Oh, The Heaviness

Three things feel heavy.

1. This essay that I am working on! “Art, Zen, and Intellectual Insurrection”! I’m starting to feel the flow of each section and to see how it will be a large and unified piece of writing. But it is still a little ways off from the serious writing part of it. I am almost done pulling quotations from The Principles of Art though. It is just such hard work pulling all these quotes. Just takes a lot of time to reread these things I’ve underlined and to determine which section they belong in. Plus, I’m actively grappling with each of the sections as I’m pulling quotations for it. So it isn’t just a simple process of pulling quotes and putting them where they belong. Because I also have to figure out exactly what each section is all about, what it is going to address, and how it connects to the sections before and after it. But I’m getting there. But I am pleased that I will be able to thread Goldman, Searle, Claxton, and Iacoboni in to this essay pretty easily. Collingwood is just so smart that their ideas all play a part. They all do specific studies that contribute to Collingwood’s more general study of art. Good stuff.

2. Work feels heavy! Carrying crates full of soda and bottled water feels heavy! Mean customers make me feel heavy! Especially because I have been sick and feel very weak. But hey whatever. I am doing a job. Today I had a huge rush of drinks come at me all at once and I was like boom boom boom lets do it. I was moving fast and I liked moving fast. I like moving fast. I should play some more sports. My friend wants to get tennis rackets. I think that would be a fun thing to do.

3. David Harvey’s book The Condition of Postmodernity feels heavy! It is always nice/jarring/hard to encounter a book that just feels out of my grasp. I am starting to make sense of it. But the bottom line is that Harvey has drawn my attention to my lack of understanding in several very crucial areas: economic analysis (like Marxism!), geography and knowledge of cities, and political analysis in general. Harvey sure does seem like a smart ass dude. No doubt. But I have been getting into Part III of the book, called “The Experience of Space and Time.” Fortunately I feel like I am understanding a lot of what he is saying in that part of the book. About space-time compression, and how people experience space and time in different ways from the modern to the postmodern. I didn’t understand part II so much, where he talked about how twentieth century capitalism transformed from a Fordist-Keynsian model to a more flexible model. What that means, I don’t know precisely. But it has something to do with labour being taken advantage of more. Core workers becoming less important, workers being exploited more. I have no clue. Such a challenging book. Glad I have made it as far as I have though, and I certainly can’t stop now! 240 pages in, 120 pages to go. Almost there. Should finish it this weekend at the latest hopefully!

Oh the heaviness! Being sick just makes everything harder. And my writing is getting heavy. My job feels heavy sometimes. And my reading is heavy. The first and the last are good. The middle is less good. But still good. Over and out.