Expressing My Emotions, Exploring My Emotions, Structuring My Reading, Structuring My Learning

I'm still doing all kinds of work on this big essay tonight. I've actually made quite a lot of progress tonight. I've written about 10 pages since 7:30 or so.

Good stuff. Like to be making progress. I'll be posting the next section of the essay on here tonight. No doubt.

But I wanted to reflect.

For a while I was too wrapped up in the writing itself. I was concerned with summarizing the content and explaining why it is useful. All concerned and wrapped up with the abstractions themselves, with the structure of the abstractions themselves.

But that isn't the point. The point is two other things. First, the emotions that I'm feeling that led me to take on this writing project in the first place. And second, the process and the way the process structures my learning.

As for my emotions, they are generally about feelings of helplessness. I have told many people that I don't feel very free. I feel quite determined, quite trapped. And especially since I started working full time on September 7th 2010 I have noticed how free I am not. My time is occupied by work. I'm pulled towards feelings of monotony and repetition. I love my job and the people I work with. I have such a fun time at work. But at the same time I know that it is this routine that has the potential to pull me in, to rob me of my sense of nuance and novelty.

I try to live my life like a remix. Everyday I do many of the same things. I see the 'same' people, I make the 'same' drinks, I toast the 'same' bagels. But I have to wake up in the morning and feel like Ludacris and just go 'REEEEEEMIXXXXXX'. Cause sure, I'm doing the same thing, but it is different. So different.

I put the word 'same' in ironic quotation marks about because the truth is that they are not the same. They are different. Every day me and my co-workers are different people. Everyday I am making new drinks. Every day I am toasting new bagels. They are different.

But why think of them as the same? Because they are the same conceptually. Because I have labels for things and those labels rob them of their novelty, their originality. Concepts are to be overcome. They rob of us things. This is the violence of language that Zizek speaks of. It is the violence of labels.

So this project, despite its abstractness, is about me trying to maintain my sense of novelty and expressive while the world around me collapses into routine and perceived monotony. I won't have that. Not for a single fucking minute. It is always different. And that is all there is to it. This project is here to remind me of how everyday is different and how important it is for me to express myself everyday. I refuse to generalize about my life. I will particularize until I die. Unless generalization is useful, which of course it is. But whatever, I won't be pulled down by monotony.

And as for the second point, this project also structures my learning. It does this in two ways. First, it gives me a direction to take my reading in. Right now I am taking my reading in an explicitly political direction. I am doing this because I am preparing myself to write Part IV and Part V of this AZI essay. It makes me curious about books like Aesthetics And Politics which I am waiting for. It structures my reading and my thinking. Of course there is room for movement, but it gives me things to think about.

Second, it structures the questions I'm asking. It gives me questions to contemplate, gives me a direction for my thinking. In Part I I was asking questions like 'What is Collingwood's definition of art? What is the imagination? What is expression?' Part II, 'Why does this matter?' Part III 'How can I live an artistic life'? So on.

It gives me a structure for my questions. I am forcing myself to grapple with certain questions.

Who knows what it will amount to. The process is enough for now. And for a little bit I lost confidence in the value of the process.

Tickled

Poetry tickles me so much.

'Poetry'.

I'm not sure if it is appropriate to call it poetry, what I write.

I'm envious of people's knowledge of form. Of the technical side of it all.

I'd like to know about the technicalities of form.

I'd like to know what you know, Golub.

I was listening about that Renaissance stuff and I thought it was really cool.

I have this desire to work within confines. This desire for expression that is regulated by the conventions of a time.

But what are our conventions?

Is it possible to go off in prose? I guess so.

But for some reason clumps of lines feel so much different.

The form feels so different.

What is poetry? I ought to read something on poetry.

Something about form.

I want to read Hayden White's book The Content Of The Form. Would be valuable, I bet.

Never read a whole book by him. Only essays.

I'm doing some serious writing tonight on life as art.

I feel better and better about it.

Which is nice because for a while I wasn't.

Ahem: to Lil B and Others

The age of information I blew up but never grew up.

I'm collaborating with you and feeling your heart.

I suspect you are deep and I'm waiting to believe it.

I'll cook with you and roll with you and listen to you.

Shouts out to the East coast.

West Side.

I would never ask someone to look at me like that.

I would never ask you to tell me I'm weird.

I'll just want what I want and want want want.

A wave of desire swept away by more waves.

A wave of wave in this mirror of mirrors.

A big mind that hasn't become big enough.

A mind too relative to feel its isolation.

I've been referencing all kinds of things.

Because I want to share in their sharing.

It's a secret.

This repetitive noise.

This high pitched wave of sounds.

It tickles my ears and makes me feel pretty excited.

It makes me feel like a partial view from a bus.

Like a world obscured by an informative sign.

A frantic desire to feel the movement and to be the movement.

But just sitting with every care in the world.

I'll just sit with all the cares in the world

And tell you that I want to be like Nicki.

That I want to be like a samurai.

That I want to be the one to shut it down.

Shut the whole thing down.

Sit with me.

I'm very still.

I'm very still.

I'm very still.

I move real fucking fast.

A Meal

I cry when I chop onions.

Not because of anything about onions.

But because of everything about you

And the way that I fear your layers.

Just Wondering, Just Kidding

So I haven't been writing for this last week. A number of different things have been happening to me, some of them bad and some of them quite good. But in any case all of these developments in my life have made me feel reflective about my writing. About the things that I'm writing, about why I'm writing them, about what to do.

I'm reflecting on 2011 and what this will be all about. Probably should be about living and having fun.

But I'm also reflecting on graduate school, how that will pan out, where I should apply, how I should go about that, and so on.

So naturally the writing I'm doing now is a question for me. What is it all about? Why am I doing it? How is it contributing to what I'm doing?

My big project, AZI, is coming under some scrutiny for me. I am going to finish it. But I no longer feel that it represents everything I'm thinking about right now.

The questions that I'm posing are still very much up in the air. But I'm just starting to feel myself drawn to questions that are different. Political questions, sorta.

I actually would like to try and do some work on it right now. But I'm just checking in.

I'm also wondering why I put this writing out on the internet. Personal stuff, why am I sharing it?

It feels good to share my thoughts and feelings. So I'm just doing it.

But I wonder why. I'm not sure why. Perhaps because I hope for people to read my writing that I do in the future, so I might as well start now. Who knows.

200, two hundred, 200

1. I suppose this is a celebration.

2. An acknowledgement.

3. A reflection.

4. I've reached 200 posts and I find it to be a curious landmark.

5. There is something going on with my writing these days.

6. Something that I feel uncomfortable about.

7. Not that I think I'm doing anything wrong.

8. I'm just losing track.

9. Even as I'm writing this thing I feel a twinge.

10. I think about how I did this 100 phrases for 100 posts.

11. Now here I am doing 200 phrases for 200 posts.

12. Not sure how I feel about it.

13. I guess I just have lost track of why I'm doing anything I'm doing.

14. The working world sometimes feels less novel.

15. Routine gets to me sometimes.

16. Makes me feel locked into a cycle, a world, a pattern.

17. One that can be frustrating.

18. Writing about novelty.

19. Someone told me that frustration seems to be a consistent theme with me.

20. Seems like it these days.

21. But I'm not sure why.

22. I'm not sure what is happening to me these days.

23. What I'm feeling, I guess is what I mean.

24. I'm just not sure what I'm feeling.

25. Im going through a vague process of grieving.

26. For an actual family member lost to age.

27. And for the rest of my family that I'm now further from before.

28. I imposed the space.

29. But I'm not sure why.

30. Just to do something for myself.

31. But I'm not sure what I'm doing,

32. I'm sorry that this is just becoming a rant about confusion and frustration.

33. One structured by silly numbers none the less.

34. Am I really going to write all 200 of these little numbers?

35. Cause for some reason it doesn't feel very engaging to me right now.

36. It feels forced to me right now.

37. When I did this for 100 posts it felt strange and exciting.

38. I was still wrapped up in the writing I was doing.

39. And I'm still very much interested in the writing I'm doing.

40. But I just don't have a lot of faith in this current project.

41. Art, Zen, And Insurrection.

42. I don't really like the title very much anymore

43. I feel myself lapsing at work.

44. Lapsing in how engaged I am with customers.

45. Today I was just so very tired.

46. I was having too much fun this last week.

47. I was just so tired today.

48. I'm giving someone their change and I almost ask them how they are doing.

49. Then I simply feel the moment pass.

50. Last night I woke up at two in the morning and my arms were numb.

51. I looked around me because I thought that there was someone in the room.

52. I felt like there was someone in the room.

53. But of course there wasn't anyone in the room.

54. I was alone in a dark room like I usually am.

55. But my arms were numb.

56. I turned over on one side and looked into the room.

57. I tried to get the feeling to return to my arms but they continued to feel weird.

58. I don't know what was happening to me.

59. But I lied there for a little while.

60. I thought maybe my arms were cold.

61. So I put them under the covers.

62. I got too hot.

63. I put them out.

64. Then something happened and I managed to go back to sleep.

65. That was it I suppose.

66. That was all that happened.

67. Someone came to see me at work today.

68. I was telling her about it.

69. About how it isn't uncommon for me to wake up in the middle of the night and think that I see someone in the room.

70. I think my mind plays tricks on me.

71. Collingwood and Frith both have things to say about this.

72. About how the mind and the imagination are positive and constructive.

73. They build reality.

74. Sometimes a pile of clothes looks like a woman sitting in the corner.

75. Sometimes a bush looks like a girl standing outside my window.

76. One problem I have with my writing is how much it resembles these instances of weird imagination.

77. My writing just pops up and I follow it.

78. I just think certain things and then they develop themselves on paper or on word documents.

79. Then I pursue them.

80. I keep looking at them and I keep writing them and they change and I change.

81. But I don't like how beyond my control it seems.

82. Or how little I understand what it is that I'm doing.

83. I think things and then I tell people about it and then they think totally different things about it.

84. I suppose in theory I'm okay with only having access to my own perspective.

85. But in reality I am troubled by it.

86. I don't understand why I see from the perspective that I do.

87. Why I think things are the way that they are.

88. They are okay.

89. Things are fine.

90. I feel happy.

91. And at the same time I don't.

92. I just have been so tired the last couple days.

93. Too much partying.

94. I can hardly keep my focus on writing all these numbered statements.

95. I can't keep my focus because I don't like doing it.

96. But it appears as though I'm going to keep doing it.

97. It doesn't look like I'm stopping.

98. It appears as though I'll hit the halfway mark with resolve to keep going.

99. Sometimes I like to force myself to write.

100. To not let my fingers stop.

101. Because I'm curious about what will come out.

102. But right now I don't have much resolve for honesty.

103. Mainly because honesty is too contradictory for me to make sense of.

104. My writing is still going through all kinds of weird changes all the time.

105. I don't know what I'm doing.

106. But why is it bothering me so much?

107. I seem to have lost some of my comfort with uncertainty.

108. Because that really is the issue.

109. I've become frustrated with not knowing what I'm doing.

110. As much as I laud my desire for uncertainty, I'm still so stuck with it.

111. Still so confused by it.

112. Still so not okay with being confused.

113. I think that confusion will change or fade.

114. I think that the holiday traveling got me all confused.

115. I think that my return has got me all confused.

116. I think a lot of things have gotten me all confused.

117. I'll become more settled hopefully.

118. Just put on Panda Bear's "Person Pitch".

119. Sounds intense so far.

120. This song is taking me back to old times.

121. I'll try to remember always, just to have a good time.

122. Try to show that you know me.

123. Do you know what coolness really means?

124. Panda Bear.

125. How fun.

126. I suppose I will just keep trucking away at this writing project.

127. Keep thinking about the different things that I'm doing.

128. One thing I really feel that I'm doing in this big project has to do with a point that Collingwood means.

129. He says that his definition of art has implications for all of life.

130. That all of us can make ourselves into artists all the time.

131. That because we use language we need to be concerned with how we use it and what we do with it.

132. And then he just moves on.

133. Then he just keeps on giving his explication of art and how art works or whatever.

134. It frustrates me that he would make such a claim and then not tell me more.

135. But he has told me enough.

136. I know he told me enough.

137. I know he said a lot of things about consciousness and the way that it is involved in all this business.

138. I'm just losing myself in it all.

139. Losing all the different threads.

140. But I don't know.

141. I continue to think about philosophy and the history of philosophy.

142. I need to know more about history.

143. Much more about history.

144. I feel like taking a break from this writing.

145. Just from this post.

146. And just for a few minutes.

147. Because I felt like I was getting trapped in a certain line of thought there.

148. What is all this business about aesthetics anyways?

149. Why does it matter?

150. It matters how we use language and express ourselves, sure.

151. But how can the word aesthetics have any kind of meaningful definition or discussion?

152. I don't know why I think it so important.

153. Or how to make it seem important to others.

154. But it gives me certain issues to think about.

155. Frames other issues in certain ways that I don't understand.

156. I wonder what will happen to America.

157. What kind of world it is now.

158. What kind of world it will become.

159. Still have 'Person Pitch' going.

160. Still blowing my mind a little bit.

161. 'Bros' just came on.

162. I'm not trying to forget you.

163. Oh oh oh.

164. I just like to be on my own. AHHHHHHHHHHahhhhhh.

165. Nice song.

166. But I dunno I went to a weird jazz performance thing last night.

167. It was strange.

168. It is interesting to talk to musicians and other people about art and expression and craft.

169. Whether they are trying to just say something for themselves, something about themselves, or if they are trying to say something to other people.

170. Nice to ask people where they are expressing or if they are communicating.

171. I suspect that both things are going on.

172. But yeah, I like to ask people.

173. But I do feel like I don't understand what philosophy is all about.

174. I don't want to just get pulled into it because it excites me.

175. Because yeah, it excites me.

176. But it doesn't excite everyone.

177. And it certainly isn't useful to everyone.

178. I wonder how useful it is for me.

179. I wonder if me expressing myself is helpful for me.

180. I think it is.

181. I think there is a weird anxiety that is looming in my life.

182. But writing about it makes me feel better somehow.

183. It puts me more at ease than I might be otherwise.

184. Funny, I've almost written 200 sentences now.

185. This really hasn't been that much fun.

186. I almost think I'm doing it just to avoid something else.

187. If I stick to this numbered format then I can somehow avoid any serious writing.

188. I can avoid just spilling my guts.

189. Because I'm quite tempted to spill my guts most of the time.

190. And then sometimes I'm just so reserved and tired.

191. So sleepy, so tired.

192. Free lunch.

193. There is such a thing as free lunch.

194. I have one waiting for me tomorrow.

195. Why would I worry so much like I am?

196. Such a vague worry too.

197. Just a drifting.

198. Many of us have vague ambitions.

199. But boy do they feel vague these days.

200. Boy do I feel myself drifting towards something that I can't anticipate.

Trajectory

I am afraid that I am just writing silly things.

Nothing too substantial or meaningful to anyone except for me.

I enjoy the process that I'm going through with this big writing project.

But I wonder what it is for.

My friend told me something that made me feel better. He told me to not expect too much of it, but to regard at as changing my trajectory, developing my patterns for the future.

I suppose the more issues I deal with at this point the better. The more I try to write about things the better. But I just am starting to realize how much reading will do for me. The more I read the better I'll be able to think about all kinds of things.

It is just nice and uncomfortable in an exciting way to feel the limitations of my thinking and writing. I just don't know how to do serious issues yet. Duh. I'm young. How am I supposed to be able to make sense of really difficult issues? How am I supposed to even know why any of it matters? Ummmm. A quest, sure.

I'm just setting out into the unknown on a regular basis. Who knows.

I certainly do think that my writing makes me feel better about myself at times. Then I get confused about myself and about my writing.

But I think more than anything else I am trying to figure out how I can live a decent life. To not feel so bad or weird about things.

Not that I feel bad or weird about things.

I feel pretty good about things, actually.

I'm not sure how my writing makes me feel, or what I'm doing with it.

These questions. The question probably is how to live well.

I was thinking a few months ago about the flow of my writing over 2010. What was I doing? What was the questions I was trying to ask? What was I thinking about?

Obviously it went discontinuously, working from one vague question to the other, entertaining multiple questions simultaneously. But I can tease out some general themes I think.

In March when I first started this blog I was still dealing with all the things I had been exposed to in my undergrad. Clausewitz was still a major concern, and of course still is. But I wrote about it a lot more at the beginning of 2010. I was finishing my paper on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and I was starting to explore other questions. Questions about the practical consequences that Clausewitz and Sumida's work had for my life.

At that same time I was beginning to read some neuroscience, notably Mirroring People and The Mind & The Brain. Those books tied in to Clausewitz in that they helped me understand how it would be possible to engage in a process of transformation like the one he describes. I was convinced that the mind could change the brain, and so Clausewitz's work took on a greater depth for me after that reading. It also gave me conviction that reenactment would be real. Mirroring People introduced me to Simulating Minds, which is an important book, one that grounded me in a theory of mind that also helped explain what was up with Clausewitz.

In April I took a detour into writing and reading some nihilist stuff. Simultaneously I was reading and writing some stuff about the imagination. At the end of April I produced a substantial essay, my first major one, I think. I became more and more curious about the intersection between Collingwood and Foucault, and was moving a bit further from Clausewitz, but still pursuing his questions in a way.

How does the mind work? What can neuroscience tell me about it? How can thought change the brain? What is the imagination? How does that work in the mind? What does history matter to the imagination? How can this help me become a better person?

In May I continued to write about simulation theory and empathy, but took more of an interest in history and narrative thanks to The Landscape Of History.

Then in June I had another interesting breakthrough with an essay about the a priori imagination. I think I started taking a bit more of an interest in Collingwood. Was starting to think of him a bit more seriously. And right after that I pursued another two essays on self-transformation, how it could happen, and how we could conceptualize it.

So it seems as though after convincing myself that personal change was really possible i concentrated on the question of how. Luckily all that reading on the imagination and philosophy of history and stuff gave me some good tools to work with.

In July I took on another big project, my most substantial completed project to date. I was preparing to move that month so I had a good bit of scattered reflections. But my reading and writing was dominated primarily by Foucault's Discipline & Punish. I was startled by how he used militaristic metaphors, and was also very curious about how his macro analysis could possibly exist on a micro level. So I wrote the 'Society's Implicit War' essays between July and August. Frankly, I think that those essays are a fairly contained statement, I think their structure makes sense. Even though they are highly abstract and probably very difficult to translate into something concrete.

But the questions were this: does society resemble resemble war in some ways? Is politics simply the continuation of war by other means? If there is indeed something like an implicit war in our society, how does it function without explicit violence? What role does knowledge play in the implicit war? How can simulation theory help me grasp that transition from torture to prison? How can we resist the forms of knowledge that Foucault describes?

A strange series of essays. At that same time I was trying to write about simulation theory and theory theory, and trying to incorporate mindfulness into it all. Society's Implicit War has mindfulness as a running theme, as did my writing on the a priori imagination.

Then at the end of August, after SIW, something happened to me. I wrote an essay 'the genealogy of the modern mind', in which I tried to conceptualize philosophy of mind as a historical project, and what that would mean for its usefulness.

At the end of those essays I was baffled by the issue of creativity. It seemed so central.

I tried to follow up on that question of creativity (in its broadest sense) with an essay called 'the science and art of minds'. I was then resolved to figure out this issue of creativity. So I read Collingwood's The Principles Of Art, which spawned my current project.

Since September I've been grappling with this project. In the meantime I continued to read about the internet, about the brain, about art. Notably, I read The Shallows and The Condition of Postmodernity, both of which contributed to my concern with art and expression.

I grappled with my changing life and my new job in October, eventually producing some stuff on small talk. Sometime in September and October I decided I wanted to write poetry. So I've been trying. Collingwood's work on art has generally made me push myself to be expressive in different ways, to not be afraid of trying to write new things.

Similar themes abounded in November: the imagination, simulation theory, aesthetics, military metaphors, so on.

December I avowed to be weird, to write fiction, to write poetry, which I've been doing. All the time trucking away on this new project on art. Writing a section every week or two. Continuing to write about empathy and language, about art, about so on.

So since August and September I've really been fixated by the role of creativity. It seems like it all still comes back to the notion of self-improvement and self-transformation. But there is this political desire lying in the back of my mind. I want to understand how the cultivation of the self can become something that can help other people. This stuff on art definitely addresses that stuff, but I don't know how, except in the abstract. Theoretically, I understand how art, and an artistic life could become political, but it seems to mean so little in the real world.

My themes are consistent but they change, new ones come in, others wax and wane. Much of it has been spurned by Clausewitz and Sumida. The questions they put to me about self-transformation, about judgment, about history.

Now I suppose I grasp the trajectory of my writing a little bit. Not completely, of course.

But I want to start asking myself about serious questions about the trajectory of the future. What programs would do me best?

At some point I'm gonna have to settle down and get a doctorate. Choose an expertise, become an expert on something.

But what? What expertise would set me up to do good things?

Collingwood? Why Collingwood? Clausewitz? Of course Clausewitz has to be a thing. But Collingwood? Who?

What to study hardest? What to stick with?

Graduate school is on the horizon, but the path isn't at all clear.

It isn't clear what I'm steering myself towards. But there is no doubt that I'm steering myself somewhere, that I'm making myself into this person with certain ideas and with certain ways of viewing the world. I just don't know what they will become, what they will make me into.

What am I doing to myself?