update

I feel like I owe an explanation as to why I dropped off the blogging world for a few weeks... first, I'm no longer needing to blog for revision procrastination.... as no more revision :) and i met a boy... i think that sums it up. But I'll be back... unemployment = lots of thinking/reading time in between filling in delightful application forms...

laughter and forgetting

Just finished an interesting book that has so many quotes that I want to try and get my head around. Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting sounds lovely and rosy... but most of it is anything but. I've been thinking about this quote...

“Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:
(1) An elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
(2) A high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
(3) The absence of dramatic social changes in the nation’s internal life....
But by a backlash, the effect affects the cause. General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside.” P127

Could you substitute the writing books with writing blogs?? Useless activities? Isolation? Wall of mirrors?

Although it is talking about life in communist Prague, reading the following cynical quotes I couldn’t help thinking about the conversations in Irish/UK politics at the minute about the abuse and expenses scandals...

“...like all political parties, like all peoples, like mankind...they shout that they want to shape a better future, but it’s not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.” P30
“The struggle of a man again power is the struggle of the memory against forgetting.” P4

Anyway, not sure if I’m recommending the book (as slightly disturbing) but definitely thought-provoking.

rough edges

One of the things I don’t like about blogging is that I love handwritten things (except essays in exams and the scrawl in hospital notes...) but I love the idiosyncrasies and variety in handwriting. A few years ago I started ‘journalling’ of sorts on the computer... but I had to return to the proper journal and pen again... it just seemed too clinical or something.

For comparison’s sake, I’ve typed half the quote below, and written out the other half... does handwriting seem more real, more personal, less aloof, less predictable even if less convenient? Maybe like Christianity.*

"...the feebleness of all those watered versions of Christianity which leave out all the darker elements and try to establish a religion of pure consolation. No real belief in the watered versions can last. Bemused and besotted as we are, we still dimly know at heart that nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. CS Lewis, Prayer: Letters to Malcolm Ch14

*While this analogy makes sense in my head, it’s a bit random...and it’s been a long day, so if the paragraph above doesn’t make sense after you’ve read the quote, just ignore it and take what you want from the quote itself!

ever feel like this?

why?

so, i've been thinking about why i started this blog...
1. i guess i could be really philosophical about it and quote socrates who said that 'an unreflected life is not worth living' and that i want to have a concrete place to think, to make myself reflect on life instead of just moseying thoughtlessly through life...
2. another reason is that i have time this week :) a week off before getting back to classes and the joys of student life...it's kind of that feeling before you're starting back afresh to classes (or anything new) when you make sure you're ready, you have new notebooks and new pens (ha, remembering 1st day of school at crest...) and maybe this is part of the process this time...
3. my sister just got on a plane yesterday to go 'home' and i'm wishing i was going with her...so this may merely be a distraction from wishing i was with her...
4. i'm anticipating the next few months to be quite busy, but still have a nack for procrastinating what i really should be doing at all costs...this may be prove to be part of my procrastination!
5. i think i actually can be quite opinionated about things, about how i see the world.. i love a good debate over a cup of tea, so maybe this will be another place to voice what i think, although realising i'm probably wrong about many things...
6. it's also a new year and i think at the start of the year, it's always a time to stop, think, readjust, try something new... it remains to be seen if it's just a fad/new yr resolution that will fade mid february :) or be something i actually keep up...watch this space!

i'm sure there are more reasons... but it's probably a mixture of all of the above.

the soul's expression... by e.b. browning

With stammering lips and insufficient sound
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling interwound
And inly answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground.
This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself into the air:
But if I did it,--as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.


*****
ok, so starting a new blog today! not sure what it will look like but i just thought this poem captures the feeling of 'this song of soul i struggle to outbear'... how do you write something that really captures anything of who you are, what your thinking?? anyway, here goes... even if it is 'with stammering lips and insufficent sound'.