drawn almost 2000 views. That may be due to the fact that the post was accompanied by a picture of a naked Helen Mirren in a bathtub. If so, it confirms the wisdom of the drunken old timer who welcomed me into the ad business with this bit of advice: “Tits sell.” More mystifying is the fact that the second most viewed post of the year was the one called Today is Donnie Perkins’ Birthday. I launched it in observance of the birth of one my former high school students and a current Facebook friend. But unless Donnie has become a cult figure there in the backwoods of New Hampshire, I really can’t quite figure out the relative popularity of that post. No tits on Donnie. Just a picture of Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli, and the subject matter got downright serious at the halfway mark. That’s about where I gave into that most seductive of blog topics—what’s wrong with America. To commit the ultimate act of narcissism, allow me to quote myself:
“We’re living in upside down America where corporations get human rights; unions are stripped of collective bargaining rights; and in the interest of leaving no child behind, students are standardized like widgets. In other words, under the guise of free speech corporations can spend as much money as they like to prevent teachers from negotiating for their livelihoods. And under the imprimatur of the free market corporations can defraud their clients, conspire against the national interest, put profits above the health and safety of their workers, and even commit the cardinal capitalist sin of losing money and still get pampered and propped up by the political class."
I told myself when I started this thing that I wanted to steer clear as much as possible from the Sturm und Drang of national politics. There are people doing a much better job of that. And anchoring the blog to the works of Norman O. Brown was a way to save myself from becoming one more angry voice on the street corner of Blogistan. I think Nobby has served me well in that regard. My commitment to his view that ultimately we all share this love’s body of human existence has forced me to be less inclined to chop off any part of it that displeases me. It has forced me, in my blog writing at least, to be more reflective.
In this assessment, the failures must come into accounting as well. In the beginning I planned to do much more exploration of how the love’s body philosophy manifests itself in popular culture--music, film, books. I didn’t do anywhere near as much of that as I planned, and part of that is due to the organic nature of blogging. It really does grow and move out of daily life, so there’s a limit to how useful planning is. But that, too, is straight out of Nobby: “Enigmatic form is living form; like life, an iridescence; an invitation to the dance; a temptation, or irritation…Meaning is in the play, or interplay, of light.”
If I had been more dutiful in this aspect of my blogging, I would have written about Red Road last spring...at the latest. Of the list of works I’ve compiled that could have been poured straight from Nobby’s noggin, this may be the most concentrated. A parent suffers the loss of a child (reputedly the greatest human loss possible, and there’ll be no argument here). The parent knows the person responsible for the loss and sets out for vengeance. We cheer. We know from constant media consumption the satisfying taste of revenge. We are wired for this, or so we have been led to believe.
But Nobby believes otherwise. He believes that our bodies are not wired to attack one another, but to embrace one another. It’s a bold, radical belief--so bold and radical that one of the first persons ever to proclaim it as philosophy was crucified for it. And then worse, the philosopher was turned on his head and many of his followers worked to turn him into an advocate for war, torture, execution, and vengeance. Red Road, like Love’s Body, attempts to put the philosopher back upright and take him down off the cross so his true philosophy might be reborn among us again.
Ours is not a friendly environment for such a philosophy. Loving our enemies seems to get more impossible as each day passes, and they--our enemies--act more determined to declare themselves our enemies. Being our enemies seems to give their lives meaning.
And who are these “they” I speak of? Are they those who don’t share my taste in music? Those who root against my football team? Those who don’t vote for my candidate? They are none of those, because we all have family and friends that we disagree with on such mundane matters.
They are, rather, those who deny love’s body…who reject the notion that we are all part of a whole, and they work to construct a world where the least of us are constantly oppressed, the queerest of us constantly marginalized, and the unluckiest of us constantly screwed. Over Christmas week we watched the brilliant BBC production of Dickens’ Bleak House. It could have been cut out of the daily news—a rich man sniffs at the need of the poor for health care, the coppers do the bidding of the wealthy, the legal system serves the clever and connected. At the death of Jo, the orphan sweeper boy, who’s been driven from hiding place to hiding place by his powerful, implacable enemies, Dickens writes:
“Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us, every day."
The enemy are those whose heavenly compassion is dead. So we must resign ourselves to the sad truth that loving them is a one-way street. That may not be the happiest New Year’s message, but I hope it’s a useful one.