On Opinion & the Changing Light of Shadows

It has been about two months now since I have blogged. The woman for whom a wee bird is fictional representative has returned to fiction & poetry as a focus. This is good, and very good, and very good again.

Great many things have happened in the world at large around me in these past two months. I have watched them, thinking many things, while my own life has both careened and lulled.

But I did not post my thoughts on the things of the world at large about me, or even allow them more than chaotic entry in my journals. My journals have never been about my life anyway. Or yours. Can't find me in them. I've tried.

Reading back through some of the older ones in these last few months, I find the weight of unwashed dishes and a house to clean. Summer heat, more so than winter cold.

An unhappy marriage. Dust & disorder.

A cup of coffee, beginning another day.

Over and over and over.

Some thoughts - the recent ones - reached the stage of idle chatter amongst friends - they must have - to look at all the events of these momentous two months & think they could pass unmarked is the stuff of fantasy.

Fiction, to be sure, is sharply distinguished from fantasy.

That was an aside.

Idle chatter. I am thinking this morning of Spring - it is coming, and soon - and the way the sun threw patterns of light - living patterns - in the trees edging the property line across the back yard at a house I lived in four years ago. A stand of trees - almost a wood - I could watch it from the bedroom window. They were in an office park on the other side of the block - a city block, though in a sister city of metropolitan Atlanta, not in Atlanta proper.

Such delicate changes - gold, then green, then gradations of each, like the delicate breath of a young woman, trembling at the edge of womanhood.

Opinion is quite so flighty as those subtle nuances of light changing in gold and green and shadow. But it is not so delicate. It is hard, more often, harsh. But it is fully as lacking in substance as those changing lights in the gold and shadows of the soft green of trees...

Perhaps that sense of lovely and nuanced comes from its sweetness.

A sweet, to be sure, only in the handling of the person whose opinion is being proffered. Others receive such 'gifts' less delicately. Swat them about like flies needing to be slapped.

I pull back from blogging now, perhaps, because of that sense of flies. Blogging is such a portion of our social landscape that you hear 'the bloggers' quoted on every subject in the more professional venues. Yet they are still petted - almost like a new pup, capable of notice - of fun - but not so serious consideration.

After all, opinion is merely that.

Substantiated, perhaps, by fact. But not by objective analysis.

So, I return to fiction and poetry and Wren will chatter less, if at all. Purity there is in fiction that subjectivity and opinion will always lack.

And I am rather fond of purity.

But I am tired of opinions. We devolve to a world of opinions. Fiction at least has the mandate of an ordered universe - of a controlled cause & effect - of (if I may) intelligent thought.

The world of opinions does not. Everyone, after all, has one or two - and most have back pockets overflowing, full of spares. I think, yes, some Eternal Rule may continue to divide as it always divided - cream rises to the crop - we are at least intelligent enough, some of us, to evaluate the opinions of others (if we are a trifle blind to our own) - mob rule only lasts so long; eventually, sanity returns.

I don't know. Celebrity - women as sexual creatures (a la the Spears girl or Madonna) - the greed of men at the top - the commercialization of art (a la book tours & genres & maybe a little bit of American Idol) - trends, after all, and where do they take us. It's not just opinion - the tools for proffering opinion - and more so, the tools for tracking it - they are what form and will form our futures.

As for me, in the present moment I am looking for something of substance. Something of larger vision. Almost a visceral need to it. And that is good.

Something more than opinion and the consequences of that changing light of shadows...