Life

So funny, so unpredictable, so... there. I often forget to laugh and cry. I forget where to look in those special, secret places. I complain about things that I cannot change, and which perhaps should not even be changed in the first place. I feel alive, I feel it all ticking away. It's all a mess, but perhaps that really is how I like it. Jumbled. Fresh. New. Tough. Easy. All rolled up and hidden until you tuck in. And then an explosion of experience at the cost of some energy.

I keep meeting people and forgetting how to relate to them. I change a little with every new face, even though I want to be myself. Perhaps that's no bad thing. Perhaps I'm assimilating a little bit of them into myself, so I may carry them within me until I die. Nobody really knows who they are anyway, do they? We are amalgams of our parents to begin with, and we turn into amalgams of the people we meet and associate with, of people we love and hate, people who scare us and people we admire. We are influenced by the world around us - just remember to influence back. Give to receive, I guess. Share whatever you have, even though people don't seem to udnerstand. It's invaluable to learn to understand. Only then will we achieve lasting peace.

Little lily monster

There is something eerie about the whole idea of creating something that will last - indeed maybe even outlast you. I know the project I'm working on now will most likely rot away in some drawer in some library or on some obscure part of the Internet, but it might actually still be around when I'm gone, even if nobody reads it. That is the power of the written word; to connect time and space by reaching into the future with a crystallized image of what exists at the moment of writing. There is both stability and transience in this, both a movement and a single frozen frame. Reading texts by deceased people is paradoxical - the voice is alive but the body is dead. There is something ghostly about this, but it also invokes a sense of awe. Through writing, you may exist indefinitely.

This is why I hope that the project I'm working on now will be the last of its kind for me. It does not really come from my heart. Academic analysis is sort of like dissecting an organism. You discover how if functions, but the mystery is lost in the process, and sometimes even the life itself. There is the possibility of new thoughts and wonderful ideas springing to life from this method of rigorous examination, but honestly, I'd rather be the dissectee than the dissector. I'd like to do my analyses of texts in my own time, with no papers to be written and no people to be impressed by these. And then I'd like to create my own worlds, my own universes, and let the people who love to analyze have a field day exploring them. But most importantly, I want my work to be readable and enjoyable for the majority of people, without making it banal. In fact, by analyzing Ursula Le Guin's work, I've come to the realization that her style is very much what I'm aiming for, but until I've found my own voice, I won't be able to write anything worthwhile. This is the real conclusion from my work during the last year, but it's also one that you won't find in my paper, so what's the point anyhow? Yet as I write this, I see that this may very well have been the point all along.

So this is how it works. This is how I suddenly sit back and realize that I have found a way to connect many of the incoherent moments of my academic life together into something that points forward. Though I'm not religious, life does have an uncanny way of stringing things together. Or maybe the human mind has, and that is just a product of how we experience the world. Existential phenomenology holds that I am a product of my bodily experience combined with my ego, and that the ego cannot transcend the world itself. However, by adopting a presuppositionless starting point for analyzing human experience, it is still possible for us to transcend empiricist notions such as those produced by natural science, and arrive at the essence of things. I believe that the inexplicable interconnectedness of things is such an essence, and one that cannot - presently at least; we must never get too far ahead of ourselves - be explained empirically.

Life is a little lily monster. So small, so beautiful, so dangerous. Reach for it, and you might have to pay the ultimate price, but isn't that a risk we should all dare to take?

Day One

Funny how everything in my life has led to this very moment, isn't it? This insignificant evening of an insignificant day, in which I knocked my head against that of Emmanuel Levinas and lost miserably, only to be saved by the musical wall of force that is Sarah Slean.

This is day one indeed.

Everything branches from here. Levinas wrote "The phenomenological theory of being" when he was 24 years old. I'm 26, going on 27, and I have serious difficulty understanding him at all, even though I've been studying all my life. I'm getting my M.A. in English this summer, and I suppose that I could have told Levinas a lot of things he wouldn't understand, had he still lived, but when I compare my master thesis with his early works, my thoughts seem so utterly inferior. Reading his work stretches my mental faculties to the limit, and sometimes beyond. It's a humbling experience, but also a valuable one. I can recommend it, but I must warn you that it can be hard on the ego.

But I don't have the same passion for my thesis that Levinas obviously had for his work, and neither do I share his background in hardcore philosophy (not to mention the fact that he was a genius and I'm not ). This is important. I believe the lesson is that I must just do the best I can now, and then find my proper place in life as I go along. I honestly used to think that I was designed for the kind of academic thinking that the University revels in, but I feel that my mind is dying in there sometimes. I feel like there's too much information rattling around in my skull, and my own voice has been lost somewhere in the philosophical maelstrom. On days like this I feel like screaming that I don't understand and I don't give a damn about it. But it's over soon. Come August I will graduate and get on with my life. And then I'll see if my brain still works. I suspect it does. And I still believe there's something forming in there, that will eventually be written down.

Writing a master thesis is hard, hard work. Those who think that I'm slacking off should try it. I dare them. But it's also a privilege, a learning experience, and a milestone achievement that I will cherish when it's done. Right now I have trouble looking forward at all, though.

But then, paradoxically, Levinas, my tormentor, saves me. The concept of potential consciousness amazes me and comforts me right now. Like the existential discussion of whether falling trees in the forest make sounds when nobody is there to hear them, Levinas has his thoughts about consciousness and perception. "The object which we do not have actually in sight does not disappear from consciousness," Levinas says. "It is given potentially as the object of a possible actual consciousness." This means that even the things we have encountered and don't understand at present, or things that are not presently within our active field of consciousness, still have the possibility of entering into our consciousness later and then become understood. And the marginal and implicit contents of our potential consciousness still exist on our mental horizons, as Husserl called them. All we need to do is to find a way to turn our gaze towards them and illuminate them. This also gives us the opportunity, as Levinas says, of "going back to the same thing and reidentifying it." Both Husserl and Levinas agree that consciousness is thus not simply a case of the mind perceiving and relating to the actual, but to actuality surrounded by a sphere of inactuality on the verge of becoming actual. That is exactly how I feel at the moment. All I need is the power to reach out, and to look upon different parts of the horizon.

Be ready
I'm taking my seat
O lucky me