Meta-Nostalgia

Invasion of a nauseous outpouring of self-expression from the distant past: I pull up the unrecognized document in the folder, only to be lambasted by a quick scribble of a soul-aching creation from years ago. And suddenly I’m back there, realizing where the pain will take me, namely here, where I sit reading this ancient plea for comfort, thankful that empathy implies externality. Thankful that I’m not there; thankful yet again that if I were, I could do it better.

And that is just it—that pain, the release, and yet the irony of cathartic nostalgia! Worry, worry, worry—I worried my time away on that lonely trip, worried moreover and the most that I wouldn’t take hold of the pain, that I wouldn’t use that depth of discomfort diagnostically, self-realization, growth, beauty, creation, art, depth, God. There’s a lately-born release to it now, to look back on that act of creation squeezed from my weeping soul, and to see the dynamic, then-invisible wonder of it all, the predictive glance turned backward to assure that self that I would get…here.

And yet now, as these hands come out of hiding in adultish comfort to renew the tapped-out pact with keys and screen, as these fingers dance to the rhythm of inwardness once more, and I make this absurd little attempt at creativity—which nevertheless is born in another realm as the resplendent experience of meaning—I come to realize, in stuttering non-response, that more legitimate than the fear of not harnessing one’s pain—is not feeling it.

Ivory Tower #2

And here is where philosophy falls: the suppression of truth-intuitions in the interest of keeping one’s coherence. For that matter, this is the downfall of any systematic pursuit of knowledge lodged within a necessarily critical institution: I have just taken a break from a paper I’m writing, stopping in the middle of a thrust toward completion, in the middle of a hasty deletion of a thought because it didn’t fit, and I was afraid of a bad grade on grounds of self-contradiction.

At this point, then, I succumb to an irrationalist epistemology, because it is clear that we’re just saving face.

From the Ivory Tower

The academic does not long for anyone: he is quite at home taking pleasure in things that are not there.

He truly has an addiction to abstractions, to the not-here—at times to the nowhere—and thus you stand right before him as he closes his eyes to dream of you.

Yet there is a salient difference between academia and romance, though you are to both something which you are not: the romantic loves you via his imaginings; the scholar loves his imaginings via you.

On Priorities

I’ve almost come to understand those pale, staunch Christian denialists who barricade themselves below the world, in defense against any uncomfortable opposition, armed with judicious undertones and that insecure and therefore all-too-self-asserting ignorance. No, not the few who have no treasure to guard—those latently nihilistic ideologues—but those whose blind faith, yes, in its most derogatory sense, is weathered and accepted by those who practice it merely as a means to an end. And here is something I sense any cynical smarty-pants will never catch: the meekly religious will go to great lengths and sacrifice all worldly gain—indeed, in many cases, their objective sanity—to preserve what is many times a deep experience of the Spirit of God. Once you find that treasure in the field, it is indeed truer than many realize that no good is too prized to sell toward its cost.