"I've never felt so overwhelmed," I deadpanned. "Classic Mitch," she responded.
That exchange illustrates- and is my strongest point of reference to- my slow acceptance of the disconnect between my own feelings and my uneven ability to impart them to another. At times I feel transparent; a palpable sense of self-revelation, which can be either blessing, curse, or both. Or neither.
Other times I feel opaque. This isn't to say that I exist in either one mode or the other- things are always more complex than that. Rather, and depending on the subject and the object, my sentiment ebbs, flows, dissipates and wells inside me in impossible to fully articulate or to understand.
And these feelings- perhaps more than their reception- are under semi-constant reevaluation from new vantages, as I assess the results of actions taken.
Though I may feel that my interlocutor may see right through me, or right past me, it is -- to my thinking-- maddeningly unverifiable. Maintaining a relationship is (shockingly) both a matter of the emotion of the subject, and the facility of relating that emotion to the other. It becomes a matter of language, as we speak of "love languages," and we unpretentiously talk of "being on the same page."
I think that language is important, but it is only a tool. I feel that emotion is important, but is useless when encased in the heart and not imparted. Communication is crucial in bridging the divide between persons, but the substance that is communicated in myriad ways can't be disentangled from the act of communication.
I think what is important -- beyond metaphysical speculation-- are the choices we make, and our ability to follow through on them as the results make themselves known.
This shit is hard.
Is emotion what matters in relating between the individual and something external to that individual? That marriage of selfishness and selflessness has to exist- but by what mechanism?
Connections, it seems, are punishingly difficult. Still- we make them all the time- or feel we do. Is that what matters?
Monday, December 13, 2010
Sunday, December 12, 2010
On The Other Hand
I may have been willfully misleading as to my intentions in creating this blog, both in my description of its tone and its scope.
I seem unwilling to break myself from an academic writing style. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this, but it does point to my level of comfort in this form of expression. Much of my life has been spent in an unquestioned and unexamined belief in the inherent superiority of this manner of imparting thought and emotion to the world.
Embarrassingly, I have only in the very recent past come to accept that expression takes legitimate form not only in written and verbal form other than the academic style I have so admired and sought to make my own, but in many MANY Many many extra-lingual or verbal forms. Photography, sculpture, music, painting, poetry, and many other mediums-- which I have never meaningfully explored-- I am obliged to accept these as perfectly as legitimate as any of which that I have engaged myself.
The reconciliation of this rather basic fact has occurred largely in conjunction with (and partially caused by) my return to a pursuit of academia. My question is this: if academic language isn't to be the standard, the apex of expression, then what is it's role? Why is it important? Why am I pursuing it?
More important for the purposes of this blog-- Why am I using it's structure to raise questions pertaining to its limits, its limitations, and its inadequacies? I think these are the questions that I will be exploring for the near future. However long that might be. For now, here is my all-to-simple postulate.
Sometimes it's just nice to be comfortable, even if you know that it won't and shouldn't last.
I seem unwilling to break myself from an academic writing style. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this, but it does point to my level of comfort in this form of expression. Much of my life has been spent in an unquestioned and unexamined belief in the inherent superiority of this manner of imparting thought and emotion to the world.
Embarrassingly, I have only in the very recent past come to accept that expression takes legitimate form not only in written and verbal form other than the academic style I have so admired and sought to make my own, but in many MANY Many many extra-lingual or verbal forms. Photography, sculpture, music, painting, poetry, and many other mediums-- which I have never meaningfully explored-- I am obliged to accept these as perfectly as legitimate as any of which that I have engaged myself.
The reconciliation of this rather basic fact has occurred largely in conjunction with (and partially caused by) my return to a pursuit of academia. My question is this: if academic language isn't to be the standard, the apex of expression, then what is it's role? Why is it important? Why am I pursuing it?
More important for the purposes of this blog-- Why am I using it's structure to raise questions pertaining to its limits, its limitations, and its inadequacies? I think these are the questions that I will be exploring for the near future. However long that might be. For now, here is my all-to-simple postulate.
Sometimes it's just nice to be comfortable, even if you know that it won't and shouldn't last.
Love and History
I have been in love, I think, at least twice. Neither of these experiences ended with the results I might have hoped for. Which is fair enough, in the last analysis. I best understand romantic love as among other things: an alogical and unverifiable feeling that the universe exists to facilitate your coming together, the marriage of selfish desire for the other with the selfless giving of oneself, and the desire to see and to feel the world through the other, to be unmetaphorically connected in to the other.
It is the last of these provisional definitions of love that I would like to draw from in this post. Everyone has written everything on love, and done a fantastic job of it on the whole. I don't intend on adding anything exciting to that corpus. I would rather address how I see my pursuits of love and of history as efforts toward a similar experience.
I hate uncertainty. I think that that sentiment is fairly universal, but people come to terms with it in diffuse ways. I have chiefly sought certainty through two somewhat broad avenues: people, and factual knowledge. If both of the last two sentences are true, then it is only fair that I have been deeply challenged on both of these fronts roughly concurrently.
I seek certainty in my connections with other people. When I find someone who I want to pursue, in any respect, I work hard to get to a feeling of being "on the level" with someone. Its tellingly inchoate, but that's always my desire-- and its less a spoken stipulation, and more a feeling that I get, and I hope I share. My own history has conditioned me to not expect to lose the important people from my life. I'm young and this is changing. It's forcing me to accept that I will lose people, some of them before I want and some that I never want to lose at all. And never on my own terms.
A recent conversation with my friend Tommi reawakened not so old memories of how history used to safely be a memorization game for me. I am an excellent memorizer, and very motivated. It kept history safe, a fairly unchallenging effort in learning what has happened. While I knew that there were different opinions on why things happened, historiographical debate was ancillary to my quest to know all of the "what's" available to me.
The intellectual leap that changed this game was my final acceptance-- kicking and screaming though it is-- that "history" or History, is not "the past". Rather, that history is merely the representation of the past based on laughably fragmentary evidence and is subject to perspective, bias, politics, power structures, the nefarious influence of historians own inner demons, romantic inclinations, memories, identities and myriad other inputs which vie for control of how we think of the past in unsearchably complex ways.
This acceptance of a post-modern understanding of history has left me feeling decidedly uncertain. Occasionally my quest for certainty has tried to find a back door by being certain that the my definition of history in the above paragraph is unquestionably true. No such luck. It seems that every foothold is a temporary one and that a certain sense of unquestioned certainty- a place to call home, and for home to last forever- is out of reach.
I am unable to avoid the connections between how I view the past in my own life, and in the life of the world. On the whole, this is a good thing, since the two aren't really separable, and it helps avoid the cognitive dissonance of compartmentalizing ones thinking. It has made it difficult to keep my personal and professional life separate. Everything is a double edged sward, I suppose.
I am unable to deny that our understanding of history is inexorably governed by perspective, and that objectivity is an impossibility, apart from achieving godlike transcendence. That I find this position rather untenable has left me in an awkward position. If that is true for history as a corporate exercise then how true it must be in my personal interactions. This has left me with various attempts to reconcile my acceptance of the impossibility of certainty, and my unending desire for it.
My best effort is in emphasizing the primacy of emotion. If a person, if the past, is not certainly knowable; if there is no set of indicators, no appeal to an authority that will let the mind rest, then in both cases I feel I must shift to feeling. The feeling of doing the impossible.
The Truth of the past is lost, our representations of it are incomplete, and even localized veracity is unverifiable outside of referencing sources which only demand more questions. A certain knowledge of the past, beyond unconnected snippets is as impossible as time travel; our ability to comprehensively untange causality is even more futile for the past as it is for the present.
Romantic love, with its inexplicable emotional intensity has the added problem of immediately requiring that temporal actions to a feeling that seems to defy time. As we reconcile living in love and living in the world, we face the constant reminder of a gulf of perception, experience, and sentiment which we can't overcome any more than we can physically be the other person.
In experiencing love, I long for the feeling-- intoxicating and ephemeral-- that the pedestrian alienation which separates two people has been bridged. Despite my awareness that the past is an abstraction, what I want from history is the same feeling. The feeling that I am envisioning and representing the world as it was, outside of my own perception. I seek the feeling that I can't hope for perfection, completion, or an all encompassing general exposition of all of the past-- that would be an exercise in recreation. But in my effort to understand a particular aspect of the past, I aim to have that same feeling of connectedness to something outside of myself, which I can't know, can't fully experience, can't be.
It is the last of these provisional definitions of love that I would like to draw from in this post. Everyone has written everything on love, and done a fantastic job of it on the whole. I don't intend on adding anything exciting to that corpus. I would rather address how I see my pursuits of love and of history as efforts toward a similar experience.
I hate uncertainty. I think that that sentiment is fairly universal, but people come to terms with it in diffuse ways. I have chiefly sought certainty through two somewhat broad avenues: people, and factual knowledge. If both of the last two sentences are true, then it is only fair that I have been deeply challenged on both of these fronts roughly concurrently.
I seek certainty in my connections with other people. When I find someone who I want to pursue, in any respect, I work hard to get to a feeling of being "on the level" with someone. Its tellingly inchoate, but that's always my desire-- and its less a spoken stipulation, and more a feeling that I get, and I hope I share. My own history has conditioned me to not expect to lose the important people from my life. I'm young and this is changing. It's forcing me to accept that I will lose people, some of them before I want and some that I never want to lose at all. And never on my own terms.
A recent conversation with my friend Tommi reawakened not so old memories of how history used to safely be a memorization game for me. I am an excellent memorizer, and very motivated. It kept history safe, a fairly unchallenging effort in learning what has happened. While I knew that there were different opinions on why things happened, historiographical debate was ancillary to my quest to know all of the "what's" available to me.
The intellectual leap that changed this game was my final acceptance-- kicking and screaming though it is-- that "history" or History, is not "the past". Rather, that history is merely the representation of the past based on laughably fragmentary evidence and is subject to perspective, bias, politics, power structures, the nefarious influence of historians own inner demons, romantic inclinations, memories, identities and myriad other inputs which vie for control of how we think of the past in unsearchably complex ways.
This acceptance of a post-modern understanding of history has left me feeling decidedly uncertain. Occasionally my quest for certainty has tried to find a back door by being certain that the my definition of history in the above paragraph is unquestionably true. No such luck. It seems that every foothold is a temporary one and that a certain sense of unquestioned certainty- a place to call home, and for home to last forever- is out of reach.
I am unable to avoid the connections between how I view the past in my own life, and in the life of the world. On the whole, this is a good thing, since the two aren't really separable, and it helps avoid the cognitive dissonance of compartmentalizing ones thinking. It has made it difficult to keep my personal and professional life separate. Everything is a double edged sward, I suppose.
I am unable to deny that our understanding of history is inexorably governed by perspective, and that objectivity is an impossibility, apart from achieving godlike transcendence. That I find this position rather untenable has left me in an awkward position. If that is true for history as a corporate exercise then how true it must be in my personal interactions. This has left me with various attempts to reconcile my acceptance of the impossibility of certainty, and my unending desire for it.
My best effort is in emphasizing the primacy of emotion. If a person, if the past, is not certainly knowable; if there is no set of indicators, no appeal to an authority that will let the mind rest, then in both cases I feel I must shift to feeling. The feeling of doing the impossible.
The Truth of the past is lost, our representations of it are incomplete, and even localized veracity is unverifiable outside of referencing sources which only demand more questions. A certain knowledge of the past, beyond unconnected snippets is as impossible as time travel; our ability to comprehensively untange causality is even more futile for the past as it is for the present.
Romantic love, with its inexplicable emotional intensity has the added problem of immediately requiring that temporal actions to a feeling that seems to defy time. As we reconcile living in love and living in the world, we face the constant reminder of a gulf of perception, experience, and sentiment which we can't overcome any more than we can physically be the other person.
In experiencing love, I long for the feeling-- intoxicating and ephemeral-- that the pedestrian alienation which separates two people has been bridged. Despite my awareness that the past is an abstraction, what I want from history is the same feeling. The feeling that I am envisioning and representing the world as it was, outside of my own perception. I seek the feeling that I can't hope for perfection, completion, or an all encompassing general exposition of all of the past-- that would be an exercise in recreation. But in my effort to understand a particular aspect of the past, I aim to have that same feeling of connectedness to something outside of myself, which I can't know, can't fully experience, can't be.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
an introduction
My friend Aron encouraged me to start a blog and put my thoughts down on binary. So, in what is a once every several years ritual, here goes.
I have very few promises to make concerning the nature of this blog. It's far safer to proffer ideas as to certain tendencies that I may follow as this vehicle takes shape. Safer still, I will give you a list of negative claims to start with.
I can't promise that I will post frequently. I have made concerted efforts in the past to keep the interested world involved in my life through this medium-- and have failed to keep my end of the bargain.
I can't promise I will be truthful. Occasionally I may attempt to bare my soul a tad. I can't promise that I will mean what I say-- which is, I think, distinct from being truthful. I'm not sure what I want from this blog. I'm not sure what it's purpose is. I hope that that will burgeon me forward rather than hinder me. Occasionally I might revel in my supple usage of English. From time to time I will almost certainly try to say something profound. I will check my comments with gusto when this happens.
Editing is a new animal to me. Only the very recent past has borne witness to a Mitch who writes several drafts in the effort to refine my thinking on a topic, and to better clarify my expression of it. I don't intend that the writing on this blog will exhibit such efforts. Not to say that I won't edit-- write and rewrite sentences in the attempt to find better words for my thoughts. The real point of this blog, I think? is a somewhat free-form outlet for lose ideas that would otherwise get lost in my mental clutter.
One can only hope I can be concise.
I have very few promises to make concerning the nature of this blog. It's far safer to proffer ideas as to certain tendencies that I may follow as this vehicle takes shape. Safer still, I will give you a list of negative claims to start with.
I can't promise that I will post frequently. I have made concerted efforts in the past to keep the interested world involved in my life through this medium-- and have failed to keep my end of the bargain.
I can't promise I will be truthful. Occasionally I may attempt to bare my soul a tad. I can't promise that I will mean what I say-- which is, I think, distinct from being truthful. I'm not sure what I want from this blog. I'm not sure what it's purpose is. I hope that that will burgeon me forward rather than hinder me. Occasionally I might revel in my supple usage of English. From time to time I will almost certainly try to say something profound. I will check my comments with gusto when this happens.
Editing is a new animal to me. Only the very recent past has borne witness to a Mitch who writes several drafts in the effort to refine my thinking on a topic, and to better clarify my expression of it. I don't intend that the writing on this blog will exhibit such efforts. Not to say that I won't edit-- write and rewrite sentences in the attempt to find better words for my thoughts. The real point of this blog, I think? is a somewhat free-form outlet for lose ideas that would otherwise get lost in my mental clutter.
One can only hope I can be concise.
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