Scraps: "Continuity"
Nov. 20th, 2010 03:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lhexaI should speak with joy of the sudden appearance, the beauty of an angle unanticipated. Do I?
I love this world. What is my love? Can I in any sense call it returned?
How do I make myself understood? I have complicated the task in the pursuit of density of meaning. My excuses are insufficient in the face of my friends' bafflement: I write for myself, yes, but in writing for them I also write for myself.
My disappointment needs expressing too.
I do not want to mask my vanity, my arrogance or my mediocrity. The effort spent in concealing them would be better spent undercutting them.
I maintain the continuity chiefly through text, and I measure the starts and ends of the stages of myself by specific acts of writing. The first essay from my past that I still read (from twelve years ago) seems like a refusal spoken through clenched teeth, saying that I will not yield who I am to circumstance. Call it a Declaration of Identity, written with the intent to fight. Next come my draconic rambles, coincident with my discovery of philosophy, slowly growing in length and complexity over the course of six isolated years. The most significant among them were the report on the discovery of flight (something that still resides in my list of values), an essay on being obligated to one's ideas (like the earlier declaration, a recurrent provocation of myself), and an enormous, impenetrable work on emotions (written as my ability to control those emotions reached its extremum).
Starting with a footnote on the death of my draconity, the next period of writing was an exploitation and sublimation of my capacity for insanity, in which density of meaning became my chief goal. The pieces standing out here are the mentioned footnote, a startled placing of myself bodily into the domain of ideas, a paean to my friends in which each received a paragraph, and a somber derivation of how little separation remained between me and insanity. Afterwards there were some pieces on writing, which now read to me like a slow recovery. And at present there is the project of giving form to my values, and thus form to myself, a slow process.
Continuity and convolution go hand in hand, I think. It is only a complex creature in whom portions can die without killing the whole. But the fight to define myself is over: there no longer remains any external agency which can obscure my sense of myself, now that I have faced all of the most powerful effacers of an identity, schizophrenia included.
I am misunderstood -- well then! -- am I prey to my friends' errors? Or are they merely one element of our interaction, one very finite element? I should not let my continuity be severed by anything so simple as my writing style.
If I have lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to you.
I love this world. What is my love? Can I in any sense call it returned?
How do I make myself understood? I have complicated the task in the pursuit of density of meaning. My excuses are insufficient in the face of my friends' bafflement: I write for myself, yes, but in writing for them I also write for myself.
My disappointment needs expressing too.
I do not want to mask my vanity, my arrogance or my mediocrity. The effort spent in concealing them would be better spent undercutting them.
I maintain the continuity chiefly through text, and I measure the starts and ends of the stages of myself by specific acts of writing. The first essay from my past that I still read (from twelve years ago) seems like a refusal spoken through clenched teeth, saying that I will not yield who I am to circumstance. Call it a Declaration of Identity, written with the intent to fight. Next come my draconic rambles, coincident with my discovery of philosophy, slowly growing in length and complexity over the course of six isolated years. The most significant among them were the report on the discovery of flight (something that still resides in my list of values), an essay on being obligated to one's ideas (like the earlier declaration, a recurrent provocation of myself), and an enormous, impenetrable work on emotions (written as my ability to control those emotions reached its extremum).
Starting with a footnote on the death of my draconity, the next period of writing was an exploitation and sublimation of my capacity for insanity, in which density of meaning became my chief goal. The pieces standing out here are the mentioned footnote, a startled placing of myself bodily into the domain of ideas, a paean to my friends in which each received a paragraph, and a somber derivation of how little separation remained between me and insanity. Afterwards there were some pieces on writing, which now read to me like a slow recovery. And at present there is the project of giving form to my values, and thus form to myself, a slow process.
Continuity and convolution go hand in hand, I think. It is only a complex creature in whom portions can die without killing the whole. But the fight to define myself is over: there no longer remains any external agency which can obscure my sense of myself, now that I have faced all of the most powerful effacers of an identity, schizophrenia included.
I am misunderstood -- well then! -- am I prey to my friends' errors? Or are they merely one element of our interaction, one very finite element? I should not let my continuity be severed by anything so simple as my writing style.
If I have lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to you.