About

before coffee

Before coffee

Conventional blogging wisdom says that in order to attract and retain readers, a blog should have a focus. Maybe that’s true. But if I had to stick to just one or two topics, I would’ve burnt out a long time ago. So, welcome to the melange! I post poems, photos, essays and videos, pen the occasional satire, and do a weekly audio podcast. There are occasional guest writers, too.

Via Negativa isn’t so much a journal as a writer’s life work, unfolding in real time. I’ve been posting stuff on the web for six years now (counting the essays at a now-defunct Geocities site), and the great thing is, I still have no idea what I’m going to write about when I wake up in the morning. But as the Rene Char quote in my masthead says, “How can we live without the unknown before us?”

I’ve tried for five minutes to describe [Via Negativa] and can’t — make up your own description once you go there.
—Lori Witzel, chatoyance blogroll

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Please see my Google profile.

FEEDBACK
Most kinds of comments and feedback are welcome, including friendly criticism and total non sequiturs — I love non sequiturs. Commenters own the copyright on their comments, though I reserve the right to delete for any reason (I try to be a good host, but see no reason to tolerate poorly behaved guests). For personal messages or inquiries, including public speaking gigs or readings, please email me: bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com.

The world undecided and loose, without preconceptions. Is that how you see things when you look out the window? Giving everything, even the dark games, a chance? Because that is true tolerance, in all its terrible beauty. I love that you take the world for what it is and love it no matter how much it bites back.
—Miguel Arboleda, Laughing Knees

WHAT’S UP WITH THE TITLE?
Via Negativa is also: a British thrash metal band, a Polish ambient-electro-rock band, a popular episode of The X-Files, and, oh yeah, a 2,000-year-old tradition of religious agnosis. Vianegativa.us was named with the last of these in mind (though I’m rather fond of the metal band, too). The Latin term has nothing to do with negativity as it is generally understood. It’s a way of trying to honor the inexpressable and to live with the questions, aware that ultimate realties cannot be apprehended directly. Meister Eckhart’s sermons and the Cloud of Unknowing are perhaps the best-known briefs for this perspective in the West, while the opening verses of the Tao Te Ching are a good example of a non-Christian via negativa. This blog began as a more tightly focused celebration of the unknown, the unknowable, and the mystic experience, and some version of that remains at the center of my worldview and informs almost everything I write. (See “This I don’t believe” for some important qualifications, however.)

One of my favorite blogs, discovered early in my blog existence, had been Via Negativa, by Dave Bonta. I loved the range of his thought, his openness, his eye for detail, his kindness, his refusal to prettify. But he did a queer thing. He wrote poems. Just as if no one had ever told him that poetry was a dead language, as if he thought people still wrote in it. And they were good poems. Beautifully made things that held the best of his thought and his eye.
—Dale Favier, mole

SITE HISTORY
Via Negativa started out as a Blogspot blog on December 17, 2003, and moved to WordPress on April 1, 2006 (which explains the lack of comments on posts written before that date — I used Haloscan for comments at the Blogspot site, and couldn’t import them). I am deeply indebted to my cousin Matt Albright for free hosting and tech support from April 2006 until March 2009, when I finally bit the bullet and moved Via Negativa to a regular shared webhost. Along the way I’ve learned just enough about code and WordPress to get by. If this blog were a car, I’d be able to replace the battery, change the oil, and do a few simple repairs on my own. I’m indebted also to another cousin, Jeff Suydam, for the ethernet setup and the free recycled computer (running Windows XP — sorry, Macabites and Linux geeks) that I depend on to do all this.

after coffee

After coffee

RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS

Unless otherwise indicated, all text and images on Via Negativa are original. They are protected by an Attribution – Share Alike Creative Commons License that grants permission to reproduce or to modify for any purpose, provided that any new works that alter, transform, or build upon mine distribute the resulting work under the same or similar license to this one, and as long as my original authorship is credited (for web use, a link will be sufficient). If you’d like permission to reproduce something of mine in a copyrighted work, please drop me a line. I’m easy. For more on my thinking about this, see “Should poetry be open source?”

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  • "On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
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