Hello world wide web. I've been feeling more ancient than usual lately. I haven't really written more of these general posts since I made this blog. And I suppose I don't really need to . It's a space for me (I keep telling myself). There are no expectations and nothing that I am forced to do. I'm really just writing this on a whim. Posting a few paragraphs in a fit of procrastination over work that I should actually be doing.
Also I may have even quite a bit of chocolate.
Is there a subject matter? Anything specific that I wanted to say? Not really. I read a bit of Oscar Wilde this morning and it was so beautiful that I wanted to cry. It was for research purposes, of course. For one of my papers the lecturer has been unhelpfully vague about our upcoming essay. "I want you to write about a truth," he said. Which is seductive and lovely and also a massive headache because there are entire worlds of truth that I could write about but this is an Institution. And the university only pretends to love us, as much as I hate to say this. By in large as much as I'd love to wax on about poetry and truths, I also need to do well and get a good grade and go through all those motions that will make me "useful" to this crappy capitalist society.
So we'll see how this essay ends up. Hopefully I will find a harmony between truth and academic rigidity. A chance to encounter impossibility and write a page that isn't completely filled with structured, stilted, soporific sentences that really are just a bunch of rearranged words that have already been uttered in the exact same way by countless others before me. I hope that there will be an encounter with something chaotic and catastrophic, something that struggles to make its way to the surface, clinging to the edges, gasping with exertion. Something my lecturer told us in our first class: that we all already have passion. We all already have this passionate hatred or passionate obsession. It's already existing, it's already in us. But the point of significance is to hate what you hate well. Hate the thing diligently, thoroughly, give it all your critical research and give it all your commitment. Foster your already existing passion into something even more potent.
I have a class in an hour so I'm going to stop myself here. Maybe a bit of Wilde... just to commemorate.
"The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing."
- Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
Also I may have even quite a bit of chocolate.
Is there a subject matter? Anything specific that I wanted to say? Not really. I read a bit of Oscar Wilde this morning and it was so beautiful that I wanted to cry. It was for research purposes, of course. For one of my papers the lecturer has been unhelpfully vague about our upcoming essay. "I want you to write about a truth," he said. Which is seductive and lovely and also a massive headache because there are entire worlds of truth that I could write about but this is an Institution. And the university only pretends to love us, as much as I hate to say this. By in large as much as I'd love to wax on about poetry and truths, I also need to do well and get a good grade and go through all those motions that will make me "useful" to this crappy capitalist society.
So we'll see how this essay ends up. Hopefully I will find a harmony between truth and academic rigidity. A chance to encounter impossibility and write a page that isn't completely filled with structured, stilted, soporific sentences that really are just a bunch of rearranged words that have already been uttered in the exact same way by countless others before me. I hope that there will be an encounter with something chaotic and catastrophic, something that struggles to make its way to the surface, clinging to the edges, gasping with exertion. Something my lecturer told us in our first class: that we all already have passion. We all already have this passionate hatred or passionate obsession. It's already existing, it's already in us. But the point of significance is to hate what you hate well. Hate the thing diligently, thoroughly, give it all your critical research and give it all your commitment. Foster your already existing passion into something even more potent.
I have a class in an hour so I'm going to stop myself here. Maybe a bit of Wilde... just to commemorate.
"The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing."
- Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism