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<aside> 👋 Welcome to my blog page. Since you have arrived here, I assume you are happy to read what I have written. Even so, I feel there needs to be some explanation on my part. After all, you might have arrived here from any number of webplaces, and I don't wish to cause you unnecessary upset.
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<aside> 📢 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed. (Luke 4:18)
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The spirit of the Lord is upon us all, to guide us to the marginalised, the blind and oppressed, the captives and the destitute. Not so we can save them, but so the Holy Spirit can reveal a way of living that releases and engages.
This blog is a mash of so many themes: power, faith, poverty, exclusion, oppression, deceit, anger, hope, joy, kindness, loathing, irony, satire, ...
It is reactive as much as I can get away with it, but mostly it is born out of a desire to find those at the margins and show them they are real.
My blogs are entirely the product of my mind (inspired by God). Obvious, perhaps, but worth stating, and restating. I write for all kinds of reasons. I risk ridicule and claims of ironic arrogance in mentioning his name here, but George Orwell put it well when he remarked,
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand.
Few writers come close to the clarity of thought expressed by Orwell, and his legacy towers over us all, but his approach to writing is inspirational to me. I am not a blind and meek follower of his work and there are many times he and I would disagree, but his integrity, wisdom and determination to communicate are beautiful expressions from an almost forgotten age, but which, whether we recognise it or not, continue to underpin the entire blogosphere.
His courage, energy and efforts are far beyond mine, and I cannot imagine ever coming anywhere close to his ability. But he is there, nonetheless, in much of why I write if not what I write. In particular, "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness", and I know I am not up to it, so I stumble down the blogging route. I have not the patience and commitment to author a book. I can just scuffle at the edges within this blog.
I could pretend that everything I write is here to inform, cajole, coerce and even bully into agreeing with me. I know I can come across like that. But my intention here is to communicate what is in my head at any given time. Again, Orwell put it far better,
What I have most wanted to do ... is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.
I wonder what Orwell would make of blogging, just as I wonder what Wagner would make of West End musicals or Daguerre of Photoshop. I am a fruit fly landing on the shoulder of giants, annoyingly flitting in front of the eyes of far greater and wiser people. I hope you find something here that encourages a response in your own thinking. If there is, drop me a line. I'd love to hear from you.
My very idiosyncratic reviews of books I think worth talking about. (Just starting up May 24, 2021)