"I will not settle for shallowness in my relationships.
The world opens its arms to me.
There is great beauty in intellection. "
Freitag, 17. Dezember 2010
Sonntag, 26. September 2010
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
- Walace Stevens.
"For us, anything that can be said well in prose can be said better in prose. And a great deal, in the way of meaning, belongs to prose rather than poetry." - T.S. Eliot.
I watched a whole hour of super city mayor debate today. I don't know when I became that intrested in politics, especially politics that is like..... stuff I can't even vote for. I was also intrested too at the end of the debate in thinking that I'd perhaps vote for John Banks. I didn't feel that way before I watched it. Maybe he did a good job (in the deabte). I think those two are real intresting, actually. Both of them have a real appeal for me, personality-wise I'm talking, not just politically. I don't really understand their politcs actually, I think it's near impossible to do that,(sure yes, I know one's left one's right, but..) I just feel like I'd have to spend hours and hours really thinnnkinnng and reading and researching and pouring over their pasts and council economic documents and all that before I got an accurate picture. but personiality wise. I'm intrested in personalities, feelings, ways and things that are quite hard ot pin down. And appeal. I do feel an affinity with Bank's hardness (right word?) and firmness and kinda conversatyness (image wise, again, not politically) the solidity of his presense, firmness, unwishywashyness. I feel confortable with that. But then, I don't like how he doesn't know who Temapara (sp.) George is. And I like Len Brown's communityfocusyness, and his amicableness, and his downtoearthyness, and his touch of eccenticity. that's appealing too. I feel like, just talking about myself, they capture a bit of who I am, bits and pieces, in each direction. I'd feel more comfortable talking to John Banks than Len Brown. I'm still more confortable in that side of my personailty than the other side, at the moment. stilll. i duno. this hurts my tendons but it's intresting. (same thing with my law students vs. arts students, Sonya). and though, yes, I'm an arts student full stop, not a drop of law in there. and what does that mean?
I duno. it's 3.17am, I don't even feel tireddddd. it's terrible. Back to some unrelated poetry, then I'll leave this and maybe try plan some essays out a bit.
Nothing to be Said
For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured cross-faced tribes
And cobble-close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slow dying.
So are their separate ways
Of building, benediction,
Measuring love and money
Ways of slow dying.
The day spent hunting pig
Or holding a garden-party,
Hours giving evidence
Or birth, advance
On death equally slowly.
And saying so to some
Means nothing; others it leaves
Nothing to be said.
- Philip Larkin.
sorry for a sort of depressing poem.
I'm begining to feel more confident swiming in poetry. it's a good feeling.
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
- Walace Stevens.
"For us, anything that can be said well in prose can be said better in prose. And a great deal, in the way of meaning, belongs to prose rather than poetry." - T.S. Eliot.
I watched a whole hour of super city mayor debate today. I don't know when I became that intrested in politics, especially politics that is like..... stuff I can't even vote for. I was also intrested too at the end of the debate in thinking that I'd perhaps vote for John Banks. I didn't feel that way before I watched it. Maybe he did a good job (in the deabte). I think those two are real intresting, actually. Both of them have a real appeal for me, personality-wise I'm talking, not just politically. I don't really understand their politcs actually, I think it's near impossible to do that,(sure yes, I know one's left one's right, but..) I just feel like I'd have to spend hours and hours really thinnnkinnng and reading and researching and pouring over their pasts and council economic documents and all that before I got an accurate picture. but personiality wise. I'm intrested in personalities, feelings, ways and things that are quite hard ot pin down. And appeal. I do feel an affinity with Bank's hardness (right word?) and firmness and kinda conversatyness (image wise, again, not politically) the solidity of his presense, firmness, unwishywashyness. I feel confortable with that. But then, I don't like how he doesn't know who Temapara (sp.) George is. And I like Len Brown's communityfocusyness, and his amicableness, and his downtoearthyness, and his touch of eccenticity. that's appealing too. I feel like, just talking about myself, they capture a bit of who I am, bits and pieces, in each direction. I'd feel more comfortable talking to John Banks than Len Brown. I'm still more confortable in that side of my personailty than the other side, at the moment. stilll. i duno. this hurts my tendons but it's intresting. (same thing with my law students vs. arts students, Sonya). and though, yes, I'm an arts student full stop, not a drop of law in there. and what does that mean?
I duno. it's 3.17am, I don't even feel tireddddd. it's terrible. Back to some unrelated poetry, then I'll leave this and maybe try plan some essays out a bit.
Nothing to be Said
For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured cross-faced tribes
And cobble-close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slow dying.
So are their separate ways
Of building, benediction,
Measuring love and money
Ways of slow dying.
The day spent hunting pig
Or holding a garden-party,
Hours giving evidence
Or birth, advance
On death equally slowly.
And saying so to some
Means nothing; others it leaves
Nothing to be said.
- Philip Larkin.
sorry for a sort of depressing poem.
I'm begining to feel more confident swiming in poetry. it's a good feeling.
Dienstag, 14. September 2010
In Broken Images, Robert Graves.
He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.
He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images,
Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.
Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact,
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.
When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.
He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.
He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.
a kind of a judgemental poem, and not acting in the way I think it's best for poems to act, but I like it all the same.
I thought I should talk on here more. I do have things to say. I do think about things. Maybe I've just been too busy lately. or pretending to be too busy. or just not in the right mood. i did have something to say, though. a few things. who knows how long this post will be, probably not so long, but that's okay, right?
I realised something I should be honest about. Everytime I'm feeling down, the best way to pick myself up is to watch The History Boys. I realised from doing this that for ages now, I guess what I've wanted to be more than anything else is an English school boy (and while I could still be an English University student of sorts possibly, this school boy 'fantasy' (I think that is the correct word, actually, it is) is now never going to happen, never was). I think that's intresting. And something yeah, I need to be fully open and consious about. Not that it's something that's at a confessional level, but, I think it's significant. you know. I think I often put to the back of my mind just how much of an influence that film has been on me. I mean... it shaped my whole view of academia really... and my whole opening of my mind, my whole opening up of seeing the wider world, the wider scene of things... it really I think inspired me to be truely competitive in the classroom... I think it's even true to say that when I get angsty about classroom success, when I put into perspective any success here in NZ (e.g. Sonya, top in 10 in new zealand in media studies means nothing!), when I compete against sort of imaginary foes whom I don't know personality, but who must be out there (there's always someone brighter out there), I am competing against, thinking of, the kids in that film. it's true. i've watched it so many times. I bought and read the play. its introduction by Bennet shaped my whole angle on how to tackle scholarship exams, and now how to tackle university essays (working for english - philosophers sometimes less than impressed (by this I mean As and not A+s on occasion)). it was the one thing me and MacLean agreed on in Y12 drama - that that was a good play, and we should do it (unfortunately, the rights cost like 5000 pounds or something...). She even lent me a book with the film script in it, and stuff all about the film ,and I read that too. Yeah, it must be the text, in all its forms, that I've poured over the most, possibly only closely followed by Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now (the later based on the former). Yet they were for class, that was totally independent. I must admit to myself and others that it has deeply shaped my thinking. and, where my life is at at the moment, defintely. I watched it I think it was Saturday night yeah, and I did realise there's quite a bit of kind of... average parts in the text, actually, but it's at the point where there's too much enthrallment, too much love, yeah, that I can only just enjoy it, enjoy the immersion in the world of it all. I was intrested watching how, unlike with out texts where now I'm often distant, viewing them with the eye of the critic, picking out themes and all that englishy crap, here was just enthrallment. I found it hard to pull back and analayse as usuall. Sure, there was plenty of analysing still going on, I can't deny it, but comparatively... there was so little. just you know, more pure enjoyment, regardless of theme/techniques/overall merit.
That's enoigh of that, but yes. A strange thing to bring up. But really I go on about Conrad and Melville and that enough, but really that's got to be the most influential text in my life, still to this day.
few thoughts.
1.) I feel funny watching Maori TV/ that 'Te Reo' something something one that's fully in Maori. it's like, that's NZ, right, but, it's completely different. They had on like the other day (I"m always watching it) a whole school gathering thing, and all the kids were speaking Maori. in New Zealand. Don't think I've ever been anywhere where that's happened. it's crazy! they're all speaking maori man. I don't understand. it's whack, but it's new zealand. it feels funny. totally different side of life here I know next to nothing of.
2.) the other day in the library the girl sitting in front of me got a phone call on her cellphone. she pulls it out, opens it up, and she goes "what? she's dead!" and then there's like muffled laughing. Then a serious 'but, are you okay?' then like lots of 'oh my Gods' then more laughing, then more serious concern... it was really strange. some 'so, she's really dead?' some 'awwww, will you be alright?' and then some more laughing in what seemed a really inappropriate manner. it seemed really strange. the serious parts didn't seem insincere... and there were a lot of them... but the kind of caual laughing after 'she's dead' and at points following it seemed totally out of place. it didn't make any sense. Just like, you hear the phone. look up, and you hear, fairly loudly, 'she's dead?' and then you hear laughing. and then the swinging between serious-laughing-seriousness that follows. non-sensical.
3.) on my bed I have The Bible, Proust Volume 2., The Book of Luminous Things, The Great Modern Poets (open at Robert Graves, see above), Burning Chrome (science fiction, for ENGL238), Selected Auden (ENLG231), Hesse's Siddhartha (his most famous novel, about Buddha, Buddhism), and Springsteen's Born in the USA. also my german 'progress task', german vocab written over and over on refill ,and half-written poems and theory on how poetry/ literature should opperate. and a sweet as S.J.C. postcard recieved today with big books on the cover.
4.) I think soooo mucchhhh about what the role of poetry/literature (when I say poetry/poets right, you must know (for all my posts) that I just mean lit in general/writers) and what it should be for, and how it is unique from other things. I used to think theorising about such things was bad bad bad (under the influence on Dylan natrually - but more on this later, it deserves a whole post of its own, right, I've been thinking a lot about it)
but I am coming to realise I am a theoriser. I need to understand. I need theory. I have instinct I do, but it does neen much shaping, much direction. I need a lot of the Apollonian. I do have a dionysian side I do believe, but I should perhaps accept Apollo does dominate a fair bit, and I should accept that - it's not neccessarily a bad thing, at all. anyway, to continue from the below post, right, poetry is about saying too things at once. I beleive what makes poetry unique, and thus what good poetry should be doing, is saying two things at once. contradictions, confusions. this is the true capturing of human experience. it's what other things can't do. We did Walace Stevens last week. I will read more of him. From what I heard, and from what I heard about his theory (it seems similar to how I've been thinking lately), I like. neccessarily it makes his poems pretty much impenetrable (at least by rationality, by a rational mind seeking what it normally expects to find), which is an intresting side effect, but take note:
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
duno eh. 'parently it's pretty famous.
I haven't been enjoying Auden so much. he's alright, and there's some nice, and of course some very skillful stuff in there, but you know, yeah nah. first the politics, then the didcatorial - be free, be happy stuff. there is some good stuff there. But I just don't feel like it's my kind of poetry. not wild, not open enough, not confused enough, sometimes. the earlier stuff often is, sure, sure. But still. I duno. just not geling so well.
5.) Dylan is full of complexities and slick coolness, Johnny Cash just has a great warmth. I have a great love of complexities but it's warmth that sustains, warmth that has a great love for you.
6.) Proverbs 14:12 "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death" - isn't that just brilliant? so... I can't find the word... so like, abrupt, forthcoming, direct. just straight up. also 21:21 "All a man's ways seem right to him, but the Lord weighs the heart." I think they make a good pair. Also relates to Dylan vs. Cash (I can't give up the Dylan vs. Cash man - and yet they both loved each other - there is polarity there, but also a great unity) I think. there are some weird proverbs in there man, lots about just appeasing the King and doing what he says or else you'll get in shit, even if what he's saying is a little off, (not weird - contextually understandable, but not so relevant today, realllyyyy), but there's some good ones. I do like those ones. it's true, All a man's ways seem right to him. (But does the Lord really weight the heart? Does Oedipa's Trystero really exist (Pynchon reference, thanks to ENGl238)? A modernist or a post-modernist? the plausability of post-modern religion? relatives vs. absolutes? questions, questions.
7.) I am a New Zealander and I live in New Zealand. I find that hard to understand sometimes, and what it means. I will keep reading my New Zealand literature. I love some parts of NZ. I love being chilled as, and having open space, and wearing stubbies, and just you know, that whole side. But I struggle with a lot of it. When you go to London, to Berlin, to Tokyo, Shanghai, it's like shit man, shit, it's crazy, your mind gets blown... just the shit you can do there man, the shit that's there, the access, the opportunities, the size, the age, the population, the culture.... we undenyably pale in comparision to a lot of that. you come home with NZ feeling so empty, and so small. it's nice right, and enjoyable, but smallllll. isolatedddd. i do struggle with that, I must admit to myself. it's beautiful, but.... you know. once I get out of here in a few years (maybe next year? keen. come on vic OE.) I can't see myself coming back for a while. even Sydney man. so muchhh bigger - the whole population of NZ in one city. boom. I'll always feel at home in New Zealand. but there's a lot out there New Zealand just don't have. on a side note, I want read that autobiography (http://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Anthropologist-Memoir-Michael-Jackson/dp/187736147X) of that NZ anthroplogist/poet Michael Jackson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_(anthropologist) who's professoring it up at Harvard recently (?) out here. I think it'd be plenty intresting. costs like $45 or something, though.
ah, that'll do for tonight. not that I think i'll be able to sleep any time soon, but hey, I can go maybe read or something. go hide my laptop downstairs.
P.S. (EDIT) I wanted to add to the Proverbs quotes... Ecclesiastes 7:29 - " This only I have found: God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes." Same kind of sentiment, right. schemes, ways... love it. this book brings me peace.
He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.
He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images,
Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.
Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact,
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.
When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.
He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.
He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.
a kind of a judgemental poem, and not acting in the way I think it's best for poems to act, but I like it all the same.
I thought I should talk on here more. I do have things to say. I do think about things. Maybe I've just been too busy lately. or pretending to be too busy. or just not in the right mood. i did have something to say, though. a few things. who knows how long this post will be, probably not so long, but that's okay, right?
I realised something I should be honest about. Everytime I'm feeling down, the best way to pick myself up is to watch The History Boys. I realised from doing this that for ages now, I guess what I've wanted to be more than anything else is an English school boy (and while I could still be an English University student of sorts possibly, this school boy 'fantasy' (I think that is the correct word, actually, it is) is now never going to happen, never was). I think that's intresting. And something yeah, I need to be fully open and consious about. Not that it's something that's at a confessional level, but, I think it's significant. you know. I think I often put to the back of my mind just how much of an influence that film has been on me. I mean... it shaped my whole view of academia really... and my whole opening of my mind, my whole opening up of seeing the wider world, the wider scene of things... it really I think inspired me to be truely competitive in the classroom... I think it's even true to say that when I get angsty about classroom success, when I put into perspective any success here in NZ (e.g. Sonya, top in 10 in new zealand in media studies means nothing!), when I compete against sort of imaginary foes whom I don't know personality, but who must be out there (there's always someone brighter out there), I am competing against, thinking of, the kids in that film. it's true. i've watched it so many times. I bought and read the play. its introduction by Bennet shaped my whole angle on how to tackle scholarship exams, and now how to tackle university essays (working for english - philosophers sometimes less than impressed (by this I mean As and not A+s on occasion)). it was the one thing me and MacLean agreed on in Y12 drama - that that was a good play, and we should do it (unfortunately, the rights cost like 5000 pounds or something...). She even lent me a book with the film script in it, and stuff all about the film ,and I read that too. Yeah, it must be the text, in all its forms, that I've poured over the most, possibly only closely followed by Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now (the later based on the former). Yet they were for class, that was totally independent. I must admit to myself and others that it has deeply shaped my thinking. and, where my life is at at the moment, defintely. I watched it I think it was Saturday night yeah, and I did realise there's quite a bit of kind of... average parts in the text, actually, but it's at the point where there's too much enthrallment, too much love, yeah, that I can only just enjoy it, enjoy the immersion in the world of it all. I was intrested watching how, unlike with out texts where now I'm often distant, viewing them with the eye of the critic, picking out themes and all that englishy crap, here was just enthrallment. I found it hard to pull back and analayse as usuall. Sure, there was plenty of analysing still going on, I can't deny it, but comparatively... there was so little. just you know, more pure enjoyment, regardless of theme/techniques/overall merit.
That's enoigh of that, but yes. A strange thing to bring up. But really I go on about Conrad and Melville and that enough, but really that's got to be the most influential text in my life, still to this day.
few thoughts.
1.) I feel funny watching Maori TV/ that 'Te Reo' something something one that's fully in Maori. it's like, that's NZ, right, but, it's completely different. They had on like the other day (I"m always watching it) a whole school gathering thing, and all the kids were speaking Maori. in New Zealand. Don't think I've ever been anywhere where that's happened. it's crazy! they're all speaking maori man. I don't understand. it's whack, but it's new zealand. it feels funny. totally different side of life here I know next to nothing of.
2.) the other day in the library the girl sitting in front of me got a phone call on her cellphone. she pulls it out, opens it up, and she goes "what? she's dead!" and then there's like muffled laughing. Then a serious 'but, are you okay?' then like lots of 'oh my Gods' then more laughing, then more serious concern... it was really strange. some 'so, she's really dead?' some 'awwww, will you be alright?' and then some more laughing in what seemed a really inappropriate manner. it seemed really strange. the serious parts didn't seem insincere... and there were a lot of them... but the kind of caual laughing after 'she's dead' and at points following it seemed totally out of place. it didn't make any sense. Just like, you hear the phone. look up, and you hear, fairly loudly, 'she's dead?' and then you hear laughing. and then the swinging between serious-laughing-seriousness that follows. non-sensical.
3.) on my bed I have The Bible, Proust Volume 2., The Book of Luminous Things, The Great Modern Poets (open at Robert Graves, see above), Burning Chrome (science fiction, for ENGL238), Selected Auden (ENLG231), Hesse's Siddhartha (his most famous novel, about Buddha, Buddhism), and Springsteen's Born in the USA. also my german 'progress task', german vocab written over and over on refill ,and half-written poems and theory on how poetry/ literature should opperate. and a sweet as S.J.C. postcard recieved today with big books on the cover.
4.) I think soooo mucchhhh about what the role of poetry/literature (when I say poetry/poets right, you must know (for all my posts) that I just mean lit in general/writers) and what it should be for, and how it is unique from other things. I used to think theorising about such things was bad bad bad (under the influence on Dylan natrually - but more on this later, it deserves a whole post of its own, right, I've been thinking a lot about it)
but I am coming to realise I am a theoriser. I need to understand. I need theory. I have instinct I do, but it does neen much shaping, much direction. I need a lot of the Apollonian. I do have a dionysian side I do believe, but I should perhaps accept Apollo does dominate a fair bit, and I should accept that - it's not neccessarily a bad thing, at all. anyway, to continue from the below post, right, poetry is about saying too things at once. I beleive what makes poetry unique, and thus what good poetry should be doing, is saying two things at once. contradictions, confusions. this is the true capturing of human experience. it's what other things can't do. We did Walace Stevens last week. I will read more of him. From what I heard, and from what I heard about his theory (it seems similar to how I've been thinking lately), I like. neccessarily it makes his poems pretty much impenetrable (at least by rationality, by a rational mind seeking what it normally expects to find), which is an intresting side effect, but take note:
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
duno eh. 'parently it's pretty famous.
I haven't been enjoying Auden so much. he's alright, and there's some nice, and of course some very skillful stuff in there, but you know, yeah nah. first the politics, then the didcatorial - be free, be happy stuff. there is some good stuff there. But I just don't feel like it's my kind of poetry. not wild, not open enough, not confused enough, sometimes. the earlier stuff often is, sure, sure. But still. I duno. just not geling so well.
5.) Dylan is full of complexities and slick coolness, Johnny Cash just has a great warmth. I have a great love of complexities but it's warmth that sustains, warmth that has a great love for you.
6.) Proverbs 14:12 "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death" - isn't that just brilliant? so... I can't find the word... so like, abrupt, forthcoming, direct. just straight up. also 21:21 "All a man's ways seem right to him, but the Lord weighs the heart." I think they make a good pair. Also relates to Dylan vs. Cash (I can't give up the Dylan vs. Cash man - and yet they both loved each other - there is polarity there, but also a great unity) I think. there are some weird proverbs in there man, lots about just appeasing the King and doing what he says or else you'll get in shit, even if what he's saying is a little off, (not weird - contextually understandable, but not so relevant today, realllyyyy), but there's some good ones. I do like those ones. it's true, All a man's ways seem right to him. (But does the Lord really weight the heart? Does Oedipa's Trystero really exist (Pynchon reference, thanks to ENGl238)? A modernist or a post-modernist? the plausability of post-modern religion? relatives vs. absolutes? questions, questions.
7.) I am a New Zealander and I live in New Zealand. I find that hard to understand sometimes, and what it means. I will keep reading my New Zealand literature. I love some parts of NZ. I love being chilled as, and having open space, and wearing stubbies, and just you know, that whole side. But I struggle with a lot of it. When you go to London, to Berlin, to Tokyo, Shanghai, it's like shit man, shit, it's crazy, your mind gets blown... just the shit you can do there man, the shit that's there, the access, the opportunities, the size, the age, the population, the culture.... we undenyably pale in comparision to a lot of that. you come home with NZ feeling so empty, and so small. it's nice right, and enjoyable, but smallllll. isolatedddd. i do struggle with that, I must admit to myself. it's beautiful, but.... you know. once I get out of here in a few years (maybe next year? keen. come on vic OE.) I can't see myself coming back for a while. even Sydney man. so muchhh bigger - the whole population of NZ in one city. boom. I'll always feel at home in New Zealand. but there's a lot out there New Zealand just don't have. on a side note, I want read that autobiography (http://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Anthropologist-Memoir-Michael-Jackson/dp/187736147X) of that NZ anthroplogist/poet Michael Jackson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_(anthropologist) who's professoring it up at Harvard recently (?) out here. I think it'd be plenty intresting. costs like $45 or something, though.
ah, that'll do for tonight. not that I think i'll be able to sleep any time soon, but hey, I can go maybe read or something. go hide my laptop downstairs.
P.S. (EDIT) I wanted to add to the Proverbs quotes... Ecclesiastes 7:29 - " This only I have found: God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes." Same kind of sentiment, right. schemes, ways... love it. this book brings me peace.
Samstag, 28. August 2010
It seems to me that all life is characterised by attempting to know, and accepting that you don’t know. If you think you know, then you’re in the first category, but also in denial. I think you’d have to be pretty cocky though to say you know, though.
For me too, it’s the scholars who attempt to know, the poets who accept that they don’t know. It should be said that it doesn’t necessarily have to be an optimist/pessimist dichotomy (though maybe it is sometimes?), and it should also be noted that it is perhaps the case that many scholars are in the ‘category 1 + deluded’ group. Thus they claim to know. When really they don’t. But even if they are in denial, and do not actually know what they claim to know, they still engage in the process of attempting to know, yeah? Thus the categories. Of course, poets ‘attempt to know’ things, too. But we’re talking about a very specific type of ‘knowing’ or ‘not knowing’. It’s not knowing things like ‘1+1=2’ and it’s not knowing things like ‘I am confused’ or things like this. We could go on categorising like philosophers, but I’m not a philosopher. Really it’s knowing the real things, what the world is and what God is. And maybe scholars don’t even claim to know these things. But in trying to order everything of the universe, there is still some attempt to reach an answer. A hope (which, we must note again, does not mean that poets are not possessive of hope) there is one answer, and one order. Poets much more often embrace a certain degree on confusion. One could argue they offer simply a different kind of order, but if we were to say this, we would still have to admit that it is a very different kind of order, with no or very few constants, an 'order' not built on any sort of.. slowly accumulated foundation of knowledge, but rather one entirely open to change, shifts, freedom - one that is different for everybody, one completely maleable.
A thesis offers a hypothesis, and a conclusion, and, as it goes, will lead to a Ph.D being awarded if it ends up being 'a significant original contribution to knowledge', or something like that. It seeks to add to the building blocks. without doubt, it can certainly challenge the established structure and basis of knowledge entirely, evne attempt to tear it all down, but still let it be said that this is done in order to build another structure, lay new foundations for a claimedly more accurate representation of the world, the nature of things.
poets are not generally concerned with building blocks, pure rigour and creating structures. I am not really sure what exactly they are concerned with, at the moment I want to say that a good poet is simply concerned with capturing experience and nothing more, I haven't thought it all through quite enough. For poets also seek truths, like we can say theses do. But different kinds.... I'm not sure. Poets can be empiphanic, to be strongly influenced by the wikipedia articles on Joyce and Proust. Proust can dedicate a good part of Volume I of In Search of Lost Time (a beautiful, beautiful book) to simply thinking about flowers and church steeples, and he does want to know something about them, and the world, by doing this. But, it's not the same kind of knowing. It's using them... to know the experience of the world, to know... God... (Proust being extremely patheistic, to qualify the term contextually), and it's different to using evidence and facts and things to claim to 'know' the nature of the world like one does in academia. We are entering Alvin Plantiga sensus divitus territory now, which is helpful, I guess, he talks about proving God's existance, and you see the night sky or a flower or something, and it is not evidence in an argument where the conclusion is 'God exists' (i.e. I see this flower, therefore God exists - he says this would be a terribly weak argument) but rather when you see the flower, you simply come to know that God exists. Replace the flower with anything, any experience. They don't even have to be like the flower at all, one of his other key examples is when you do something bad and you feel terrible - and this leads to belief in God. Again not an argument like 'P1 - I killed my brother, P2 - I feel bad, Therefore P3 God exists' no, but just through the experience, you can say you 'know' God exists. The idea is actually way more complex that that but, that's the core of it. The faculty through which you come to 'know' in this manner he calls the 'sensus divinitus' (sp.) ~ obv. translating to something like the 'sense of divinity' (Latin next semester, eh.).
These are just experiences. Poets are about experinces. Maybe both poets and scholars have conclusions. Maybe poets use experiences to reach them and scholars evidence. But that's a muddled idea. I don't know. I still just want to say that poets are just about capturing experience. you know, an academic can go, x, therefore y. And a poet can go, 'x'. (and, oh, that's intresting, x is intresting, let's have a think about it and a float around it and give it an all round good consideration and possibly think about trying to penetrate right to the heart of this x).
I have to note somewhere again of course, the rationality vs. irrationality thing. Academia is strictly rational. Maybe it's not fair to say that poets are irrational, perhaps only the most madly wild of them are, but still, they are not wholly rational. And is the universe wholly rational or not wholly rational? AH! There is a good question. Its answer of course proving who's getting at things in the right way (if not both/neither). Rationality again, to refer to now long forgotten posts, a strictly human thing, at least as far as any of us are able to prove. Steven Hawking talks of a great hope of us building a grand comprehensive model of the universe, and this finally built, will then put us in the position of 'knowing the mind of God' (or some wording extremely similar to this). This of course, this model, is meant to be created through yeah, this careful, slow accumulation of building blocks, ultimately intended to form this comprehensive model. Yet what if the mind of God can't be accessed through a stack of building blocks? What if God simply lives inside each and every one of those building blocks - each x, and we don't need to stack up all the xs in a massive pile to know Y - in fact, this method is not going to work at all?
But then perhaps it will, though? we don't know. everyone has faith in something, right. Hawking in his building blocks, Plantinga in his sensus divinitus. And a man in his wife, and a child in his parents, and everyone else in everything else. I'll feel like Ecclesiastes if I start giving those big long lists; 'a time to live, a time to die...'.
I want to end with a poem, but it will show a bias to the poet side, and there's already a stong enough one of them running through here. But let it be said, the scholar is an entirely reasonable position. I currently spend my days studying, and I may for may more yet. And we owe them plenty. We also owe poets plenty. yeahh i duno. this was quite short, but i gotta get some sleep.
For me too, it’s the scholars who attempt to know, the poets who accept that they don’t know. It should be said that it doesn’t necessarily have to be an optimist/pessimist dichotomy (though maybe it is sometimes?), and it should also be noted that it is perhaps the case that many scholars are in the ‘category 1 + deluded’ group. Thus they claim to know. When really they don’t. But even if they are in denial, and do not actually know what they claim to know, they still engage in the process of attempting to know, yeah? Thus the categories. Of course, poets ‘attempt to know’ things, too. But we’re talking about a very specific type of ‘knowing’ or ‘not knowing’. It’s not knowing things like ‘1+1=2’ and it’s not knowing things like ‘I am confused’ or things like this. We could go on categorising like philosophers, but I’m not a philosopher. Really it’s knowing the real things, what the world is and what God is. And maybe scholars don’t even claim to know these things. But in trying to order everything of the universe, there is still some attempt to reach an answer. A hope (which, we must note again, does not mean that poets are not possessive of hope) there is one answer, and one order. Poets much more often embrace a certain degree on confusion. One could argue they offer simply a different kind of order, but if we were to say this, we would still have to admit that it is a very different kind of order, with no or very few constants, an 'order' not built on any sort of.. slowly accumulated foundation of knowledge, but rather one entirely open to change, shifts, freedom - one that is different for everybody, one completely maleable.
A thesis offers a hypothesis, and a conclusion, and, as it goes, will lead to a Ph.D being awarded if it ends up being 'a significant original contribution to knowledge', or something like that. It seeks to add to the building blocks. without doubt, it can certainly challenge the established structure and basis of knowledge entirely, evne attempt to tear it all down, but still let it be said that this is done in order to build another structure, lay new foundations for a claimedly more accurate representation of the world, the nature of things.
poets are not generally concerned with building blocks, pure rigour and creating structures. I am not really sure what exactly they are concerned with, at the moment I want to say that a good poet is simply concerned with capturing experience and nothing more, I haven't thought it all through quite enough. For poets also seek truths, like we can say theses do. But different kinds.... I'm not sure. Poets can be empiphanic, to be strongly influenced by the wikipedia articles on Joyce and Proust. Proust can dedicate a good part of Volume I of In Search of Lost Time (a beautiful, beautiful book) to simply thinking about flowers and church steeples, and he does want to know something about them, and the world, by doing this. But, it's not the same kind of knowing. It's using them... to know the experience of the world, to know... God... (Proust being extremely patheistic, to qualify the term contextually), and it's different to using evidence and facts and things to claim to 'know' the nature of the world like one does in academia. We are entering Alvin Plantiga sensus divitus territory now, which is helpful, I guess, he talks about proving God's existance, and you see the night sky or a flower or something, and it is not evidence in an argument where the conclusion is 'God exists' (i.e. I see this flower, therefore God exists - he says this would be a terribly weak argument) but rather when you see the flower, you simply come to know that God exists. Replace the flower with anything, any experience. They don't even have to be like the flower at all, one of his other key examples is when you do something bad and you feel terrible - and this leads to belief in God. Again not an argument like 'P1 - I killed my brother, P2 - I feel bad, Therefore P3 God exists' no, but just through the experience, you can say you 'know' God exists. The idea is actually way more complex that that but, that's the core of it. The faculty through which you come to 'know' in this manner he calls the 'sensus divinitus' (sp.) ~ obv. translating to something like the 'sense of divinity' (Latin next semester, eh.).
These are just experiences. Poets are about experinces. Maybe both poets and scholars have conclusions. Maybe poets use experiences to reach them and scholars evidence. But that's a muddled idea. I don't know. I still just want to say that poets are just about capturing experience. you know, an academic can go, x, therefore y. And a poet can go, 'x'. (and, oh, that's intresting, x is intresting, let's have a think about it and a float around it and give it an all round good consideration and possibly think about trying to penetrate right to the heart of this x).
I have to note somewhere again of course, the rationality vs. irrationality thing. Academia is strictly rational. Maybe it's not fair to say that poets are irrational, perhaps only the most madly wild of them are, but still, they are not wholly rational. And is the universe wholly rational or not wholly rational? AH! There is a good question. Its answer of course proving who's getting at things in the right way (if not both/neither). Rationality again, to refer to now long forgotten posts, a strictly human thing, at least as far as any of us are able to prove. Steven Hawking talks of a great hope of us building a grand comprehensive model of the universe, and this finally built, will then put us in the position of 'knowing the mind of God' (or some wording extremely similar to this). This of course, this model, is meant to be created through yeah, this careful, slow accumulation of building blocks, ultimately intended to form this comprehensive model. Yet what if the mind of God can't be accessed through a stack of building blocks? What if God simply lives inside each and every one of those building blocks - each x, and we don't need to stack up all the xs in a massive pile to know Y - in fact, this method is not going to work at all?
But then perhaps it will, though? we don't know. everyone has faith in something, right. Hawking in his building blocks, Plantinga in his sensus divinitus. And a man in his wife, and a child in his parents, and everyone else in everything else. I'll feel like Ecclesiastes if I start giving those big long lists; 'a time to live, a time to die...'.
I want to end with a poem, but it will show a bias to the poet side, and there's already a stong enough one of them running through here. But let it be said, the scholar is an entirely reasonable position. I currently spend my days studying, and I may for may more yet. And we owe them plenty. We also owe poets plenty. yeahh i duno. this was quite short, but i gotta get some sleep.
Sonntag, 13. Juni 2010
Some thoughts stemming from Pascal's Wager.
rationality is a human faculty and has nothing to do with the universe. It is an evolutionary development that has been exceptionally useful to us in dealing with this world. However it has many great flaws, for example it cannot deal with concepts like infinity. It can only deal with the finite, which is understandable, as the world which shaped our genetic structure is finite in all the relevant aspects. How could science then, a practice based entirely on rational inquiry ever form a complete picture, obtain a total understanding of the universe when by its nature it is unable to contain or fully understand/conceive of/ comprehend concepts like infinity, and possibly others that I’m not aware of. We can form some idea of the infinite, we can claim to know it exists, we can incorporate it into some of our equations and theories. But we can’t truly be said to know it like we know the finite world. It requires a totally different way of knowing that, of course, we humans can’t conceive of, and so don’t know what this ‘way of knowing’ is. So I assert that yes, science will never obtain its complete picture, and rationality with it.
What then is the alternative? It is, (by default), irrationality. some form of it. If rational inquiry fails, irrational actions/belief/etc. something else/etc. potentially can succeed. However it really is unquantifiable and unchartable territory for humanity. Can we prove that irrationality can succeed in this way? No, we cannot, and in fact, to even attempt to prove this is paradoxical, as the concept of proving is inextricably linked to logic and rationality. Thus there is necessarily a leap of faith.
But there are problems.
a.) Which direction to leap in? A: I don’t know.
b.) I think this is a big one. The idea of actually desiring to know the universe, to understand it, to be embraced by it, to have a life of meaning, to find meaning, to pursue things in general, to desire, well, these things are unavoidably evolutionary. They are traits for survival. But if we are rejecting rationality then, this rationality that comes from evolution and the environment, should we not then reject these rational traits also? Why pursue? Why desire to know, to come closer to anything, let alone the infinite? Then we have, of course, why live? We need to justify a pursuit of the absolute and the infinite.
However again there are issues of cyclicality. Why are we attempting to justify? This is again a concept of logical and rationality, if one is rejecting rationality in making an irrational leap of faith, why should it need justification?
I guess this is again a paradox. It’s like the idea if the sceptics’ ladder, when sceptics try to justify their belief that we know nothing, except that we know nothing. Some sceptics have argued this is justifiable by way of the following method (I think it’s something like this, but I need to go re-read it), that they have followed a logical process, analogous to climbing a ladder they say, and at the top of this logical ladder, they have found the conclusion that humans can know nothing for certain. Once reaching the top of the ladder, they then kick their feet, disregard it and its logical process, and view the world from their higher position, with the retention of their one certainty. It’s a crazy position, but one must admit they can understand it/ see how it works (perhaps at least if you’ve read a bit more about it than outlined here). And maybe this is the same, or a similar analogy is useful. We have climbed a ladder of rationality, and at the top we have found that we should adopt a position on irrationality and blind faith, perhaps. So the rational action then is to kick away the ladder and embrace this. However, and this is where we differ from the sceptic analogy, we simultaneously realise in going to kick down the ladder that if we are going to embrace this model of irrationality, under irrationality, there is no justification (in a logical sense) for its embrace, for kicking down the ladder. There is only a justification under a rational model. But under the rational model, we have decided to reject rationality, which thus means we have no reason for kicking down the ladder. irrationality doesn't even understand the assent of the ladder in the first place. etc. etc. etc. round and round it goes. Therefore I find one to be stuck on top of a ladder, merely contemplating either a total nihilism, or a total embrace of the divine, the infinite and the absolute, and in this heady dichotomy of the mind you are without any ability to know why you're in it, or why you should or should not be. And of course, in this realm of confusion and total possibility, maybe it is even that embracing nihilsm and embracing of the divine universe and God, are the same "“I wish I was free/ Of that slaving meat wheel/ And safe in heaven dead”, Kerouac writes.
Do you know that feeling, your mind races and races in ecstasy, you are gathering more and more, understanding higher and higher, then suddenly bam, ouch, you can’t go any further in your thoughts and you feel like you’ve hit a great block and you and your mind collapse back down. This is the same thing.
This was going to be a word document where I did study, then it began to turn into a more general discussion of issues relating to Pascal’s Wager, then it has finally become a bare and meagre attempt to capture the chief philosophical problem that has occupied my mind this last year or two, and an attempt to better understand where my mind rests most generally. I have said to myself often these last few weeks ‘you’re stuck between nihilism and theism, nothing else’. This I guess has been an attempt to get at this a little more. It has not been a very good one, but I will admit it has been better than any I have accomplished so far in my life.
Two final comments to myself which are just complain-y:
-do other 18 year olds thing like this? Is it exceptional that your mind does this, or can do this, or strives to do this, this kind of thinking, as above?
-this is what sucks about studying philosophy where I am at in the study of philosophy. You... just talk about random dumb shit and engage in basic-as arguments where you simply take one simple position or the other, write 45 minute essays about something. I feel like all this stuff as above, I have to do myself, but you only have the spare-hours of your day to do it in, because you’re a student, and you’ve got to get grades and things, and your free-time is what’s left. Where you can read some real, full books, write some things. Ah I duno. I guess I am pleased that I’ve clarified my position more clearly to myself. I will continue reading, I know I’m just young and that there is so much more I need to consider here. Kierkegaard I feel will be a reasonable place to start, or as reasonable as any. So after exams, Kierkegaard it is. Then onwards from there.
And back to Moby Dick. Our mad and irrational Ahab after his whale... yet he still can’t get him... perhaps he was not mad enough...
What then is the alternative? It is, (by default), irrationality. some form of it. If rational inquiry fails, irrational actions/belief/etc. something else/etc. potentially can succeed. However it really is unquantifiable and unchartable territory for humanity. Can we prove that irrationality can succeed in this way? No, we cannot, and in fact, to even attempt to prove this is paradoxical, as the concept of proving is inextricably linked to logic and rationality. Thus there is necessarily a leap of faith.
But there are problems.
a.) Which direction to leap in? A: I don’t know.
b.) I think this is a big one. The idea of actually desiring to know the universe, to understand it, to be embraced by it, to have a life of meaning, to find meaning, to pursue things in general, to desire, well, these things are unavoidably evolutionary. They are traits for survival. But if we are rejecting rationality then, this rationality that comes from evolution and the environment, should we not then reject these rational traits also? Why pursue? Why desire to know, to come closer to anything, let alone the infinite? Then we have, of course, why live? We need to justify a pursuit of the absolute and the infinite.
However again there are issues of cyclicality. Why are we attempting to justify? This is again a concept of logical and rationality, if one is rejecting rationality in making an irrational leap of faith, why should it need justification?
I guess this is again a paradox. It’s like the idea if the sceptics’ ladder, when sceptics try to justify their belief that we know nothing, except that we know nothing. Some sceptics have argued this is justifiable by way of the following method (I think it’s something like this, but I need to go re-read it), that they have followed a logical process, analogous to climbing a ladder they say, and at the top of this logical ladder, they have found the conclusion that humans can know nothing for certain. Once reaching the top of the ladder, they then kick their feet, disregard it and its logical process, and view the world from their higher position, with the retention of their one certainty. It’s a crazy position, but one must admit they can understand it/ see how it works (perhaps at least if you’ve read a bit more about it than outlined here). And maybe this is the same, or a similar analogy is useful. We have climbed a ladder of rationality, and at the top we have found that we should adopt a position on irrationality and blind faith, perhaps. So the rational action then is to kick away the ladder and embrace this. However, and this is where we differ from the sceptic analogy, we simultaneously realise in going to kick down the ladder that if we are going to embrace this model of irrationality, under irrationality, there is no justification (in a logical sense) for its embrace, for kicking down the ladder. There is only a justification under a rational model. But under the rational model, we have decided to reject rationality, which thus means we have no reason for kicking down the ladder. irrationality doesn't even understand the assent of the ladder in the first place. etc. etc. etc. round and round it goes. Therefore I find one to be stuck on top of a ladder, merely contemplating either a total nihilism, or a total embrace of the divine, the infinite and the absolute, and in this heady dichotomy of the mind you are without any ability to know why you're in it, or why you should or should not be. And of course, in this realm of confusion and total possibility, maybe it is even that embracing nihilsm and embracing of the divine universe and God, are the same "“I wish I was free/ Of that slaving meat wheel/ And safe in heaven dead”, Kerouac writes.
Do you know that feeling, your mind races and races in ecstasy, you are gathering more and more, understanding higher and higher, then suddenly bam, ouch, you can’t go any further in your thoughts and you feel like you’ve hit a great block and you and your mind collapse back down. This is the same thing.
This was going to be a word document where I did study, then it began to turn into a more general discussion of issues relating to Pascal’s Wager, then it has finally become a bare and meagre attempt to capture the chief philosophical problem that has occupied my mind this last year or two, and an attempt to better understand where my mind rests most generally. I have said to myself often these last few weeks ‘you’re stuck between nihilism and theism, nothing else’. This I guess has been an attempt to get at this a little more. It has not been a very good one, but I will admit it has been better than any I have accomplished so far in my life.
Two final comments to myself which are just complain-y:
-do other 18 year olds thing like this? Is it exceptional that your mind does this, or can do this, or strives to do this, this kind of thinking, as above?
-this is what sucks about studying philosophy where I am at in the study of philosophy. You... just talk about random dumb shit and engage in basic-as arguments where you simply take one simple position or the other, write 45 minute essays about something. I feel like all this stuff as above, I have to do myself, but you only have the spare-hours of your day to do it in, because you’re a student, and you’ve got to get grades and things, and your free-time is what’s left. Where you can read some real, full books, write some things. Ah I duno. I guess I am pleased that I’ve clarified my position more clearly to myself. I will continue reading, I know I’m just young and that there is so much more I need to consider here. Kierkegaard I feel will be a reasonable place to start, or as reasonable as any. So after exams, Kierkegaard it is. Then onwards from there.
And back to Moby Dick. Our mad and irrational Ahab after his whale... yet he still can’t get him... perhaps he was not mad enough...
Montag, 31. Mai 2010
I feel like everyone is blogging a large number of times tonight. Well, Sonya has blogged like three times today. and Wibur has blogged four. not that they know i know this and it might be strange indeed that i have made note of this. but it's not like i even use this as a proper blog. it's just like a big endless white scroll where I can dumb stuff, slash occasionally bring stuff out of. (like, out of the white. give the white form. but that's another story, another time, here's a note to myself to write it down, it involves white paper, wrenching, and the relative methods of Michaelangelo and Rothko for bringing form out of nothingness whiteness. which are both opposing (opposing in some senses, not all, of course) and which go around my head constantly. not constantly but often enough. i came up with the opposition last year. anyway.)
i feel kind of sleepy and underwhelmed at the world. i want to write about how strange and white the world is.
this blog post was just an attempt to keep up.
i feel kind of sleepy and underwhelmed at the world. i want to write about how strange and white the world is.
this blog post was just an attempt to keep up.
Le Petit Prince
I just pour my head out on here. It's such a mess but it feels good. Right now I should be thinking about my German oral assesment, but I was just thinking....
about interpretations. and understanding. and how for me in my own life, The little prince is a really intresting thing.
I think i first picked it up (I was given it as a present for my birthday (?) by the daughter of some french ambsadorial (sp.) official) when I was seven or eight. And I really enjoyed it. But just beacuse it was pleasant, and the little prince, he was a good guy, and becuase it was kind of magical and fantastical, and becuase of all this kind of thing.
Then I put it down for another I don't know, well, untill 5th form, when I was looking for an easy book to add into my reading log, becuase I was rowing first term, and had hardly any time, but we had a quota to fill. And I remember that time, I had decided it was all about the power and value of innocence and youth. We were reading a book about it at the time on class, and I guess that just shone though. The power of youth, even naivity (sp.), to see through the convoluted, even outright ridiculous adult world, to drive through to more absolute (absolute then I considered only in a positive sense) truths. and it was about what youth and innocence could show adults, even the stranded narrator, who himself declared his life to be not so much attached to any adult company as such.
Anyway I think I held onto that reading for a while following this, reading the book a number of other times over especially, I think, 6th form holidays.
Then I came back to it again thinking about schol. english. and by then I'd kind of grown quite a bit english-wise, and was able to concieve books in all manner of strange or novel or intresting ways. anyway I think it was because I'd done some psycho-analytical stuff for media, and if I didn't strictly attack Le Petit Prince in a Freudian sense, it was Freudian-esque. My reading there considered the whole thing in this way:
A man goes out into the desert. The desert is an isolated, silent place. It removes one from society, and gives one time to think. the stranded narrator has been stuck in this baren and silent desert for a number of days, and then the little prince comes along. Now I then saw the prince as the re-awakening, the re-arrival, of the narrator's subconsious, and of his childhood self (that self discussed in the first few chapters, the child who liked flowers, who could see boa constrictors in drawings of boa constrictors). The prince was a metaphor for this, and the journeying through the planets a re-visitation of experiences of the narrator's childhood. And he had come about because of the setting, the desert where the narrator was totally removed from society. And so, the dialouges between the two were really just an internal dialouge in the narrator's head. And I had so much more besides this, and to support it. For example at the end, or near the end, we have our illustration where the narrator tells us we may find the little prince too, this was the place where he found him. and the thing was, the image is totally non-descript, just two sand dunes and a star, from memory. which adds tothe thesis that anyone may come upon a little prince of thier own, if they head out into some isolated environment where they are removed from society. and it also is like, there is a definte truth, and there are true values in the world, if one just takes the time to sit, and look for them - they will become apparent.
anyway yeah. And now I feel when I think about it, it develops further still. For one I see for example the house in one of the early chapters with flowers and that, as an allusion to Proust (and ah, Proust, he is madly good, and I do want to return to reading him and his giant novel). And I also strart to convieve the prince/the entire story in much more religious/biblical terms. For I beleive it's true that in the bible, a lot of soul-searching was done in the desert, even by Jesus himself. And we have our snake, and we have the little prince, who, like Christ, is a monarch of a heavenly kingdom, is he not? At any rate, he is a prince/king, and he does come from another, higher world. And now I'm begining to concieve the prince as a sort of wandering, naive, passive (perhaps more passive than Jesus was) Christ like figure. In many obvious ways I guess, in his other-worldliness, in his affiliation with the desert, in his ideas about love, his ideas about the confusion/dissilussionment/lack of clarity etc. in society, with his planetary visits, etc., how he likes the old lamp-lighter more than any of the others. and i guess of course the biggest thing is at the end. the little prince dies, but he tells us he's not really going to die. (I'm doing this from memory but, it is something very much like this). He gives himself up to the snake, this metaphor in the bible of worldly evil, which I understand Jesus also gives himself up to (if this is not explicitly the intention, it is the case), but, as with Jesus, it's intentional in the sense that the little prince knows what he's doing, and also knows the ultimate outcome of the action, that he won't actually 'die'. And then there is the return hinted at, by the narrator himself, as discussed earlier. It's not to put forward the idea that The Little Prince is explictly even intended to be a Christ-like figure, but I think there are intresting parallels there, certianly at the very least right at the end, which is something i think i was very aware of actually from even my early readings. But like I said he's more meandering, and he's softer, and more naive.
who knows what I'll think next year. Thinking's always intresting. anyway, german oral assessment. this was a nice short and orderly post.
about interpretations. and understanding. and how for me in my own life, The little prince is a really intresting thing.
I think i first picked it up (I was given it as a present for my birthday (?) by the daughter of some french ambsadorial (sp.) official) when I was seven or eight. And I really enjoyed it. But just beacuse it was pleasant, and the little prince, he was a good guy, and becuase it was kind of magical and fantastical, and becuase of all this kind of thing.
Then I put it down for another I don't know, well, untill 5th form, when I was looking for an easy book to add into my reading log, becuase I was rowing first term, and had hardly any time, but we had a quota to fill. And I remember that time, I had decided it was all about the power and value of innocence and youth. We were reading a book about it at the time on class, and I guess that just shone though. The power of youth, even naivity (sp.), to see through the convoluted, even outright ridiculous adult world, to drive through to more absolute (absolute then I considered only in a positive sense) truths. and it was about what youth and innocence could show adults, even the stranded narrator, who himself declared his life to be not so much attached to any adult company as such.
Anyway I think I held onto that reading for a while following this, reading the book a number of other times over especially, I think, 6th form holidays.
Then I came back to it again thinking about schol. english. and by then I'd kind of grown quite a bit english-wise, and was able to concieve books in all manner of strange or novel or intresting ways. anyway I think it was because I'd done some psycho-analytical stuff for media, and if I didn't strictly attack Le Petit Prince in a Freudian sense, it was Freudian-esque. My reading there considered the whole thing in this way:
A man goes out into the desert. The desert is an isolated, silent place. It removes one from society, and gives one time to think. the stranded narrator has been stuck in this baren and silent desert for a number of days, and then the little prince comes along. Now I then saw the prince as the re-awakening, the re-arrival, of the narrator's subconsious, and of his childhood self (that self discussed in the first few chapters, the child who liked flowers, who could see boa constrictors in drawings of boa constrictors). The prince was a metaphor for this, and the journeying through the planets a re-visitation of experiences of the narrator's childhood. And he had come about because of the setting, the desert where the narrator was totally removed from society. And so, the dialouges between the two were really just an internal dialouge in the narrator's head. And I had so much more besides this, and to support it. For example at the end, or near the end, we have our illustration where the narrator tells us we may find the little prince too, this was the place where he found him. and the thing was, the image is totally non-descript, just two sand dunes and a star, from memory. which adds tothe thesis that anyone may come upon a little prince of thier own, if they head out into some isolated environment where they are removed from society. and it also is like, there is a definte truth, and there are true values in the world, if one just takes the time to sit, and look for them - they will become apparent.
anyway yeah. And now I feel when I think about it, it develops further still. For one I see for example the house in one of the early chapters with flowers and that, as an allusion to Proust (and ah, Proust, he is madly good, and I do want to return to reading him and his giant novel). And I also strart to convieve the prince/the entire story in much more religious/biblical terms. For I beleive it's true that in the bible, a lot of soul-searching was done in the desert, even by Jesus himself. And we have our snake, and we have the little prince, who, like Christ, is a monarch of a heavenly kingdom, is he not? At any rate, he is a prince/king, and he does come from another, higher world. And now I'm begining to concieve the prince as a sort of wandering, naive, passive (perhaps more passive than Jesus was) Christ like figure. In many obvious ways I guess, in his other-worldliness, in his affiliation with the desert, in his ideas about love, his ideas about the confusion/dissilussionment/lack of clarity etc. in society, with his planetary visits, etc., how he likes the old lamp-lighter more than any of the others. and i guess of course the biggest thing is at the end. the little prince dies, but he tells us he's not really going to die. (I'm doing this from memory but, it is something very much like this). He gives himself up to the snake, this metaphor in the bible of worldly evil, which I understand Jesus also gives himself up to (if this is not explicitly the intention, it is the case), but, as with Jesus, it's intentional in the sense that the little prince knows what he's doing, and also knows the ultimate outcome of the action, that he won't actually 'die'. And then there is the return hinted at, by the narrator himself, as discussed earlier. It's not to put forward the idea that The Little Prince is explictly even intended to be a Christ-like figure, but I think there are intresting parallels there, certianly at the very least right at the end, which is something i think i was very aware of actually from even my early readings. But like I said he's more meandering, and he's softer, and more naive.
who knows what I'll think next year. Thinking's always intresting. anyway, german oral assessment. this was a nice short and orderly post.
Samstag, 29. Mai 2010
Hello, mind! I thought I'd come back to you this saterday night. I still can't fucking spell saterday. E or U? I try and remember but I can't ever sort it out, there are just some things you can never fix up in your head. Like I can never tell the difference between yellow and white. Or you know of course I can, but I can't ever say the right word for the right colour, no matter how hard I try.
Anyway. today is raining hard, and it has rained all week. it's been crazy, especially walking up and down to university, not being able to drive, not having any close by buses, and having only non-waterproof shoes. Rain is weird. Anyway, what Iwanted to do is sit down and finish off some off the stuff I've started on here recently and not finished. So now I'm going to spend like 2 hours or how ever long doing that. It's all muddled in my head now and I've got no idea where it will go and how it will come out.
(from thursday?):
and I think, we can't think everything at once, and everything is too much, and there is too much everything, and if we can't even properly understand people, how can we properly understand god. who is much bigger. But god understands everything. My diagram above is really courtesy of my history teacher last year, M. Savage. with some minor judgements, but essentially the same. We just had long off topic discussions in that class. so first understand X as god, Y and Z are humans. Savage's intrepreation/use of the diagram was about humans growing in understanding and acceptance, becoming more like God/Gods. so there, Z in an improvement on X. and it's like over time, as humans have grown in knowledge, become more all embracing, societies become more and more accepting, we've expanded out. I've tweaked mine though, for it necessarily works in the opposite way. For a start, with pessimism, my Y and Z are much shorter, you can see. Of course, God, X, is infinite in all these cpacities, so there is no diagram that can be truely drawn to scale, but the realative sizes/size of advance between Y and Z is intended to be symbolic. humans are so finite in their capacities.
The diagram, the x axis part of it, can be put in a number of ways. acceptance is one, as stated above. God accepts all things, people, etc. etc. but humans are not so good at this. they get angry. or want to challenge things. etc. etc. granted, some people are alot better at acceptance than others, but still understand, in relation to X, they are only Zs. This is my view, anyway. In a Christian sense, Love I think is a good one for the x axis. Jesus loved everyone, I understand. I mean I don't know anything about these things, and I know like in Michaelangelo's painting, in revelations, he was getting pretty angry, but I think I have the jist, you know. Anyway, unconditional love. Humans, though, find it so difficult to unconditionally love everyone else. to give unconditionally. to accept everyone in all thier different states. that's hard. but they should try. stretch thier arms out, as it were, and you see the diagram works that way too (if I had mad paint skills, I could have made the ends of each line hands, the lines themselves even arms, you know. it works like that. acceptance, love, understanding, knowing. we can only go so far. and it's not very far at all. and I think they're all intertwined as well. to understand everything is to love everything is to accept everything. to understand the beauty in every action! the ecstacy in every action! the beauty and god of all the world (and then side note, that starts going down a pantheistic track)! To have no hate, but to love even hate, or those who hate, or create hate in the world, unconditionally. Is Leonard Cohen's 1964(?) 'Flowers for Hitler' about that? Maybe, probably, the Jew writing a book for Hitler like that, hmm. I'll hunt it down one day, but I understand it's not easily avaliable. I really don't know where this is going. There are so many sides to everything. I come back to that basic line of Keats everyone knows, with the truth-beauty beauty-truth, and that like above, the stuff before intoducing Cohen. But at the same time this point of view is terribly nilhistic, in the sense that you go down that path, where if you love everything and everyone equally, you assign then an equal value to everything. That value could be an infinity, but it could just as easily be a zero. and then you are a nihlist. and the removal of varying values, oh, I am totally confused and totally confuse myself! And loving God? But do you need to love God more than say John down the street? Or is loving John down the street loving God? And can you love John if you don't really do anything nice for him really, just.. I don't even know? And even if he's mean, and kicks cats? It's crazy to accept him as you accept other people. But no it's wrong because, you should also say that if, if you unconditionally love him, properly, properly, he'll fall out of chaos in his head and stop kicking cats and see the light, as it were. becuas ehe doesn't really want to kick cats, he's just gone a bit crazy coz of something, and he's probably rather unset inside. anyway you don't love him for kicking cats, you just love him. and then he comes to love. but then the world is proposterous! humans can't love that much, they'd go mad! things become stagnant and pleasant and you want again, chaos, madness, change difference violence primal chaos. it's true. there are alot of questions about everything. I think loving unconditionally's an intresting topic. I remember savage telling us about trying to embrace the idea, going to parties, people telling him that they liked his jacket, and he just giving it to him. and then his like life spiraled down. maybe that's no proper loving unconditionally. but then what is? And how does equal assignment of values work? And surely loving people who kick cats the same as you love your best friend, or God, is crazy. it works somehow but. you know. and anyway this all proves the point that our line thing of understanding is so small. it's the whollleeee point.
So we come back of course, of course, to art, as a tool for stretching our arms wider. Being able to grab hold of more of the world, to embrace more of it, to take more of it in. as a tool for saying more than statements, more than just i duno. more than philosophical essays.
i want to cut back into what i was writing last whenever I was writing this, in links up, it links up, everything's the same, everything's the same:
Nausea. By Sarte. I haven't read it at all, but I want to, but I understand it's the same - there's a guy trying to write an autobiography right, some of the book is this anyway, and he can't he can't capture a person, in words. And it's a problem with language as much as anything, language's inability to encompass. it's neccessarily singular, specific, made for dealing with this world. I want to read Wittgenstein on language but, quite reasonably, I think, think I won't be able to understand it. so in place of language, what is there? Gestures? Eyes? paintings? Silence.
The only way we can think is with language. and language can not encompass everything, and it is impossible to fully get inside someone else's head with only language as a tool to get in, and it is impossible to get inside the world by thinking about it. and fuck, this is the sammmeee as bellow. and it's the same as a thousand people have thought before. and this is why people become monks and renounce language to come to know God, and understand and accept the world, and this is why (some) people take drugs, and drink, to stop thinking, and to just fall into swing with the 'drunk world' (see bellow), and this is where automatic writing/drawing comes from, not thinking, just creating, that sleeping subconious understanding seeping out into art, and this being considered more profound, and closer to X.
and I give up going down this path, and I cut back in here, and no worries with all the cutting and changing, becuase really, it's all the same threat of discussion:
there are pictures, but not as powerful as books for me, more engagement in books... but painting may work for painter, a process of intense and beautiful ecstatic creation of art and I think writing would work best for a reader, too. poetry as a great naked process of learning and understanding, but in a swirlier way (see bellow) that manages to get closer to a truth than a direct assult (philosophy) or silence (meditation). it's a human lunge in the dark at X. which is multiply interperetable and defineable, as below, that X. my head is stagnating. I need some new idea to think, new fictions to read. I will finish Dost. then on to something new. I think Bolano, I think and I want it to be so, but I'm not sure. but onwards. I should also be studying for university.
Anyway. today is raining hard, and it has rained all week. it's been crazy, especially walking up and down to university, not being able to drive, not having any close by buses, and having only non-waterproof shoes. Rain is weird. Anyway, what Iwanted to do is sit down and finish off some off the stuff I've started on here recently and not finished. So now I'm going to spend like 2 hours or how ever long doing that. It's all muddled in my head now and I've got no idea where it will go and how it will come out.
(from thursday?):
and I think, we can't think everything at once, and everything is too much, and there is too much everything, and if we can't even properly understand people, how can we properly understand god. who is much bigger. But god understands everything. My diagram above is really courtesy of my history teacher last year, M. Savage. with some minor judgements, but essentially the same. We just had long off topic discussions in that class. so first understand X as god, Y and Z are humans. Savage's intrepreation/use of the diagram was about humans growing in understanding and acceptance, becoming more like God/Gods. so there, Z in an improvement on X. and it's like over time, as humans have grown in knowledge, become more all embracing, societies become more and more accepting, we've expanded out. I've tweaked mine though, for it necessarily works in the opposite way. For a start, with pessimism, my Y and Z are much shorter, you can see. Of course, God, X, is infinite in all these cpacities, so there is no diagram that can be truely drawn to scale, but the realative sizes/size of advance between Y and Z is intended to be symbolic. humans are so finite in their capacities.
The diagram, the x axis part of it, can be put in a number of ways. acceptance is one, as stated above. God accepts all things, people, etc. etc. but humans are not so good at this. they get angry. or want to challenge things. etc. etc. granted, some people are alot better at acceptance than others, but still understand, in relation to X, they are only Zs. This is my view, anyway. In a Christian sense, Love I think is a good one for the x axis. Jesus loved everyone, I understand. I mean I don't know anything about these things, and I know like in Michaelangelo's painting, in revelations, he was getting pretty angry, but I think I have the jist, you know. Anyway, unconditional love. Humans, though, find it so difficult to unconditionally love everyone else. to give unconditionally. to accept everyone in all thier different states. that's hard. but they should try. stretch thier arms out, as it were, and you see the diagram works that way too (if I had mad paint skills, I could have made the ends of each line hands, the lines themselves even arms, you know. it works like that. acceptance, love, understanding, knowing. we can only go so far. and it's not very far at all. and I think they're all intertwined as well. to understand everything is to love everything is to accept everything. to understand the beauty in every action! the ecstacy in every action! the beauty and god of all the world (and then side note, that starts going down a pantheistic track)! To have no hate, but to love even hate, or those who hate, or create hate in the world, unconditionally. Is Leonard Cohen's 1964(?) 'Flowers for Hitler' about that? Maybe, probably, the Jew writing a book for Hitler like that, hmm. I'll hunt it down one day, but I understand it's not easily avaliable. I really don't know where this is going. There are so many sides to everything. I come back to that basic line of Keats everyone knows, with the truth-beauty beauty-truth, and that like above, the stuff before intoducing Cohen. But at the same time this point of view is terribly nilhistic, in the sense that you go down that path, where if you love everything and everyone equally, you assign then an equal value to everything. That value could be an infinity, but it could just as easily be a zero. and then you are a nihlist. and the removal of varying values, oh, I am totally confused and totally confuse myself! And loving God? But do you need to love God more than say John down the street? Or is loving John down the street loving God? And can you love John if you don't really do anything nice for him really, just.. I don't even know? And even if he's mean, and kicks cats? It's crazy to accept him as you accept other people. But no it's wrong because, you should also say that if, if you unconditionally love him, properly, properly, he'll fall out of chaos in his head and stop kicking cats and see the light, as it were. becuas ehe doesn't really want to kick cats, he's just gone a bit crazy coz of something, and he's probably rather unset inside. anyway you don't love him for kicking cats, you just love him. and then he comes to love. but then the world is proposterous! humans can't love that much, they'd go mad! things become stagnant and pleasant and you want again, chaos, madness, change difference violence primal chaos. it's true. there are alot of questions about everything. I think loving unconditionally's an intresting topic. I remember savage telling us about trying to embrace the idea, going to parties, people telling him that they liked his jacket, and he just giving it to him. and then his like life spiraled down. maybe that's no proper loving unconditionally. but then what is? And how does equal assignment of values work? And surely loving people who kick cats the same as you love your best friend, or God, is crazy. it works somehow but. you know. and anyway this all proves the point that our line thing of understanding is so small. it's the whollleeee point.
So we come back of course, of course, to art, as a tool for stretching our arms wider. Being able to grab hold of more of the world, to embrace more of it, to take more of it in. as a tool for saying more than statements, more than just i duno. more than philosophical essays.
i want to cut back into what i was writing last whenever I was writing this, in links up, it links up, everything's the same, everything's the same:
Nausea. By Sarte. I haven't read it at all, but I want to, but I understand it's the same - there's a guy trying to write an autobiography right, some of the book is this anyway, and he can't he can't capture a person, in words. And it's a problem with language as much as anything, language's inability to encompass. it's neccessarily singular, specific, made for dealing with this world. I want to read Wittgenstein on language but, quite reasonably, I think, think I won't be able to understand it. so in place of language, what is there? Gestures? Eyes? paintings? Silence.
The only way we can think is with language. and language can not encompass everything, and it is impossible to fully get inside someone else's head with only language as a tool to get in, and it is impossible to get inside the world by thinking about it. and fuck, this is the sammmeee as bellow. and it's the same as a thousand people have thought before. and this is why people become monks and renounce language to come to know God, and understand and accept the world, and this is why (some) people take drugs, and drink, to stop thinking, and to just fall into swing with the 'drunk world' (see bellow), and this is where automatic writing/drawing comes from, not thinking, just creating, that sleeping subconious understanding seeping out into art, and this being considered more profound, and closer to X.
and I give up going down this path, and I cut back in here, and no worries with all the cutting and changing, becuase really, it's all the same threat of discussion:
there are pictures, but not as powerful as books for me, more engagement in books... but painting may work for painter, a process of intense and beautiful ecstatic creation of art and I think writing would work best for a reader, too. poetry as a great naked process of learning and understanding, but in a swirlier way (see bellow) that manages to get closer to a truth than a direct assult (philosophy) or silence (meditation). it's a human lunge in the dark at X. which is multiply interperetable and defineable, as below, that X. my head is stagnating. I need some new idea to think, new fictions to read. I will finish Dost. then on to something new. I think Bolano, I think and I want it to be so, but I'm not sure. but onwards. I should also be studying for university.
and chop and change:
I was thinking when I first discovered, first realised, the meaning of the term ecstacy. I don't know where it was, or how, probably maybe in the later stages of reading on the road, but my first memory related to it is in art history class, 7th form. the memory is neccessarily vauge, but it's just a feeling, a sense, with a dim image, and i just remember knowing what ecstacy meant. and another memory just similar of sitting in bed, and the dim image related to it is me looking up at my Smiths poster. madness.
I remember first reading Whitman's line (in some place or other):
"I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least"
and is it patheism or not, by the way, that quote? When I first saw it, I jumped, yes it was, but I don't know if Whitman would have thought similarily, and I think that in his mind was a rather christian sense of god, and can christianity recognise God in a pantheisic sense? In some respects yes, I think.
I remember when I was little, and hearing, coming to hear, that 'God was inside everyone' (something like this). And I always pictured a little minuture man (you know that classic media representation of God) inside your stomach, and the devil was there too I think, and they were just chilling, and I found it very weird. like if you had an x-ray and then you could see inside and there they would be.
and what is the holy spirit, and does it inhabit everything, and can it be understood in a patheistic sense?
I'm starting to grow attached to the characters in the brothers karamazov, or have, rather, to Aloysha, and Mitya. and have a bunch of affection for that Kratorskin (sp.) kid.
and there are no no new ideas in the world! where are the new ideas! i DON'T SEEM TO BE ABLE TO FIND ANY!! this is why i want to read the savage dectives next, perhaps it will have some new ideas for me. i also know there are some new ideas to be found in very complex philosophy, which is why I pursue it, shall continue to do so.
and books are swirly and they are great that they are swirly, to hold two contradictory opinions at once is to be god like, to hold an infinite number of contradictiory opinions at once is to be God, and for a human to hold wholly contradictiory opinions at once he is insane, and illogical, and this god, god is illogical, in that he is not logical, and logic is a human thing, a human thing, and do not criticize god becuase he does not add up in human terms, and this is why people get drunk, and they are illogical when they are drunk, and they are swirlier, and they are closer to God, and maybe it's all just a big mind-trick, and remember that, remember that. but the first part is true. to whole heartedly be a a national supporter and a labour supporter at the same time is to come to understand god, if you can come to understand this of course, but of course, of course, you cant do that! becuase humans are designed to be rational, and logical, to take one course of action, to make decisions, it's all about survial, survial, and yet yet! there's this other side of us! this strange other side, that other animals, that rocks & plants for sure, don't have, the illogical side, and as Dostoyevsky says, what principally distinguishes us from animals is our ability to curse, and so maybe God lies in curses!
and see how that doesn't make any sense! and see how that is and isn't the point! and see how we cant get enough things in our heads, becuase our heads aren't made for it! and see how essays are silly, and to hold an opinion on anything is silly, and that books and paintings are better because thier swirly systems can hold more, can reach further than us alone, can jam pack more into them that makes them fit to burst, and means you can't write a silly english essay about them at all, without totally and completely mis-representing them!
anger and hilarous laughing.
Whitman:
"And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes."
"Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever."
I think I love most of all those last two lines, especially "And I leave them where they are". beautiful.
and oh gosh, there are more things to write about. when I'm in a more logical frame of mind, I want to write about the problem of 'irrational' (again, the term is used to bring out the fact that must be accepted, that faith is not rational, in that it doesn't rely on emperical evidence, strong conclusive conclusions, etc.) faith.
Ah.
And I just think I should chuck in at the end, more stuff in my box of drafts, because I'm not going to come back to it, it's just me, tiredly writing a few weeks back about importiant dreams. Good bye and oh gosh, this was the worst blog post of the lot and it had the lest sense in it and it's a mess. it's clarity is completely gone, everything is murky and ridiculous. anyway here:
Ah, my head hurts from so many things. I don't know, no one else, no one else! Where are you all, where are these people!
I had a dream last night, I think it's going to be one I'll really remember. There are not many like that, but they're importiant, and I'll have to get them down on paper some time. And dreams are so hard to get on paper. you just have snatches in your mind, images, words, peoples eyes, colours...
I hate how I write.
I'm sitting in Critical Thinking class, up the back, and this girl comes up to me. She's young, with big eyes, and younger than you should be if you're at university, I later learn she's 15 (so she says). I'm sitting up there packing up my things, and she comes up to tell me, and she tells me that my reasoning abilty is 'seriously flawed'. That I can't construct logical positions. Now I think it's because she's so young, and at university, which I assume means she must be pretty bright, which leads me not to just ignore her but demand why, why, what she means. I'm genuinely worried, and there's something inside of me that suggests she might be right. But she doesn't say anything, just smiles and laughs, and runs down the steps of the lecture theatre and pushes open the door. Of course I'm following, and I catch her in the hall outside. But she won't tell me anything, just looks at me with big eyes, I ask how old she is, what she means, she just runs off.
We run, I'm increasingly frustrated that I can't get any answers, I'm growing tired, we wind through the corridors, end up, eventually, eventually, in a brick garden, by which I mean it's a garden with a grass lawn, but with brick steps and brick flower beds with tall flowers in them, and specifically there are delphiniums, and maybe bluebells. We are still in the university (the bricks I think give that away to me) but there might be faeries is that kind of garden. So I've caught her but all she talks is nonsense, out-of-breath nonsense when I ask her questions about why she thinks my arguements aren't logical, why she thinks that I can't posit reasonable theses. She doesn't have any answers, she just keeps giving me these silly suggestive smiles and is near-panting for having been out of breath. I finally gather she's 15 and some sort of brilliant genius girl. She says something about that what I write is just silly, it's made up, it's just me playing games, and that I should try writing something serious. Everything I write doesn't actually make sense if you look at it she tells me, and she can see that. This annoys me as she's hardly being serious herself, she's just paying games, but at the same time I know she is right about something there. And all the time the central images/colours are the bricks (slightly mossy), the delphiniums, her big wide suggestive laughing-eyes, and a certian roundness of her face. Oh, and her name's Olivia, for whatever reason. And all the time I'm so frustrated I can't get clear, sensible answers out of her, she can't logcially form an argument to tell me my argument-forming is inadequate. And all the time at the back of my head too there's my two essays I'd just about killed myself writing the last three days before that friday (which is of course why this dream was happening). And she's just laughing, and talking nonsense, but I know what she's saying is sort of true, and it must be, because she's a 15 year old genius girl. She might finally grab my hand at the end there, I'm not sure.
It's all also because I picked up Yates again, too. that's the faeries and the delphiniums part.
Freitag, 28. Mai 2010
Sleep madness
High ho!
High ho!
Eating fire all Night?
there's no cure for that
silly girl –
eating fire's a profession,
see it through!
Don't mince meat your words,
put poetry in your soup
vocabulary in your handbag's
dangerous,
silly girl –
put down your Rimbaud,
your Shakespeare, too!
Don’t you want to straighten your
hair girl, to learn to mime,
stopping the chase and
slowing, slowing?
Silly girl –
and madness is fine,
this that, that this.
Sifting thoughts wildly
through your
no-sleep night sieve,
I see you’re still awake
silly girl –
why not bed,
why not peace!
High ho!
High ho!
Eat fire all Night
there's no cure for that
silly girl –
eating fire's a profession,
see it through! see it through!
_______________________________________________________
sleep and silliness. I'm sick of university, as usual. so I'm up at 2am watching documentaries on art that I illegally downloaded and writing some random shit (see above). I have like, ALOT, of blog posts that I have started and haven't finished. I've got a new intrest in van Gogh, who never really got through to me before, too much boldness, too brash, strokes too big and bold, I thought. but there are some things in there I have just been made to notice. i'm tired. i wish winter were warmer. i want to go back to europe.
High ho!
High ho!
Eating fire all Night?
there's no cure for that
silly girl –
eating fire's a profession,
see it through!
Don't mince meat your words,
put poetry in your soup
vocabulary in your handbag's
dangerous,
silly girl –
put down your Rimbaud,
your Shakespeare, too!
Don’t you want to straighten your
hair girl, to learn to mime,
stopping the chase and
slowing, slowing?
Silly girl –
and madness is fine,
this that, that this.
Sifting thoughts wildly
through your
no-sleep night sieve,
I see you’re still awake
silly girl –
why not bed,
why not peace!
High ho!
High ho!
Eat fire all Night
there's no cure for that
silly girl –
eating fire's a profession,
see it through! see it through!
_______________________________________________________
sleep and silliness. I'm sick of university, as usual. so I'm up at 2am watching documentaries on art that I illegally downloaded and writing some random shit (see above). I have like, ALOT, of blog posts that I have started and haven't finished. I've got a new intrest in van Gogh, who never really got through to me before, too much boldness, too brash, strokes too big and bold, I thought. but there are some things in there I have just been made to notice. i'm tired. i wish winter were warmer. i want to go back to europe.
Samstag, 22. Mai 2010
Drinking
Abraham Cowley (1618-67)
I think I have no other home than this
I have forgotten much remember much
but I have never any memories such
as these make out they have of lands of bliss.
Perhaps they have done, will again do what
they say they have, drunk as gods on godly drink,
but I have not communed with gods I think
and even though I live past death shall not.
I am rather forever bondaged fast
to earth and have been: so much untaught I know.
slow like great ships often I have seen go
ten priests ten each time round a grave long past
And I recall I think I can recall
back even past the time I started school
or went a-crusoeing in the corner pool
that I was present at a city’s fall
And I am positive that yesterday,
walking past One Tree Hill and quite alone
to me there came a fellow I have known
in some old times, but when I cannot say:
Though we must have been great friends, I and he,
otherwise I should not remember him
for everything of the old life seems dim
as last year’s deeds recalled by friends to me.
Okay so, there's stuff there that doesn't even fit what's above. but alot of it does. but hey, the world is so complex and everythnig is so complex but everything is so simple but at the same time complex and so you know. I just like that poem.
I also have a note here that I want to write down:
-an interpretation of romeo and juliet related to the above -- R&J youthful buzzing dionysisian agents, as such, with the friar App.+Dion., with the perfect (near perfect) balance and as the central character and the one with the greatest understanding of the world as it is
-things about WB Yeats
-60s as a base culture as the Greco-Roman one was.
-ideas on creation
-etc. etc.
sleep.
Abraham Cowley (1618-67)
The thirsty Earth soaks up the Rain,
And drinks, and gapes for drink again.
The Plants suck in the Earth, and are
With constant drinking fresh and fair.
The Sea itself, which one would think
Should have but little need of Drink
Drinks ten thousand Rivers up,
So fill'd that they or'eflow the Cup.
So fill'd that they or'eflow the Cup.
The busie Sun (and one would guess
By's drunken fiery face no less)
Drinks up the Sea, and when h'as done,
The Moon and Stars drink up the Sun.
They drink and dance by thier own light,
They drink and revel all the night.
Nothing in Nature's Sober found,
But an eternal Health goes around.
Fill up the Bowl then, fill it high,
Fill all the Glasses there, for why
Should every creature drink but I,
Why, Man of Mortals, tell me why?
[After the Greek of Anacreon]
Ah so. where am I. the idea of this is that I'm going to release my mind from thoughts it has, and then I'll be able to sleep. I liked this poem. I thought it was a good metaphor for some of the things I think about, one side of my thoughts. It's like... like before really, like down bellow (every thing's the same). Becuase humans have consiousness, and all that jazz, more than anything else in the world, they are detached from it. They think about it, consider it, map it, plan it, analayse etc. etc. etc. right. and but the world, the world doesn't do that. it just is. it just buzzes. it doesn't have life or death or any of those human definition things. it just is. you know that idea. anyway I think that's buddhist thinking. you know, and you let go of life and death, you pantheistically embrace the buzzing world, and try and sink into its drunkenness? This is also the philosophy (theology? haha) of quality druggies. Quality like, they've got a goal there like that, they're not just smoking etc. to ingnore thier problems and that. My god this is terrible. I just need to write untill I sleep. but you know. I want to quote at random and then go on:
From my english text book:
"the first [the truth of fiction is not neccessarily true] is actually a venerable insight. Aristolte's teacher, Plato, banned most fiction from his republic becuase, he claimed, it enevitably distorted the truth. Plato beleived that absolubte truth did exist, yet in another world from our own. the things of our world for plato were shadows of that other one, and, accordingly, the things of the worlds of representational fiction were shadows of shadows. In this view, anyone who says of a novel "How true!" is decieved. For some time now, and especially since Neitzche, much theorising about representation (though not all) has had to do without Plato's idea of Absolute Truth. In this view, the world we seek to get to with no hope of finally arriving, is, paradoxically, the actual world we inhabit and the life that goes on in it. to put this in narrative terms... if narative discourse always mediates story, both story and discourse in turn mediate how we view the world. Narrative, with all its powerful and distorting rehotric, comes between us and the world. -- H.Porter Abbott.
Replace 'narrative' with 'consiousness' or 'language' or 'thinking' (all are one in the same and interlinked, of course) when it makes sense to do so.
I wrote along side this: "the sober human's inability to get inside his drunk world. He thinks too much. Alchol, drugs are bad in a sense, they impair rationality. but X is irrational. Moby Dick is irrational."
that's what I do in english, which is why I do philosophy. anyway everyone knows these ideas a thousand times over, but I'm just setting them out for myself in my head, straight, and digging deeper into ME.
Anyway so yes. On National radio the other day there was a BBC documentary on silence. and they went to monastaries, christian and buddhist and other religions like them. and the idea of silence, and that silence is penetrating into the world/god (/ they are the same thing, depending on where you sit -- the christian god is in another world, a distinct and higher one, the buddhist one is as I understand just, you know, it's pantheistic) and removing language, and thought, and consiousness, and narrative (thank you text book on narrative) to crawl inside the drunk world and huddle up, and just hum.
It was intresting though, of course, becuase then they talked to people who were'nt monks, but still religious. And the buddhists, they were all for as much sitting around being silent as possible, but Christians, of course, well Jesus talked to people. The Word is also rather importiant to Chirstianity. you know, just a bit. And they were like, Jesus found silence importiant, he went off into the desert to say Hi to God etc. but he also went amoung people and had a few chats and told them a few tales and that. and there was good and God and beauty there too.
anyway fuck I'm totally out of it. i can't bring together ANY OF MY THOUGHTS. it hurts. I'm just tired. I'm not truely inspired. but I want to get everything out. out out out out.
to continue. Nietsche and art. Art is to neitsche the combination of that drunken dionysian oneness with the world(/God) and the appolonian. Which is the human consiousness. He talks about something like the 'dream' side, which is like, humanity's ability to envsion, to plan, to map out, to have a wider image of how one can bring disperate things together into one, which is art. to utilize the buzzing force of the world and unify it, or was it to be inspired by the dionysian drunken world, and unify our perceptions of it. it's something like that. Anyway you see fuck, this is why I need to finish his book on the matter, and read so many other books. Do you know how many books, how many ideas there are out there! I loved loved loved how Dostoyevsky explains that in the Russian Orthodox tradition, people aren't said to have 'died' they are said to have 'fallen asleep in God'. Isn't that beautiful! doesn't it just fit perfectly! I think it's great. these are the only ideas that exite me anymore. I was thinking that you know I mean, you read that stuff all the time "all you can do is live life to the full" or "take every opportunity you get, make the most of life", but that stuff has never ever worked for me. And I like like Dostoyevsky sort of says, it's all christianity for atheists. it's all a cult around man, not god. but it's whack i reckon.
anyway to continue neitsche, neitsche's claims about art are part of what make humans better than being plants of animals. becuase they, as Cowley's poem indicate, live within and totally emersed in the buzzing drunkenness. And we don't. we can know it, come to experience it temporarily, maybe for longer periods of time though drug use, or meditation, silence, etc. etc. but not fully be there, be can't just be it, just like I said, know it, which is a typically human thing, right, to know things. But on the otherside we have this other power, the ability to unify, to bring together, to, you know, to THINK. and I'm not sure what I think about thinking yet, but it seems to be quite intresting powerful etc. etc. gives us a bit of an advantage. it ddoes lead to ART for example, which is rather powerful/intresting thing. and I think it's what D., or at least his Elder Zosima, talk about when they recognise the specialness of humanity. the ability to think, the ability to think FREELY (to the extent that it is possible) may lead to great sin, and great evil even, but also to great good, and greater, greater something, than can be had without it. and thinking brings trouble, but it's a trade off. Did Jesus (in christian tradtion) give people free thought? Ivan argues he did, or at least that he rejected the idea of bringing them under some sort of control.
And humans have all sorts of things that other things don't. They go wandering for instance. what a beautiful idea. and oh fuck, we don't even have to start considering how this all links to KEROUAC, becuase of course it's ALL kerouac. crazy wandering buddhist/catholic art creating apoloinan/dionysian human. too influential in my life and thinking. at the same time mad though, far on the dionysian side. there's alot to say there. Neal, Neal, was too much of the dionyisian, too much in communion with the Gods, that he would never have enough of the appolonian to create truely great ART. to be truely human (for maybe to be the truest human is to create the truest art) but Kerouac, kerouac could always pull it back. right on the brink of the abysis of dionysis, and having Neal shout up things from its depths, he did a good job. And there are men far more on the applonian side too. and the greats, the greats, the true greats, maybe they're somewhere in the centre. Shakespeare, Goethe, Mozart.those guys. just, maginifficent. no words even, right? limitless powers, almost limitless powers. Dylan is highly dionysian, he moves over too, the first ablums, espc. that disgusting times they are a'changin', are v. appolonian. he swings alot. he's a mad man. he drove himself wayward too, drugs etc.
I want to end with R.A.K. Mason, who is finally someone from New Zealand who I do actually love. he's mainly a 1920s fellow. didn't write alot, wrote alot of crap, but what's good, i like. Here the metaphors/similies/illusions have changed... but the message sis similar. the earth for example here is not drunk and godly, but is the human realm. obviously this is becuase it's strongly located within the christian sense of the way the world is. but anyway:
Old Memories of Earth
I think I have no other home than this
I have forgotten much remember much
but I have never any memories such
as these make out they have of lands of bliss.
Perhaps they have done, will again do what
they say they have, drunk as gods on godly drink,
but I have not communed with gods I think
and even though I live past death shall not.
I am rather forever bondaged fast
to earth and have been: so much untaught I know.
slow like great ships often I have seen go
ten priests ten each time round a grave long past
And I recall I think I can recall
back even past the time I started school
or went a-crusoeing in the corner pool
that I was present at a city’s fall
And I am positive that yesterday,
walking past One Tree Hill and quite alone
to me there came a fellow I have known
in some old times, but when I cannot say:
Though we must have been great friends, I and he,
otherwise I should not remember him
for everything of the old life seems dim
as last year’s deeds recalled by friends to me.
Okay so, there's stuff there that doesn't even fit what's above. but alot of it does. but hey, the world is so complex and everythnig is so complex but everything is so simple but at the same time complex and so you know. I just like that poem.
I also have a note here that I want to write down:
-an interpretation of romeo and juliet related to the above -- R&J youthful buzzing dionysisian agents, as such, with the friar App.+Dion., with the perfect (near perfect) balance and as the central character and the one with the greatest understanding of the world as it is
-things about WB Yeats
-60s as a base culture as the Greco-Roman one was.
-ideas on creation
-etc. etc.
sleep.
Montag, 10. Mai 2010
I like to lie completely naked
on my bed at two am
listening to Mozart.
it's a good time for
it, becuase you start to breathe
Mozart, even start to speak like him,
violins here, french horns do this,
cellos go 'hum hum huh!', that's it,
you got it.
*
I'm sleeping on my front tonight.
it's change, it's peace,
it's back pain,
(feeling, not losing it), it's about trying
to reshape reshape reshape
which is meant to lead to more something,
more capacity perhaps,
more
capacity for something.
*
far away stars out the window kill me,
pow pow pow.
I crawl back into cold sheets nakedness humanity,
eating into sleep, gnawing,
waiting for a poem to come.
________________________________________________
I'm just bored.....
this needs fleshing out, most of it needs to disappear, i know, i know. I just can't sleep. I'll be back here later, later, later, again later... fuck.... haven't slept in ages tirednesss..... go away.....
on my bed at two am
listening to Mozart.
it's a good time for
it, becuase you start to breathe
Mozart, even start to speak like him,
violins here, french horns do this,
cellos go 'hum hum huh!', that's it,
you got it.
*
I'm sleeping on my front tonight.
it's change, it's peace,
it's back pain,
(feeling, not losing it), it's about trying
to reshape reshape reshape
which is meant to lead to more something,
more capacity perhaps,
more
capacity for something.
*
far away stars out the window kill me,
pow pow pow.
I crawl back into cold sheets nakedness humanity,
eating into sleep, gnawing,
waiting for a poem to come.
________________________________________________
I'm just bored.....
this needs fleshing out, most of it needs to disappear, i know, i know. I just can't sleep. I'll be back here later, later, later, again later... fuck.... haven't slept in ages tirednesss..... go away.....
Sonntag, 9. Mai 2010
I don't even have anything to say, I just can't sleep and thought maybe If I talked to myself a bit on the internet that might help, since I really need to sleep, since I have a german test tomorrow, and I need the whole good morning to study for it, since I failed to bring myself to do that tonight, and becuase right up untill friday I have to write two 2000 word philosophy essays due friday, and then have a speech exam again on saturday, and so all of this needs sleep and rest and to have slept when sleep was neccessary.
God.
I think also I'm supprised I'm writing on here for a third time. It must mean it's working. I thought as well it's about figuring out myself more, and mapping myself out a bit more.
I was thinking about how I never do anything without neccessity behind it. Given free time, I hardly do anything but sleep, or lye around and think thoughts, or go on the internet (which, seperate from the other two is not strictly becuase I want to, but becuase it's like a kind of mind-sucking trap thing I find it so hard to just turn off and walk away from ,especially becuase it's right there, on a laptop, under my bed). About school work, and how I honestly have to stay up to 4am on the morning something is due to get it done. I don't have any desire at all to do it, and so I construct this mad construct where it's the day it's due, and I am dead tired, and then so this, only this, creates enough motivation to get something done -- it's due in a few hours, and you're dead tired and want to sleep so bad -- do the assignment and then you can. It doesn't make locial sense, it doesn't, and even when you know it doesn't make logical sense, when you could just have it done two weeks before and have it done, it doesn't happen. Why? It does mean you've got such an aversion to it, right? I mean, if I liked what I had to do, I probably would have had it done earlier. Last year I did somethings earlier. And I think it's coz I guess they were genuinely intresting. But not anything I'm doing now, an mostly not what I've had to do any other time either. Same with anything else and neccessity. Driver's licence? Don't need it. so I've never even got my learners. Not a suffiecient want at all. Mostly everyone else got thier learners, at least, especially by now, but I haven't. Dentist too is another I've just come aware of myself. I have to get a root canal at the end of the month, and now, only now is that sufficient motivation to start motivating myself to brush and floss twice daily (before that it's been sporadic). Mainly becuase I know my teeth are crappy to start with, I have plenty of fillings, and as I'm aware I may not have so much money as mmy parents do in the future, I won't just be able to keep paying for expensive (expensive!) dental treatments. Therefore, it becomes a neccessity to look after my teeth from now on.
But it's silly like that. But it's the way it is. I've tried to change how it is, but I can't. My head is so muddled, the battle so extreme, I can't manage it. I can stand still for minutes internally telling myself to go brush my teeth, logically everything's there, it makes total and utter sense to go do it, but after minutes of inertia, I just go and sit down and go on the internet, and have the back of my mind worry about it, and think that I should have gone and brushed my teeth. absurd! At times like that, I just want to smash my laptop, throw it out the window, be free. But I don't know if that would help. Dostoyevsky would call it 'human', knowing logically everything points to brushing one's teeth, yet having a very logical person reject this, go sit down and worry to themselves over and over again that they should get up and go to the bathroom, pick up the toothbrush and start, while all the time never doing this. it's absurd. And this is not to condone it, it's to try understand it more and more (although I'll admitt I'm not getting very far) and try and fix it. But it's tough, and weird. I don't know what it is. I feel like if I just got out of home and out of the country and onto my own a little better it would all work out, but I'm not sure, I'm not sure. Anyway I was thinking the same about writing. Everything is so much the same. About how I never write, becuase I don't need to. I don't. I can consider it, and then go to sleep, not do it, even if all lgical paths point to it. which is just how I work. no 'neccessity construct'. it's all so weird.
I've been watching Bukowski interview clips on youtube, and he talks about when you go out, and you can't, you can't bare the idea of a 9-5 job, and so you go out and you take 24 out of 24 hours of the day to yourself, and it means you starve, but it also means by neccessity, becuase you're refusing to pick up a 9-5 have the family over for birthdays and christmas go to the pub after work on a friday lifestyle, you've got to write, and write well, publishably well, or you'll die. It's the only weird fucked up profession out there (or one of the few) where you can live like that. If you reject so much of that other stuff, or you can't bare it, you don't think you could live it even for a second, if you'd go crazy, then writing's what's there. and it becomes neccessity. I'm thinking I'd really like to try that. Not that it even might work. Just the idea of trying it, that's the sort of thing I want to do in my life. try things. to be able to go do that, just somewhere else, somewhere far away from here, find a tiny appartment somewhere and starve. it's mad. My only reservation of course is that I may end up finding more in the starving than in the writing, and give myself over to wasting away, because I've always (and ever increassingly so) had a thing for that. Brothers Karamazov is making me think about it alot, with so many monastic scenes going on, there's alot of fasting. It's like the final rejection of material pleasures. I think I wouldn't mind being a monk sometimes. I think it'd be very difficult, but I think solid as. Then agian of course, what is a monk ,and does one need to go into a monastary to be one, and are there things outside monastaries that are even more monastic than those inside. Didn't Kerouac embrace many monkish qualities? Oh, I don't know where I'm going with this. It makes me think of Kafka's 'A Hunger Artist' too, which was absolutely beautiful (Kafka is ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL!) anf which I had no idea what it was about but it was about a man fasting. and he died. there was more too it than that as well. OH, I just want to leave here. I hate university. I've got to say it to myself. I'm not learning a thing. But then we must say, in 4 weeks timester 1 teaching will be over, the majority at least if not all of 100 level 1st year will be over, and 200 level possibly will be better, and I shall keep my hopes up for that. I've just trailed off looking up random things on the internet, maybe there is so much more to say, but I think I'm tired enough now and possibly will be able to get some sleep. Oh, there are so many more things to talk about, and at the same time they are all such a waste of time. I also need to reply to few emails, or, more than a few...
God.
I think also I'm supprised I'm writing on here for a third time. It must mean it's working. I thought as well it's about figuring out myself more, and mapping myself out a bit more.
I was thinking about how I never do anything without neccessity behind it. Given free time, I hardly do anything but sleep, or lye around and think thoughts, or go on the internet (which, seperate from the other two is not strictly becuase I want to, but becuase it's like a kind of mind-sucking trap thing I find it so hard to just turn off and walk away from ,especially becuase it's right there, on a laptop, under my bed). About school work, and how I honestly have to stay up to 4am on the morning something is due to get it done. I don't have any desire at all to do it, and so I construct this mad construct where it's the day it's due, and I am dead tired, and then so this, only this, creates enough motivation to get something done -- it's due in a few hours, and you're dead tired and want to sleep so bad -- do the assignment and then you can. It doesn't make locial sense, it doesn't, and even when you know it doesn't make logical sense, when you could just have it done two weeks before and have it done, it doesn't happen. Why? It does mean you've got such an aversion to it, right? I mean, if I liked what I had to do, I probably would have had it done earlier. Last year I did somethings earlier. And I think it's coz I guess they were genuinely intresting. But not anything I'm doing now, an mostly not what I've had to do any other time either. Same with anything else and neccessity. Driver's licence? Don't need it. so I've never even got my learners. Not a suffiecient want at all. Mostly everyone else got thier learners, at least, especially by now, but I haven't. Dentist too is another I've just come aware of myself. I have to get a root canal at the end of the month, and now, only now is that sufficient motivation to start motivating myself to brush and floss twice daily (before that it's been sporadic). Mainly becuase I know my teeth are crappy to start with, I have plenty of fillings, and as I'm aware I may not have so much money as mmy parents do in the future, I won't just be able to keep paying for expensive (expensive!) dental treatments. Therefore, it becomes a neccessity to look after my teeth from now on.
But it's silly like that. But it's the way it is. I've tried to change how it is, but I can't. My head is so muddled, the battle so extreme, I can't manage it. I can stand still for minutes internally telling myself to go brush my teeth, logically everything's there, it makes total and utter sense to go do it, but after minutes of inertia, I just go and sit down and go on the internet, and have the back of my mind worry about it, and think that I should have gone and brushed my teeth. absurd! At times like that, I just want to smash my laptop, throw it out the window, be free. But I don't know if that would help. Dostoyevsky would call it 'human', knowing logically everything points to brushing one's teeth, yet having a very logical person reject this, go sit down and worry to themselves over and over again that they should get up and go to the bathroom, pick up the toothbrush and start, while all the time never doing this. it's absurd. And this is not to condone it, it's to try understand it more and more (although I'll admitt I'm not getting very far) and try and fix it. But it's tough, and weird. I don't know what it is. I feel like if I just got out of home and out of the country and onto my own a little better it would all work out, but I'm not sure, I'm not sure. Anyway I was thinking the same about writing. Everything is so much the same. About how I never write, becuase I don't need to. I don't. I can consider it, and then go to sleep, not do it, even if all lgical paths point to it. which is just how I work. no 'neccessity construct'. it's all so weird.
I've been watching Bukowski interview clips on youtube, and he talks about when you go out, and you can't, you can't bare the idea of a 9-5 job, and so you go out and you take 24 out of 24 hours of the day to yourself, and it means you starve, but it also means by neccessity, becuase you're refusing to pick up a 9-5 have the family over for birthdays and christmas go to the pub after work on a friday lifestyle, you've got to write, and write well, publishably well, or you'll die. It's the only weird fucked up profession out there (or one of the few) where you can live like that. If you reject so much of that other stuff, or you can't bare it, you don't think you could live it even for a second, if you'd go crazy, then writing's what's there. and it becomes neccessity. I'm thinking I'd really like to try that. Not that it even might work. Just the idea of trying it, that's the sort of thing I want to do in my life. try things. to be able to go do that, just somewhere else, somewhere far away from here, find a tiny appartment somewhere and starve. it's mad. My only reservation of course is that I may end up finding more in the starving than in the writing, and give myself over to wasting away, because I've always (and ever increassingly so) had a thing for that. Brothers Karamazov is making me think about it alot, with so many monastic scenes going on, there's alot of fasting. It's like the final rejection of material pleasures. I think I wouldn't mind being a monk sometimes. I think it'd be very difficult, but I think solid as. Then agian of course, what is a monk ,and does one need to go into a monastary to be one, and are there things outside monastaries that are even more monastic than those inside. Didn't Kerouac embrace many monkish qualities? Oh, I don't know where I'm going with this. It makes me think of Kafka's 'A Hunger Artist' too, which was absolutely beautiful (Kafka is ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL!) anf which I had no idea what it was about but it was about a man fasting. and he died. there was more too it than that as well. OH, I just want to leave here. I hate university. I've got to say it to myself. I'm not learning a thing. But then we must say, in 4 weeks timester 1 teaching will be over, the majority at least if not all of 100 level 1st year will be over, and 200 level possibly will be better, and I shall keep my hopes up for that. I've just trailed off looking up random things on the internet, maybe there is so much more to say, but I think I'm tired enough now and possibly will be able to get some sleep. Oh, there are so many more things to talk about, and at the same time they are all such a waste of time. I also need to reply to few emails, or, more than a few...
Mittwoch, 5. Mai 2010
Sleep is the main emotion at the moment. Music puts me to sleep. University puts me to sleep. Winter puts me to sleep (but so does summer). Toothache puts me to sleep, becuase you force yourself to be calm, and keep way more controled than otherwise. It feels strange to be so calm and empty, and good too. Panadol puts you to sleep too, I can so see how people can get really into panadol, I always want to take way more than it says you should, I enjoy it.
I was listening on the radio to day, about the dumbing down of university courses, worldwide. And it made sense.
What do University Proffessors want:
What do University Proffessors want:
a.) Time and energy to pursue thier own researches
b.) Simultaniously, to keep their teaching job; it's the income, and a good one too, the job being largely unregulated by other bodies and having low hours.
And what's an easier way to do this? Why, make courses shorter, simpler, easier, less complex/challenging. This works for both the above points:
a.) such a course takes less time to prepare, mark, etc. etc.
b.) such a course leads to higher student evaluations, rather than ones from failing students frustrated with a course.
Meanwhile, there really is little motivation to dedicate huge amounts of time and energy to your lectures/courses, other than, you know, personally holding the belief that you really want to attain teaching excellence, and inspire, challenge and motivate your students.
Now, of course it's an over simplied model, and there will be university proffessors out there who really do a fantastic job. Still, I do think the argument does indeed hold some weight. Especially from the personal perspective. I mean in Ethics at the moment, I know I'm falling asleep. And I know it isn't 'cause the topic's not intresting, it's becuase the lecturer is dreary, unmotivated, his slides and infomation basic, and just generally tend to veer away from any element of the issue that looks like it could be remotely challenging/intresting/controvertial. He just slowly speels out stuff you already know (but with bigger philosophical words attached, of course) over a 50 minute period. The worst bit too is that, there's no real attempt to, you know, offer a comprehensive set of perspectives on an issue. It's wholly bias, he is, the slides/selection of writers/material is, even the rest of the class is. We're doing Animal welfare/Environmental ethics, and there's been 5 lectures so far, and all we've heard is, don't kill animals, and save the environment. Sure, there have been a variety of different reasons for why this should be the case. I'll admit that. But over 5 lectures, only having 3 lines from one philosopher that provide any truely alternative perspective? That's just not on. And he trashed him. I thought he had some intresting points I wouldn't have minded hearing about. But oh well.
I think you compare it to school, where teachers (most of them, anyway) are passionate. They do want to be there, teaching. It's thier choosen career path, they've trained for it, they (again, most of them) sat down, thought about it, and sought it out. But philosophy professors? They trained to be philosophers. Same with any other academic. And the teaching? Well I'm sure most of them would be happier on research leave, without it. But that's not the same of secondary teachers. but hey, there you go. I thought it was intresting. And the whole make courses easier and easier thing, it's a continuous downward spiral. And it's mad. I duno. Anyway this was all about sleepiness. fucking tangentttttt.
Um. um um um. That's a sleeping noise. I am happy. I am stressed but then I forget about it and I am happy. then melencholyyyy. that's spelt wrong. I always think Joni Mitchell 'there's comfort in melencholy/ when there's no need to explain/ it's just as natrual as the weather/ in this moody sky today'. Just like that. I'm definitely sending Sonya that CD. Let this be a note to self right here. I have a spare copy, I just need to write a little letter about it, and mail it.
Fuckk, this all sounded way better in my head. It keeps deviating. If you intend things, they never go the way you intend. it's so weird. I want to stop intending things. But I think that involves ALOT of untraining. you know? You are conditioned, and I must admit I have conditioned myself, to think like that. plan things out. consider, judge, weigh up, analyse. It has some benifits. you do well in exams. There are other benifits too, inc. good jobs, ability to live a reasoned and pleasant existance, abilty to solve problems in your life, ability to help others better, ability to have greater stabilty. But I think I take it to extremes. I want to just go lie in the sand or something. Like this:
I so struggle to feel proper emotion. Like so I begin to feel something, like crying. That's not an 'emotion' persay, but I think it's a good example. See haha, it's funny if you say, I want to stop being over-anylitical' and the way you do that is by analysing, but ah, i have just now sat here and considered it, and i find it benificial to continue. So crying. so you start crying. and i think it's a pretty pure emotion, like, it takes a bit of build up to cry, and it should be quite a fairly fairly powerful experience. powerful in the right sense, you know which sense I mean. But like, I get there and I say 'is this really justified?' 'Are you at a level where you are truely this upset?' 'Are you just pretending?' 'Should you be upset about this?' 'Are you slightly out of kilter but then just driving yourself forward and indulging in crying becuase for whatever reason?' you know. And so you fail to feel the true emotion. the pureness of it. Becuase you're always pulling back, always asking questions. And if you're always doing that, well, it's a mess. You'll never get there. Whereever you want to go, you'll never get to feel something if you keep analysing why/why not/should you/ should you not be feeling/trying to feel it. That's the problem with philosophy too, you see? Generally anyway, in many cases. We are doing religion at the moment and, jezz, you're not going to get hardly anywhere sitting around and writing words (words!) and having arguments and reading what randoms from the 18th century have to say on the matter. At various points perhaps I should note, so as not to seem so absolubte on the matter, these have thier benifits. But overall, it is slightly absurd.
Everything is the same. FUCK, everything is the same. See how crying and god are the same thing? What is up with that. everything is the same thing. honest. watch. it's the same too, literature vs. philosophy.
Literature is like crying, and philosophy is still the questions. Literature delves in and bam. And it's confusing, and it's a mess, and you just feel it. literature should be anyway. I talked about it with Sonya. Now how did it go...
Mostly the difference was evidenced by looking at the process of writing english essays.
Now the idea of english essays, is to extract the ideas, themes, ideas, etc. etc. etc. from the book, and note them down in a logical form on paper, backing up all you've found with textual examples. Now that's absurd. Did i say this before? Because, if all there was in the book was this list of ideas and themes you were looking for, well fuck, just go read lists of ideas backed up by examples, it's called philosophy. One must note of course that one thing literature has over philsophy is this ability to engage the reader, relateble/perspective giving character etc. etc. and that's importiant, but still I think there's more than that. Becuase you can write about that, examine it, understand it. But there's something else, the core emotion you can't quite get hold of. I want to draw a diagram. It's like not word, no argument can capture anything of value. But like, in a mass of hundered of higgedy piggledy pages of book, swirling round and round, you can get somewhere, maybe. Not very far, to be sure to be sure, but perhaps somewhere more.
You can say 'beauty' but there's nothing there. same as you can say 'God' or 'crying'. And you can write an essay and say 'beauty is x y z becuase of x y z' and do the same for God or for anything else. And you can say 'Text A shows us that beauty is x y z becuase of textual examples x y z' But fuckkk, none of that is anywhere. hon-hest.
I duno. And again, this could be all just idealised pursuit of some imaginary shit that I have invented for fun and becuase arguments and explaining shit (stop explaining things!) can be so boring and hopeless. All you get is 'we don't really know anything' when it comes down to it. But hey, i dunoooo ehhhh. just know everything is fucking the same as everything else. Everything I think is the same.
Okay I sort of uderstand uploading shit and there's a diagram up the top. X can be a lot of things, let us know it as 'infinity'. It encompassess alot of shit. Then around the outside spiralling around, are things that represent words/questions/arguements/ ideas etc. etc. That's the model in my head atm for how books work. and everything in general. See language, which is all we have to comprehend things with, or not to comprehend, but to UNDERSTAND (in a scientific, academic, absolubte sense of comprehension, you know waht i mean, so you could write it all out with science and arguments and premisses n cconclusions and things) is finite, and is limited, and can never fully express. never FULLY. but you see like, it tries to. Notice how some dashes are closer to X than others. and it's like that. and you see everything is related. You can't ever know X, but you can infer its existance, and come to know something about, or of it, through the stuff round the outside. that's words for you. people try to get there. good writers do. or try to say something about the process. good monks do too. good bums or good psychopaths or good children or good old people sometimes do, too.
The other importiant thing about it is that it's irrational. the center. It lies outside reason. you see the problem with philosophy is it is about reason. no wait! okay I've got a better model. the first one is books. philososphy is the second one, lemme go draw it. okay shit they're just deleting each other. I'll upload them later. I don't know how to use computers properly. Let that be DIAGRAM II. Ah so much to say. That is for philosophy's assult on x. Note how say the first one is a book (literature book) and a whole book. and it's swirly wirly, like a book. And say philosophy one though, each set of lines is a sperate argument attempting to reach realisation of something. get somewhere. Get there. That's philosophy's style. Note of course, how it hasn't got there. Does anyone notice how after 2500 years of western philosophy (always remember we can speak only of the west, I think, and I just don't know enough about anything that the east thinks, they refuse to teach it at school, and almost all of university. ) it fails to answer any of the questions it poses. i duno, i'm losing my train of thought. My panadol is wearing off, I need some more more fucking more, soon soon. But humans are finite beings. And they're not perfect. And they can't. they cant get there. not with reason, not with rationality. which is their thing. it doesn't work. oh god, i know what i mean but i don't know if anyone else does. my tooth hurts. there are so many things to think about. anyway, the spiral does a better job, i think. but you've got to embrace it. And see the english essay thing, taking the spiral and linear-ising it doesn't work, it makes it all alot less effective. English essays are importiant, i should say, and i learnt a lot from them, but now, now, it's different. Creation is the construction of a glorious spiral. Actually everything is everything. Say if God created people, and God is the X and the people are the dashes in the spiral, and some are and get closer than others, and they can never fully concieve God, but they can get closer, and work towards it, and catch glimpses of God in thier world of crazy spiralling people, and it can make them happy. Fuck, there is so much to say. say how nature can fully embrace, and be x, becuase it doesn't think, it just is, and is for eternity. And humans are apart, and round the outside, and although they have consiousness, and rationality, it sure brings some problems. See how we break up plants to, we see each plant living and dying, and new ones, and ifferent types of plants, etc. etc. But really, like they say, it's just one big buzzing mass of neurons and protons and all that other shit. And that's what it is. But humans, they compartmentalise. And they break it down. And I tell you, it ruins the magic alright.
It's the apple too right. Say the X area in the spiral diagram is the garden of eden, and then people have been banished from paradise to the spiral of consiousness. that apple eh.
And then see how the garden of eden, and crying are the same thing!! these are the only things my mind thinks about. I reckon that J writer guy, he must have been pretty darn on to it back in the day. I know Harold Bloom rates him as being up there amoung some of the greatest of all time.
I really want to read 'Gravity's rainbow' by Pyncheon, you know. I do believe it's about trying to get to X, and not getting there, and that being rather funny. My only reservation is that i won't understand it, since grappling with the Crying of lot 49 was hard enough.
Okay, that's enough. I talk shit and make alot of typos I'm wayyyy too lazy to correct. at least for now.
Donnerstag, 29. April 2010
I'm getting to not sleep again. thought I'd come find this again, don't remember writing that which is below. what does that mean, "I'll see you in heaven," with just the comma and... ?I seriously don't remember writing that. But I like it. You see like, I get embarassed writing. I think alot of people do. Most people do. But I think it's not for a normal reason (or maybe it is, but I'm never going to know, am I).
So like, you read real poetry, and the stuff that you like, that's good, is good. you like it. But every time I read something by teenagers, I think yuck, I think pretentious, I think try-hard, I think vanity and hell you're only 16 and what can you know and don't you know what you're feeling, everyone's feeling, and yet you're elevating it to the level of heart-felt poetry ('poetry') and going on and saying to things, and trying to be clever about things, and trying to understand things, that 100 million other people have already gone through before. Vanity. And also in general, the banality of trying to, you know, to make sense of the world. ridiculous. So what i've got below I like. becuase it doesn't really make sense. And I don't think it's really trying to understand anything in particular. There's a bit of self-expression there for sure, a bit of typical teenage-depressedness which is a little difficult to escape, a little humour, a bit of trying to be clever (but it's not too clever, not so it seems too clever, you know) and a little nonsense which is also simultaniously the kind of 'but is it serious, is there really meaning, significance there' nonsense. It is like, in Hesse's steppenwolf, his Goethe goes "eternity is but an instant, just long enough for a joke". I don't know if that's a real Goethe quote or is Hesse was doing something trickier there, but all the same, it's sort of like that. The world is nonsense. I am nonsense. you are nonsense. And sense can never caputre man, becuase as soon as he realises he is acting sensibly, he will run from it, as Dostoyevsky will explain over and over again to anyone who reads him.
I also wanted to write here that I'm sick of university. Honestly like, it better get better. I feel like I'm growing, developing my mind, my thinking, my consiousness, my being, (my soul?) onwards and outwards, open-wards still, but I'm doing all the work myself. Using my own time to read novels, and wikipedia, and dedicating long tracts of time to thinking, just thinking. I'm building on my understanding, developing everything, coming to comprehend everything on a wider scale and come up with more satisfactory answers (or more appropriate, precise questions) (or coming to appreciate questions and answers can only get you so far) and that's good by me, that's what I've decided I want to be doing for I don't know, I good few more years at least. But then side-by-side to this, taking up so much of my day, are these absolubtlely ludicrous uinversity courses. All we do in English is microscopically break down books into little compartments with fancy greek and french names. why do we want to do that? it's weird. In philosophy all we do is look at one argument, then, look at another one, then say which one is stronger, better. I don't even get it. Nah like, and the arguments are so basic, and simplifed further for us in lectures after we've read them at home, because apparently we won't even be able to take in the whole thing as it stands on it's own (and this is actually true, as a class the average grade is a solid C - good one) but then like, even the whole process. I don't even see how you're meant to decide which is the better argument. I'm not sure how to put it, it's like, for example there's one guy, and he thinks you shouldn't kill animals coz they're like people, and so we should be nice to them. And then there's another guy, and he thinks it's okay to kill animals, coz they're not like people, they're different enough from us, and it's fine. And I mean what does that come down to? It comes down to wether or not animals possess the same qualities that are equivillent to the ones which dicate that we don't kill humans. That comes down to two things though then, or rather many things, namely say for example a definition of animal, of human, of why it is wrong to kill humans, of the qualities each respective party possesses, etc. And do we have an agreed definition for any of these things? why we don't kill people, for example? I don't think so. I mean we can link it to divine command if we wish, or to darwin and evolution, but still there's no concrete sort of set of reasons. Same goes for what a person is, or anything like that. You can see that just in the way that the two people arguing each side dissagree. They have for example different reasons for why we don't kill people. And both are perfectly valid, and of course, coz it's all realtive isn't it, why one person doesn't kill someone is different to why antother doesn't. And so where does that leave you? For me, I'd love to say then, okay, everyone just thinks differently, let's leave it at that, and kill animals if you think you should, or don't if you don't, it's fine. for me that's the sensible place to stop. rather than for exmaple in a 45 minute essay trying to see who has the better account for why we shoudn't kill people. I mean it's been thousands of years of philosophy, no one's ever come up with a reason everyone's happy with, (for the very reason of course, that it's all realtive, to a sufficient degree anyway) I, a 17 year old undergraduate student officially studier of philosophy for 6 and a half weeks aren't going to be able to do it. But that's the task. Granted I don't think it's what's expected of you. You're expected to ignore those big sort of questions, focus on petty details of some sort, which I can never quite identify accurately, becuase I jump straight to what surely are actually the key issues. Those however, you need years, and 10,000s of words to deal with, and so we ignore them entirely (? why? becuase most people would just fail if we tried, so, we don't?) and you'd have to go do a Ph.D if you want to get rewarded for thinking about them in any detail. Ah it's mad. Regardles of this anyway, even if you could ernestly place two sensible, sound arguments next to each other and easily see which was better than the other, two sure isn't enough. it's stupid, you don't get an acurate, true perspective at all. you hear two middle of the road views out of a million that probably exist (probably, yet I don't know, becuase we don't study them). Oh, it's all a waste of time. German's nice, though :)
My grades oscillate wildly. I hate it.
It's all just like my art history essay. I know it got a 3/8, and was the worst of the worst as far as my scholarship papers went, but it's still my favourite, and I think my most accomplished peice of essay writing that I've ever done. Sure a 32/32 Media paper is pretty, and it feels good, it does, and it was most-likely the most conventially pefect essay, intro body conclusion, simple socially consious politcally correct yet challenging argument posed and put forward powerfully and with sound structure in a single vien throughout the whole of each essay, but god it was boring, and I sure didn't believe the crap I came up with. grand conclusions about the role of maori in modern media, or the role of directors in shaping something or other, i can't even rember. no. conclusions are utter bullshit. How can you... you can't. You cant conclude things. it's like you know them, you understand them perfectly, you've solved all the problems, shown everyone how it really is in a neat little 1,500 word package, and there you go. you can't capture the world, even one aspect of it, like a media industry. you can't.
take a flower. you cant even capture a flower.
like this: 'flower'.
did that capture the flower? no, it didn't. even if one was to go 'the gorgeous red rose, serene in the evening sunlight, magestically rose above the other flowers of the garden' one can't capture the flower. Even in 'the blossoming rose, swaying ever so slightly in the oncoming brezze, almost teasingly, as if to say 'you may write about me in your notebook, but you should never understand me' drew my attention for a just second, before I was quickly called away to other business. Yet it left an impression that would endure for days, untill I retured to the garden the next time. (and so on and so on and so on) can't capture the flower.
even a picture of the flower can't capture it. Even seeing the flower, smelling it, touching it, all these, can very rarely result in fully comprehending the flower. there are too many things in the way. One can't ever be the flower, fully get inside its consiousness.
One could scientiffically descibe it certianly, probably in this modern day and age fairly accurately, but as we know it may just be missing something. In the scientific description for example, the flower can not talk. there are many issues like this that are oh so tricky to deal with (I'd like to deal with some, but no one seems to be able to tell me where to start, not even wikipedia).
Anyway art history. And this is what I wrote about, untimately. Set a whole bunch of ponsy arguments about the neccessity of art, the importiance of one formal element of another, etc. etc. etc. said God, look, they're all fine, fine arguements, and well well done to the men who wrote them certianly, well done, fine arguments. But surely the only reasonable conclusion one can really, and i mean really come to though, looking at all these fantastically absolbutely logical arguements, is that none of them really matter. They all make sense. and so none do. you see it's preposterous to have a model that explains the whole role of art in the world, or why we need art. It's ridiculous to claim that line is more importiant that clolour, or depth more importiant than form. are you mad? and to think you have this arguement, and so now it's all solved, and you are right, and we understand art now, and it's okay, and everyone can go to sleep and not worry anymore becuase it's okay art is solved? no, no no! I say, i say, if all of the arguments make sense, none do, and therefore we should just leave art alone, and stop trying to claim the absolubtle rightnesss of one arument or another, the importiance of one formal element of art over another, and just let art be. "There is no must in art, for art is free" wrote Kandinsky. I wrote it too. I got a 3. but it's a beautiful 3. If any of my essays were worthwhile, if anything in that year was worth while, along with reading heart of darkness and having Savage as a teacher, it was that.
Also, as a footnote, FUCK motherfucking having torrettes syndrome for making this take 5x as long to write as it should if someone just had normal hands and normal eyes and a normal fuckingggg brain that didn't have weird issues.
Also, I really want to read Moby Dick again already. it's my favourite, I swear, but I really don't have any idea what it's about. which is fantastic, right? Also, why isn't theology a properly accredited subject at school? Also, I thank the christian club I accidentially signed up to (long story, yes, but they were giving out free jandals) for sending me a free footnoted New Testament just randomly the other day. it's been helpful in reading Brothers Karamazov. see even saying you read books sounds ponsy. I want to just go and sit in the rain and be cold.
So like, you read real poetry, and the stuff that you like, that's good, is good. you like it. But every time I read something by teenagers, I think yuck, I think pretentious, I think try-hard, I think vanity and hell you're only 16 and what can you know and don't you know what you're feeling, everyone's feeling, and yet you're elevating it to the level of heart-felt poetry ('poetry') and going on and saying to things, and trying to be clever about things, and trying to understand things, that 100 million other people have already gone through before. Vanity. And also in general, the banality of trying to, you know, to make sense of the world. ridiculous. So what i've got below I like. becuase it doesn't really make sense. And I don't think it's really trying to understand anything in particular. There's a bit of self-expression there for sure, a bit of typical teenage-depressedness which is a little difficult to escape, a little humour, a bit of trying to be clever (but it's not too clever, not so it seems too clever, you know) and a little nonsense which is also simultaniously the kind of 'but is it serious, is there really meaning, significance there' nonsense. It is like, in Hesse's steppenwolf, his Goethe goes "eternity is but an instant, just long enough for a joke". I don't know if that's a real Goethe quote or is Hesse was doing something trickier there, but all the same, it's sort of like that. The world is nonsense. I am nonsense. you are nonsense. And sense can never caputre man, becuase as soon as he realises he is acting sensibly, he will run from it, as Dostoyevsky will explain over and over again to anyone who reads him.
I also wanted to write here that I'm sick of university. Honestly like, it better get better. I feel like I'm growing, developing my mind, my thinking, my consiousness, my being, (my soul?) onwards and outwards, open-wards still, but I'm doing all the work myself. Using my own time to read novels, and wikipedia, and dedicating long tracts of time to thinking, just thinking. I'm building on my understanding, developing everything, coming to comprehend everything on a wider scale and come up with more satisfactory answers (or more appropriate, precise questions) (or coming to appreciate questions and answers can only get you so far) and that's good by me, that's what I've decided I want to be doing for I don't know, I good few more years at least. But then side-by-side to this, taking up so much of my day, are these absolubtlely ludicrous uinversity courses. All we do in English is microscopically break down books into little compartments with fancy greek and french names. why do we want to do that? it's weird. In philosophy all we do is look at one argument, then, look at another one, then say which one is stronger, better. I don't even get it. Nah like, and the arguments are so basic, and simplifed further for us in lectures after we've read them at home, because apparently we won't even be able to take in the whole thing as it stands on it's own (and this is actually true, as a class the average grade is a solid C - good one) but then like, even the whole process. I don't even see how you're meant to decide which is the better argument. I'm not sure how to put it, it's like, for example there's one guy, and he thinks you shouldn't kill animals coz they're like people, and so we should be nice to them. And then there's another guy, and he thinks it's okay to kill animals, coz they're not like people, they're different enough from us, and it's fine. And I mean what does that come down to? It comes down to wether or not animals possess the same qualities that are equivillent to the ones which dicate that we don't kill humans. That comes down to two things though then, or rather many things, namely say for example a definition of animal, of human, of why it is wrong to kill humans, of the qualities each respective party possesses, etc. And do we have an agreed definition for any of these things? why we don't kill people, for example? I don't think so. I mean we can link it to divine command if we wish, or to darwin and evolution, but still there's no concrete sort of set of reasons. Same goes for what a person is, or anything like that. You can see that just in the way that the two people arguing each side dissagree. They have for example different reasons for why we don't kill people. And both are perfectly valid, and of course, coz it's all realtive isn't it, why one person doesn't kill someone is different to why antother doesn't. And so where does that leave you? For me, I'd love to say then, okay, everyone just thinks differently, let's leave it at that, and kill animals if you think you should, or don't if you don't, it's fine. for me that's the sensible place to stop. rather than for exmaple in a 45 minute essay trying to see who has the better account for why we shoudn't kill people. I mean it's been thousands of years of philosophy, no one's ever come up with a reason everyone's happy with, (for the very reason of course, that it's all realtive, to a sufficient degree anyway) I, a 17 year old undergraduate student officially studier of philosophy for 6 and a half weeks aren't going to be able to do it. But that's the task. Granted I don't think it's what's expected of you. You're expected to ignore those big sort of questions, focus on petty details of some sort, which I can never quite identify accurately, becuase I jump straight to what surely are actually the key issues. Those however, you need years, and 10,000s of words to deal with, and so we ignore them entirely (? why? becuase most people would just fail if we tried, so, we don't?) and you'd have to go do a Ph.D if you want to get rewarded for thinking about them in any detail. Ah it's mad. Regardles of this anyway, even if you could ernestly place two sensible, sound arguments next to each other and easily see which was better than the other, two sure isn't enough. it's stupid, you don't get an acurate, true perspective at all. you hear two middle of the road views out of a million that probably exist (probably, yet I don't know, becuase we don't study them). Oh, it's all a waste of time. German's nice, though :)
My grades oscillate wildly. I hate it.
It's all just like my art history essay. I know it got a 3/8, and was the worst of the worst as far as my scholarship papers went, but it's still my favourite, and I think my most accomplished peice of essay writing that I've ever done. Sure a 32/32 Media paper is pretty, and it feels good, it does, and it was most-likely the most conventially pefect essay, intro body conclusion, simple socially consious politcally correct yet challenging argument posed and put forward powerfully and with sound structure in a single vien throughout the whole of each essay, but god it was boring, and I sure didn't believe the crap I came up with. grand conclusions about the role of maori in modern media, or the role of directors in shaping something or other, i can't even rember. no. conclusions are utter bullshit. How can you... you can't. You cant conclude things. it's like you know them, you understand them perfectly, you've solved all the problems, shown everyone how it really is in a neat little 1,500 word package, and there you go. you can't capture the world, even one aspect of it, like a media industry. you can't.
take a flower. you cant even capture a flower.
like this: 'flower'.
did that capture the flower? no, it didn't. even if one was to go 'the gorgeous red rose, serene in the evening sunlight, magestically rose above the other flowers of the garden' one can't capture the flower. Even in 'the blossoming rose, swaying ever so slightly in the oncoming brezze, almost teasingly, as if to say 'you may write about me in your notebook, but you should never understand me' drew my attention for a just second, before I was quickly called away to other business. Yet it left an impression that would endure for days, untill I retured to the garden the next time. (and so on and so on and so on) can't capture the flower.
even a picture of the flower can't capture it. Even seeing the flower, smelling it, touching it, all these, can very rarely result in fully comprehending the flower. there are too many things in the way. One can't ever be the flower, fully get inside its consiousness.
One could scientiffically descibe it certianly, probably in this modern day and age fairly accurately, but as we know it may just be missing something. In the scientific description for example, the flower can not talk. there are many issues like this that are oh so tricky to deal with (I'd like to deal with some, but no one seems to be able to tell me where to start, not even wikipedia).
Anyway art history. And this is what I wrote about, untimately. Set a whole bunch of ponsy arguments about the neccessity of art, the importiance of one formal element of another, etc. etc. etc. said God, look, they're all fine, fine arguements, and well well done to the men who wrote them certianly, well done, fine arguments. But surely the only reasonable conclusion one can really, and i mean really come to though, looking at all these fantastically absolbutely logical arguements, is that none of them really matter. They all make sense. and so none do. you see it's preposterous to have a model that explains the whole role of art in the world, or why we need art. It's ridiculous to claim that line is more importiant that clolour, or depth more importiant than form. are you mad? and to think you have this arguement, and so now it's all solved, and you are right, and we understand art now, and it's okay, and everyone can go to sleep and not worry anymore becuase it's okay art is solved? no, no no! I say, i say, if all of the arguments make sense, none do, and therefore we should just leave art alone, and stop trying to claim the absolubtle rightnesss of one arument or another, the importiance of one formal element of art over another, and just let art be. "There is no must in art, for art is free" wrote Kandinsky. I wrote it too. I got a 3. but it's a beautiful 3. If any of my essays were worthwhile, if anything in that year was worth while, along with reading heart of darkness and having Savage as a teacher, it was that.
Also, as a footnote, FUCK motherfucking having torrettes syndrome for making this take 5x as long to write as it should if someone just had normal hands and normal eyes and a normal fuckingggg brain that didn't have weird issues.
Also, I really want to read Moby Dick again already. it's my favourite, I swear, but I really don't have any idea what it's about. which is fantastic, right? Also, why isn't theology a properly accredited subject at school? Also, I thank the christian club I accidentially signed up to (long story, yes, but they were giving out free jandals) for sending me a free footnoted New Testament just randomly the other day. it's been helpful in reading Brothers Karamazov. see even saying you read books sounds ponsy. I want to just go and sit in the rain and be cold.
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