Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Reflections on this Blog

I can't work under the restraints of the rules against plagiarism,under the needs and necessities of an academic performance, the reflective 'stops' and awkward attributive designs which for me that involves. Not that I don't deploy them on occasions because after all I wouldn't want anyone to think that everything I say or write is 'original' , that I owe nothing to anybody else when, in fact, I owe everything to them, even that which is most intimate and personal, seemingly drawn from the deepest recesses of my own experience. I just have a extremely difficult time disentangling the threads of what I know and feel, why I know and feel what I do as it is without burdening myself with the huge and complex project of identifying the sources of those thoughts and feelings in a formal structure that finally discounts the concept and ideas I'm juggling except as they might 'be possessed' like any other material commodity in life.
This attitude is reflected in my blog, the site of my primary intellectual effort, which paradoxically tries above all to restrain the expression my 'personal opinions' and simply present the 'findings' of the authors of book I read in their own words, albeit condensed, rearranged and focused on certain points which are of interest to me more or less in a random fashion, that is, without any fully formed intent to make an argument that encompasses a concept of the totality of the life- past and present- we live today, as might be the case in a novel or an essay in the fullest possible sense of that literary form. I'm just not up to it. I have to content myself with presenting multiplicities and in popular forums like Facebook and twitter, moments of reaction to what others say in the negative mode of perception, which I recognize can be over-bearing and selfish but there is no help for it but to withdraw and remain silent.
I do make an effort to turn my blog into something more than it is. For instance, I have undertaken a project to index its contents to a more detailed degree than the search mechanism of Blogspot makes available, I have been pushing aspects of The Critical Tradition. This would be for for a constructive purpose but the job is interminable and I doubt there is enough time nor do I possess the capacity to develop these resources where I could use them to establish myself as an 'original author', an existential impossibility as I see it currently.Every attempt I have made in the past has turned to ashes. I look back on those efforts with contempt and shame. I have no desire to reproduce the like. I'd just be wasting my time in self-flagellation. I am satisfied to live and work with my own obvious limitations.
I am where the North Sea touches Alabama

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