Ah, modern life, when only the crazy people are wise. John Michael Greer put up a thoughtful essay on why modern art is bad–because at best everyone is playing it safe, just cranking the same ol’ blasphemy box over and over and over.

“The reason so many people are into abstract art is that it’s impossible to fail.”

I found a new concept in the essay–new to me, anyway–called dinergy.

Dinergy is the relationship between a force and a resistance that creates form. Think of a grass blade bending in the wind: the wind is the force, the structural integrity of the grass blade provides the resistance, and the result is the exquisite curve that marks the balance between the two.

Beautiful lives are lives that have dinergy. The will, the excitement of being a self, of having one’s own body and one’s own interests, in a dance with the world and other people and God. Avoiding the pure selfishness of the devil, where we want our will to smash everything else flat, or the pure selflessness (that is also taught by the devil) where we act as if our own existence is embarrassing.