I Can't Be Held Responsible ...

for how hard it was to name this blog. To my amazement, someone had already beaten me to "Mawkish for the Nonce" from Lolita. Fzzt! I was looking forward to writing a lot of mawkish posts in which I indulge my most stridently sentimental side, because I try to suppress it rigorously in the rest of my writing. (The truth is it noses in far more often than is comfortable. )

But now look! "Titular Head." What does that suggest? Will I write an endless series of posts about my sense of having no innate authority? Will I just keep reasserting my feeling of not-as-good-as, for the blogosphere's delectation? I mean, I might. I mean, why not? But it would have been more fun to be mawkish. I think I will subtitle my blog: Mawkish as I Want to Be.

On the mawkish front: Today my brother-in-law emailed me that some Buddhists he was recently meditating with had a very light, unconcerned attitude to dreams -- they regard them as unimportant remnants that can be shrugged off in waking life. He gave me that parable about someone watching a beautiful bird in a breathtaking evening sky and then the bird shits on their head. That's very Buddhist. It was in response to my writing about a dream that was really bothering me, which I had over the weekend. I dreamed I was in a car, in the driver's seat, but it was in a river and I was floating slowly backwards. "When will it stop?" I wondered in the dream. Then some rocks appeared and it gently hit them and stopped. But in the morning I felt depressed, as the dream seemed to signal something dismal about my going backwards in life. Not according to my brother-in-law, who kindly wrote to try and get me to shrug it off. This and some other kind emails brought tears to my eyes (mawkish alert).

My first blog post! What else shall I talk about? I could ramble all day, but is that a good way to treat the blogosphere? Let me open the discussion up for questions. Do you ponder your dreams, prying through their imagery for answers in your life, or do you shrug them off?

One more thing. The Buddhists may have a good approach to living, one that leaves them less tormented than us multi-addicted, stress-casualty Westerners. But I've wondered how that attitude -- of yin/yang, everything should be balanced, nothing in excess, don't be too up or too down -- how that translates into art. How can you write if you're so balanced? I know there's a good answer to this but it's something I'm genuinely curious about. Where would the novels of Saul Bellow, to name only one, be if he didn't understand and beautifully render the neurotic excesses of unhappy Westerners?

Oh blogosphere. I'm so happy to be here. I love each and every one of you. Blogs, bloggers, blog readers, blog site maintainers. I love you.