The Face of the Web
Michael is a man who wakes up laughing. It's rare, don't you think, for a 40-year-old man to be filled with that much joy? This is a man who loves life and people and art so very much he never wants to sleep at all. He believes in equality for people, he holds a belief of freedom and independence more strongly in his heart than almost anyone I know, perhaps even myself. When he suffers it is because he's empathic, and he feels the pain and ignorance around him, within him.
Michael has a website.
Word Made Flesh
As a gifted songwriter and musician, poet, and fine artist, Michael offers his work to the world from his site. His songs are often pounding anthems of what is ugly about people. His poetry can read as so dark people wonder whether he's suicidal. And his art is at times hard, perverse and cruel. Some less imaginative people could look at his work and make the dreadful -- and very, very wrong -- mistake that he is a depressed or even hateful person.
He has long suffered from Catholic guilt, and I've watched him struggle daily with whether or not to post something to his blog, or add a particular song or poem to the site. He is well aware that his art is confrontational, that his work, as he likes to say, "pokes holes in the Sacred Cow." His work can in fact make people uncomfortable.
Michael is deeply conflicted about causing discomfort and upset to others. He's concerned that people will misunderstand his art. This is a reasonable concern, because people do misunderstand his art, and him. What people fail to realize is that artistic expression is his personal catharsis. It is the process of a profoundly charged human soul shouting out the rage, frustration, pain, and anger so that what remains in the day-to-day person is joy. But it is never fair for an artist to feel he must apologize for authentic expression, although, sadly, it seems he will always suffer for it.
The Muse, Michael says, has her claws on his throat and has her knees on his elbows.
Digital Mirrors
It's difficult enough to battle a muse. As any creative person knows, getting one's creative work into the public sphere can be difficult. But the web brings our voices to the public very easily, and very quickly. The resulting authenticity is no longer the doing of the Muse, but of the self. Now, a person's work might be captured in the digital, and promoted in the binary, but it is wholly derived from the flesh, blood and spirit.
We must realize how profound a process this is! Without witnesses to hear and see the pain, can joyous laughter remain? With its tangents and sidebars, non-linear non-sequiturs and anchors of truth and sometimes lies, the web can be a soul's opportunity to find itself.
Whether we create a site or visit one, learning other people through their thoughts and expressions means that love, hatred, or misunderstanding become temporarily suspended. It is in the act of expressing that Michael -- and any other independent spirit -- can embrace a certain freedom not easily available to people before. That freedom of expression in turn provides an opportunity of freedom for each of us, ourselves: Confronted with another's truth, we are forced to look at and deal with our own.
Whether we use our new self-knowledge as a tool to empower is entirely up to us.
All Things Human
It is possible that an independent voice's wanting a public forum for self-expression is an expression of extreme selfishness. It is also possible that it is the antithesis of selfishness, because in having a forum, we allow others not to only see us, but ultimately -- through the confrontation of other people's truths -- to see themselves.
A perfect example of this is when a student once asked me what I thought about hate crime sites. I told him that I'd rather have my enemy in front of me than working surreptitiously behind. I knew then and believe even more strongly now that the web must encompass all things human because it is all things human. I have no question in my mind that independent spirit has found a natural home on the web, and it will survive here, and thrive here, in all its intriguing diversity, for years and years to come.
Looking for Me in That Which is You
I do not know how to separate the web from the human story. I think of the web as a medium of art, passion, and personal challenge, not of commerce or convenience. I can talk markup and design and technicalities 'til the cows come home, but it means naught to me at day's end. And you know by now if one of those cows is a sacred cow, well, it's in harm's way around here.
True art is almost always overlooked, and true artists are always, always misunderstood. Face it, we're mostly freaks out here, giving our art and most intimate thoughts to the public world of the web. Beautiful freaks, I'll grant you that. But we're all looking for something, and I think it's either ourselves, or each other, or a new way of relating to one another that dramatically removes the façade of social interaction and instead promotes greater humor, understanding, and human growth.
The web's greatest gift is that it allows me to look for me in the beauty that is you.
