December 2011
34 posts
“I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.”
—Lolita: A Screenplay, Nabokov
1 tag
WHY WOULDN'T WE WRITE?
One cannot think of the purpose of academic writing without thinking of the process of writing itself. As a method of situating ourselves in debates questioning the nature of ontology, philosophy, life, and meaning, writing helps to establish our sense of involvement in the complex world in which we live, thereby establishing, confirming, and developing our identities and sense of self. In...
“I didn’t become your other half so you could bear half of my misery.”
—Tablo
“You’re beautiful, but you’re empty. No one could die for you.”
—Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince
2 tags
“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them- if you...
“I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without history, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents: I used to believe in every kind of magic.”
—Arthur Rimbaud
YOKE
There’s something inherently true, or fixed about the way recursiveness manifests through days, months, years, other nebulous and constructed sequences of time—primary school, middle school, high school, college. Time itself seems less fixed, allowing for fluidity, a back and forth between experiences and thought: they are both no longer completely distinct. Mornings rush into late...
“Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s...
“So that each is its own, now—each has fallen, blond stillness. Closer, above them, the damselflies pass as they would over water, if the fruit were water, or as bees would, if they weren’t somewhere else, had the fruit found already a point more steep in rot, as soon it must, if none shall lift it from the grass whose damp only softens further those parts where flesh goes soft. There are...
3 tags
FISH ARE FRIENDS, NOT FOOD: THE FALLACY OF THE...
The lives of animals at first thought might not seem all that dissimilar to the lives of humans. We both have similar bodily needs (we need food and nutrients, sleep, oxygen), similar physiological systems (digestive, nervous), we both organize in groups, live in communes, hunt and gather for the sake of our families and the members of our society. Yet still, as a society and culture, we tend to...
“Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.”
—Charles Baudelaire
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz, or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: I love you as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself, and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose from the earth lives dimly in my body. I love you...
“Her eyes were the color of faraway love.”
– Pablo Neruda, The Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks
“All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons and preserves their quintessence’s.”
—Rimbaud
“Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from...”
– Clive Barker, An Existential Life:
4 tags
1: the thing about white dudes is that there are too many of them
makes it hard to stand out.
2: [laughs] I guess. But I think there's a willful determination to sublimate into the normative gender/racial category.
1: why is there a determination to do so? to avoid alienation? to find a lover?
2: Both I think. It's the whole phenomenology thing. Sharing likeness with other white guys solidifies and confirms their identity. Paradoxically it's insecurity used as a means of security
1: hence the making fun of each other. but everyone does that. white people are just more marketed to. the biggest consumer base, most susceptible to advertising.
that's an oversimplification but certainly a cause
you empathize with others based off the images you have a common, yet constructed and abstract stake in. ie what a hipster is/does.
2: Right. I mean as far as humor goes the poking fun of their white maleness phenomenologically solidifies their identity: by poking fun of that which makes them see more stereotypically white and male they deconstruct the categories (sorta) but simultaneously activate them.
Like it on one hand challenges but only ultimately reaffirms. It also establishes a local parameter distinguishing whether or not you're "in" or "out"
1: it's a defense mechanism though.
2: Right: by establishing a local parameter that inherently alienates people who differ they create security
2: Out od the insecurity and fear they have of facing difference
1: all true. it's ironic too. self deprecation. it's a joke with no punchline. hero to zero.
2: Right. What's "funny" is that they've put you outside of the parameters through simply acknowledging their existence.
2: It's also just an example of privilege and power
1: sort of. on that last point maybe the SL does that and is conscious of it thru their awareness of their own white guilt. I mean it's like everybody wants to be great but we are conditioned to strive after certain ideals of greatness. artist, intellectual, etc.
1: thing is you don't have to compete with other white dudes.
2: You lost me in terms of sequence.
1: but that depends on what you want. if it's girls then maybe. if it's white girls then definitely.
nope the points were not connected.
2: Okay. Right (I think)
1: for me. it's funny because I can define myself doing things tied to the identities of white male stereotypes (like being a music guy) but it isn't so much a part of my identity as it is for T (I can presume).
2: Yeah they're reliant on "external goods" to develop identity rather than primarily experience/felt things
1: but it's hard to be soft bro.
2: What?
1: it's hard to open up and be vulnerable. especially when you're told not to.
2: Yeah but I have little tolerance for people who don't see the benefits/necessity of being open and developing openness
1: yes. agreed. though it takes time and can be expressed through different means, like discussion or physical intimacy.
2: Absolutely
I do need to go and finish this paper. Maybe we continue this later tonight?
1: definitely. just lemme know.
2: Will do.
I am very much looking forward to the time when I can write unfettered and can treat my body well.
“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a...”
– Richard Buckminster Fuller
“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want...”
– Simone de Beauvoir
“Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.”
– Oscar Wilde
