Stone Life

Editing.  Revision.  Proofing.  Call it what you will, a rose by any other name still sucks (eloquent, I know).  Yesterday I finished the first rough, and I mean rrrruuuufffff, draft of the chapter that I am trying to send off by Feb. 1.  This means that today has been an exercise in deciphering what I think I meant to say weeks ago, and rewording/reframing it to fit into the larger context of five sections written separately.  In short, it has been taxing, time-consuming, and disorienting.  I’m making progress, and I’ve no doubt it can be finished this weekend, but just over 1/3 of the way through my first round of revision I keep running into what I have affectionately coined “WTF-Moments.”

For example, I apparently wrote 3 successive paragraphs that said basically the same thing, worked with basically the same source material, yet somehow they were unique enough that I had to find a way to combine their strongest points into a single long paragraph.  Another: I have come across more than one double-quotation in which the wording is different.  How does that happen?  They are taken from the same book.  And, at least one quote has a random page number that is not related to the book in question.  I had to comb 700 pages to find a single line of text.  Like I said, WTF?

On another front, I semi-secretly took up boxing this year.  I say “semi,” because in week 2 I found myself on the receiving in of a perfectly delivered straight-right, and I have my first boxing-black-eye.  Simultaneously awesome for me and utterly disconcerting for my students and colleagues.  I have a feeling this will not be the last.  Updates to follow.

Let’s be honest here, I stink at this whole communication thing.  Since my last post, which itself came after a long hiatus, I have rejoined the Facebook community, but have since left again for many of the below cited reasons.  In short, I neither need that level of closeness with other, nor do I wish them to have it with me.  I only sporadically answer my phone, which understandably annoys family and friends, but it seems to be a trait (i.e.: character flaw) that we shall all have to endure.  I am slow in returning email.  I have attempted to write letters to no avail.  In an effort to stave off moving to the hermitage and communicating only through smoke signals, I am brushing off the ole’ blog and hoping against hope that I might keep those interested apprised of my doings.

Week 3: It is Sunday night, and I am preparing to embark on the third week of my dissertation work.  I spent much of the last semester reading and writing towards it, which has left me with more than 50 pages of text, but I have yet to put any of this work towards a final product.  When Julie went back to work two weeks ago, so too did I.  While I am only teaching a single class at UTD this semester, I have been putting in my hours each day at the desk.

I am in the midst of my first or second chapter (there is still some internal debate within my own consciousness as to which chapter will precede which), which is proving to be a monster.  Basically, the gist of it consists in trying to trace what I am referring to as Thomas Mann’s ‘mythos’ (imagine it as his unique contribution to telling the story of the twentieth-century German soul) through his five most influential predecessors: Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Wagner.  I have been writing individual sections for each of these thinkers, which will continue into next week, and then hopefully in just a week or two I will piece them together into a coherent whole.   It’s shaping out to potentially comprise 60 or more pages, which is far, far more than I was hoping for this section.  We shall see, I suppose.

That’s enough for now.  If you still subscribe to this and care to keep track of my progress, stay tuned, and pass on the word.

It’s safe to say it now.  We were all sixteen once – angry, confused, bitter at nothing at all, and tightly-wound with so much seemingly nonsensical angst – and so I suppose from this side on the other half of a life lived since, I can admit the thought crossed my mind a time or two.  Good idea, bad idea, it would be difficult to quantify from this vantage point, but such things are watered under the proverbial bridge at this point.

Either way, a week shy of the calendar turning and bringing me to what I have affectionately begun referring to as ‘the death rattle of my 20′s,’ I did it.  I committed the suicide that has eluded me from my the grave of my hormone addled adolescence.  Mind you, this is no Kafka novel.  I sit in the flesh, smoking my pipe out of the half-opened door of my apartment with no physical wounds worth voicing, but make no mistake about it, I am dead.

I canceled my Facebook account Thursday morning.  Partly out of idealism thunderous voice that has haunted me these past years, partly on account of frustrations and weariness of the strain of social, communal life that I generally avoid, and at least in part owed to that same germ of angst brought to birth in my youth.  Like any suicide, I suppose simplifying one’s decision to end the charade of life is difficult to pinpoint.

Of course, one might easily point to the proverbial straw that broke my back and dismiss it as reactionary.  My ‘friends” petty sense of entitlement to own a piece of me, to peer into my life in no less a voyeuristic fashion than to tom outside one’s windows, and then to demand the same level of prurient interest on my part.  Or maybe it was less high-minded than even that.  One too many requests to feed their electronic cows or to ‘join a cause’ they are committed to only so much as pushing a simple button will require.

I could cite Heidegger’s notion of inauthenticity and present myself as above the fray, resisting the Nietzschean herd like some Zarathustra on high.  I could tell you that in a perpetual state of mask-like unhomeliness in a land at home with its unhomeliness that I am hastening my journey back home, but would that really be honest?  Or would such sentiments only reinforce my inauthenticity as one feigning the authentic?

I could rant like a madman, and I will if you corner me over a beer, or I can hold myself as a bastion of classical virtue, which even I would have a hard time maintaining without Mann’s ‘ironic slant’ of the eyes, but perhaps its all of these things, and none of them.  In short, like so many who depart from their life, I offer only the non-explanation that I had enough.  At least for now.

“History is that which has happened and that which goes on happening in time. But also it is the stratified record upon which we set our feet, the ground beneath us; and the deeper the roots of our being go down into the layers that lie below and beyond the fleshly confines of our ego, yet at the same time feed and condition it – so that in our moments of less precision we may speak of them in the first person and as though they were part of our flesh-and-blood experience – the heavier is our life with thought, the weightier is the soul of our flesh.” – Thomas Mann – Joseph und seine Brüder

My concerns, though shallow as the puddles  splashing beneath my feet as I walk down the street, evaporated by the time I return, a mere shadow existence remembrered only as minor nuisance and momentary disruption of my gait, nontheless resound with the intensity of thunderclouds or demons in the immediacy of the moments I can no more escape than ignore.  The banalities of everydayness, trifles and insignificances by any interpretation, weigh heavier than the proverbial millstone dragging one, me, further into the abyss.  Mightn’t we, mustn’t we, rather, stand before the colossus of History and marvel, not merely at the collected mount of achievement, loss, failure, love, hope, and fear that opens before us like a doorway which both cannot be breached from behind yet will inevitably be again reopened before us without our full knowing; must we not also marvel no less at our own insignificance?  Or mightn’t we instead tremble before the great paradox: History as the product of the collective insignificances of the everyday, interrupted only sporadically by fleeting moments of greatness that become so only in the mirror of the historical.  This poor visage that dwells upon creation for less than the span of a century stands testament to a living, breathing, rolling cycle upon which one is ground and grounded.  I might live and die in the span of three decades, a mere sneeze in the annals of recorded history, but the ‘soul of my flesh’ carries with it the added weight of Being that transcends such a span.

What of this first-person accounting?  Do I share equally in the pains of generations previous on account of my pains, small though they might appear in comparison?  Do the grieving mother and I contain within us the same germ of loss, our strengths and weaknesses no less divided than the individual grains that make up the coastline?  Is the strength of writing these words any more or less heroic than the spirit of Achilles that pushes warriors into the brink of destruction just because the outward manifestation takes on a different form?  We desire individuality, the seperateness of our triumphs and disappointments, because the unbearable lightness of undifferentiated being crushes us beneath its gentleness, but our strength resides in this inescapable connectedness in and out of past and future, neither with precedence over the other.  Our fears, therefore, should not be aimed at the loss of self, ego’s great fall into the well of community; rather, our fear should be squandering a lifetime in missing the warmth of knowing oneself as oneself, in disentangling oneself from the mythic fog of the I and taking refuge one’s place in and out of the great tapestry of History – merely a thread, yet as vital to completing the whole as any other.

I am without the necessary thinking capabilities required to actually tell you about the day yesterday, so instead I’m just going to post a few pics.

San Francisco – Day One

Seems like as good a time as any to “dust off the ol’ blog” and see if there are any of you still out there that will look at it.

In the morning I will begin the first leg of my 7-week traveling adventure, bright and early, with a flight to San Francisco and my bro. Never been there, not sure quite what to expect.

I wish there was something pithy or profound to say, but I am in the midst of packing and cleaning before I leave, so this will suffice for the first post in about six months. More to come, stay tuned.

Today is one of those days. I am wearing the same clothes that I have been in for days now, and I have begun to wear a hole in the couch from where I have been sitting for eight or more hours a day with a pile of books beside me. The reading load is pretty intense, and I am currently mired in Freud, Jung, Lacan, and a host of other psychoanalytic theorists, but I had to stop to share a bit of joy. I was assigned a reading at the last minute from a book I did not buy at the beginning of the semester, and I had begun to search for an online copy, when I remembered that we have an ever-expanding library that might contain just such a short story. So, sure enough, I found a collection of Poe short stories, and of course this one was there. That may be my favorite part about collecting books…you never know exactly what you have and when you will need it. My joys are simple and small today.

Posting two weeks worth of pictures may take two years at this rate, but I suppose (for those of you who are looking) that it is better to post them slowly than not posting them at all.

Walking through East Berlin (the day that we estimate we walked over 15 miles) was both surreal and enlightening; surreal in that there is no trace of the schism that existed not even twenty-years ago, and enlightening in outlining the vast differences between the two sides of the country in the post-war era.

Thinking through those last comments, they sound as if they are contradictions, so let me explain myself further. What defined a country for so many years, the East-West split, was nearly impossible to find in 2009. We looked all over for markers/indicators to let us know that we were crossing the border between the two, but other than the few monuments (Checkpoint-Charlie..etc), that split has been utterly forgotten by the looks and operation of the city. At the same time, though, the difference in architecture and culture between the former-sides is striking. Where the West, in the stereotypical westernized-fashion, rebuilt itself into a modern-industrialized, metropolitan city in the fashion of Paris after the destruction of Berlin in the War, the East, in the spirit of Communism’s Mater-centric Russian heritage, clung to its roots and rebuilt their side in the traditional, modest fashion. Much of these distinctions no longer exist, because the sweeping force that is the West (e.g. capitalism) has infiltrated both, but the East had a decidedly different feel.

It is hard to put into words what exactly that “feeling” was, whether influenced by the experience itself, or merely a colouring of experience through the lens of the historical understanding I mentioned above, but there was a certain charm to it. The buildings were filled with more graffiti (some of it was outstandingly artistic), the buildings were consistently more traditional in form, even to the point of being bland at times. It was grittier, dirtier in places, but these things added and element of genuineness that the sanitized sections of West Berlin did not give-off. I realize it is a romanticized version of the place that probably only partially corresponds to the actual place, but those were my impressions of it at least.

My fellow Americans….

I realize I have fallen woefully short on my explanation of our German experience, and there are a myriad of pictures and stories to tell, but the dreaded monster that is grad-school has once again reared its ugly head, so my time/energy is limited again.

I thought that I would write and tell my family/friends just where things stand in the seemingly endless quest for my degree. I started what will hopefully be my last semester of course work (don’t get too excited – that doesn’t mean much) the day we got back from Germany. I am again taking twelve hours, which feels like suicide most days, but I am that expediency turns out to be a worthwhile plan.

Part of the “hopefully this is my last semester” hinges on the tricky language requirement that has been looming large for the past few years. I just now finished taking the four-hour exam, and I feel pretty good about it. So, assuming I do not hiccup too badly over the next three-four months, I should knock the coursework out.

From there it is on to a series of exams (6-8 months, I’ve been told), and then the whole dissertation process (God knows what that will entail).

Anyway, for those who were interested, I thought i would update. In theory, by May I should be halfway finished or more. There is a faint glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.