the dance

؟؟؟

i always think that, if you have a goal, and you aren't meeting with success in your pursuit of that goal, but you keep going, that's better than if you had achieved success quickly. 

in the same way, I'm more inspired by people who have their struggles and setbacks and fears, but they try anyway, and they keep trying....to me that's more inspiring than someone who achieves a lot because of their strength or talent

but then there's also another kind of achievement that really impresses me, that is kind of related to talent...it's when someone does something that is so well done that it achieves a kind of  perfection. I think a good example of this is figure skating in the winter olympics. There are performances that are really good, and impressive.....and then there are those that embody a kind of magic. They are flawless....and when you're watching a performance like that, it lifts your spirits, because you're seeing someone achieve the impossible, but there's also a strange sense of inevitability about it...there isn't going to be any slip-ups or errors, because such things have no place in such a performance 

the obstacle is the way

courage is not the absence of fear. courage requires fear. courage is acting or speaking in spite of fear. but fear is also a lie. when you confront fear, it doesn't just crumble or dissipate or whatever....it ceases to exist

but it's so convincing. and there's the irony that to really have courage means that you have believed the lie. 

only the hopeless situation provides scope for redemption 

i remember a while ago - sometime in the second half of last year (2019)....I had a really challenging year....and in the midst of the storm I was in, one day pinterest spoke to me. all of these positive messages appeared. there are these pins that are like a message from God, or just a message that something good is going to happen, and others that are like affirmations. 

So I got the idea that God was going to bless me. I actually remember thinking - tommorrow something spectacularly good is definitely going to happen (that's what pinterest told me). the next day was a Saturday and I was working at a tutoring college, and because I'm so obsessive about not being late, and also the tutoring college is quite a long trip away, I used to always arrive about an hour or more before I needed to be there and I would go to a coffee shop and have something to eat and a coffee

it was just a normal Saturday really. but that idea that God was going to bless me made me start thinking about what that would look like....what do I want? so I started to write things down. it was pretty inspiring. I continued to add to the list over the coming days, and I still have it. The things I wrote down were, I felt and told people that I shared some of the things with - they were basically outside the realms of possibility. but there was something coinpelling about the list. this was pre-covid, so if they were outside the realms of possibility then, they are even more so now.....

time went by and more Saturdays came and went/// like I said, this was a difficult and stressful time in my life. I remember thinking one Saturday, if only I could get past this, get over all this stress and the sense of crisis in which I was mired....if only I could do that, then maybe all of these goals I have, or some of them, could happen. 

and then it occurred to me that I was thinking about it the wrong way. what would prepare me to achieve my goals? would feeling more comfortable and secure - feeling the way I imagined I would feel if all of those things happened....would that bring those things about? no 

what occurred to me was that the pain and turmoil - the discomfort - I was going through was the necessary preparation. it was exactly the right preparation I needed. you become strong by going through things that require you to be strong. it wasn't exactly cathartic....like, I didn't suddenly feel better. I didn't feel like, oh, it all makes sense now. but it was a realisation that brought some meaning to the challenges I was going through. 

irreducibility

in an earlier post about the critique of critical theory and post-modernism, I wrote about the idea some critics of post-modernism have that modernism is associated with the enlightenment and reason and that post-modernism is a rejection of that. but then, I did an internet search - both google and microsoft edge - and searched amazon for books, and it seems like no one else uses modernism in that way. Modernism is a movement that happpened in the late 19th/ early 20th century.

to look into it further and see if anyone actually uses the word 'modernism' to describe developments from the enlightenment, I did a search using the terms Locke and modernism, and I found that Locke, Bacon, Descartes, the enlightenment, etc are definitely associated with modernity, but not with modernism. 

On the website, encyclopedia.com, it says this: 'Modernism is distinguished from modern philosophy in that it is linked to certain movements in art and literature that began sometime around the end of the nineteenth century. While drawing upon some similar characteristics of "modern philosophy," modernism in art, literature, and philosophy involved novelty, break with tradition, progress, continuous development, knowledge derived either from the position of the subject or from claims to objectivity, and concomitantly the crisis in knowledge produced by this very dichotomy. Hence in modernism, at the same time that certain theories based knowledge on a centered, transcendental, interpreting subjectivity, and others based knowledge on certain, atomistic, analytic, empirical objectivity, the crisis in knowledge created a sense of uncertainty, paradox, incompleteness, inadequacy, emptiness, and void. Modernism in art and literature involved a shift away from the dichotomies of romanticism and realism to the stream of consciousness, lived and internal time-consciousness, transcendental subjectivity, narrated remembrance and awareness, portrayed speed, mechanisms, objects, and abstractions.' 

I was only going to quote the first sentence because that's the main point I wanted to make - that modernism and modern mean different things - but I really liked the description of modernism, so I included the whole passage. 

the book that I have that is a Christian critique of post-modernism, doesn't use the term modernism - it talks about modernity and uses the term 'modern' - but the more purely academic text (which I don't have but have previewed) uses 'modernism' to describe the movement associated with the enlightenment, the scientific revolution, etc, which I think is quite problematic. That brings me to one of the main issues I have with a lot of the critics and criticism of post-modernism.....

My interest is literature and literary theory, so I relate movements and approaches to those. And critical theory has a lot of very cogent things to say about literature. I think I can say that that's a fact, or at least it's a fact that people like me, who are interested in language and literature, are also interested in critcal theory (or whatever you want to call it...I don't really like using the term 'critical theory' because it seems to be the term favoured by those who hate theory). So anyway, nearly all the people (at least that I've come across) who are stridently opposed to critical theory and post-modernism are philosophers or scientists, not literary theorists, and their criticism of post-modernism is based on it's ideologial aspect, which is a different issue from the theorys' application to literature. 

I think this highlights a more general problem in our world, including the academic realm. We tend to think that someone who is an expert or successful in a particular area can speak authoritatively about other areas. For example, we're generally quite receptive to the views of successful writers about social issues. We tend to think that they're somehow wiser or smarter or their views are more valid because.....*checks notes*....they are good at writing novels. I'm not saying that that's necessarily wrong, but it's not necessarily right either. 

Anyway, I still want to read the book about post-modernism that calls the enlightenment modernism because I'm interested in the ideas. Another book I want to read, which engages with these ideas is The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (2004) by Alister McGrath. McGrath too seems to use modernism and modernity interchangeably. He writes this about the relationship between modernism (the enlightenment type, I think) and post-modernism:

Postmodernism is a cultural mood that celebrates diversity and seeks to undermine those who offer rigid, restrictive, and oppressive views of the world. Modernism - which tried to reduce everything to a uniform set of ideas - is excoriated by postmodern writers as a form of intellectual Stalinism, a refusal to permit diversity in our readings of the world. Postmodernity celebrates diversity of belief, seeing any attempt to coerce individuals to accept the viewpoints of another as being oppressive. (p 227)

I think that's a pretty good description of the dynamic between modernism and post-modernism. McGrath goes on to talk about how, on the face of it, it would seem that postmodernism, as defined in the quote, would lend itself to an atheistic world-view. He brings up deconstruction - a type of post-modern analysis that considers the power relationships manifested in but not explicitly mentioned in texts - and talks about how, surely that approach too would lead to a rejection of God because the idea of God as represented in the great texts of Western culture could be read 'as a powerplay on the part of churches and others with vested interests in its survival.' But then he writes that that's not how deconstruction is meant to work, at least according to Jacques Derrida, who devised it. According to Derrida, deconstruction was about openness to 'the other', and decentring. 

There are social and polical implications of these ideas. There are moral dilemmas. I think part of the answer to those dilemmas is the realisation that complexity and nuance is not the enemy. 

in expression

sometimes it's hard to just keep going. normal interactions and simple, routine tasks are overwhelming. making progress - for example, eating a healthier diet or doing more exercise - is difficult when you're struggling to do the bare minimum. And there are so many things like that - areas where you need to improve or get your life in order - clean and tidy your room/house, do your laundry....and all your other personal goals. When things are a mess, maintaining order is not possible because the order is not in place to maintain. all the issues combined keep you trapped and stuck 

and then you look at the way other people succeed in life in different areas and it makes you feel worse because you can't do what they seem to do so naturally - you can't even begin. I know that's not fair....that everyone has their own struggles, but I'm expressing my thoughts, even though I know they are distorted 

I also know that there is the other side. there are things that I can do - things I can do well - that some other people can't. 

there's a certain state of mind where everything seems wrong or inferior. Like, if I'm trying to think of something to write, every idea I think of, I will entertain it for a moment, and then be like, no, I can't write that, because....so it's just a lot of thinking and no writing. there was one time when i didn't censor myself in that way and I wrote 900 pages in a few months. I basically wrote a book (although I didn't publish it)...simply because I just allowed myself to express my thoughts and feelings without censorship, as they came to me. I was also writing a lot at that time....that was the main thing I was doing besides working, eating, sleeping, etc 

that's depression - that inability to write or speak...it closes you down. that's kind of the essence - or one of the essential features - of depression - that 'stuckness', but with lots of thought - a lot going on inside, but it's going round and round like worry and there's no resolution. 

I think that's one of the main reasons why people don't talk about depression. There's something inexpressible about it - something that even defies expression, not just in the sense that it's hard to talk or write about but in the sense that it's opposed to or closes down expression. Maybe it's to do with meaning. depression is an absence of meaning....there's nothing to express

but that's why writing can be powerful....it's a way of making meaning

inspirant

slowly.....very slowly...it begins to dawn on me | when you've never seen something before, you don't know what you're looking at and you are held captive by lies

a still small voice reaches you and pierces the pain temporarily 

in that moment, you doubt the lie

you realise that there can be another story

listening to writers

I'm listening to an interview with Don DeLillo. I think it's Jonathan Franzen interviewing him - the video is called A Conversation with Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen. Franzen asks what, to me, seems like a super weird question: how important is meaning to your writing? It's hard to know what he's getting at. One clue is that the question comes after he reads a quote from one of DeLillo's stories that evokes a dichotomy between the sound of language and its meaning, and emphasises sound over meaning.

But DeLillo really gets the question and gives a very interesting answer. He says that meaning is not 'the primary force' in his writing. Language is more important and he says that he will sometimes 'yield meaning to words - just to words...to the sound of words...to the look of words...and to the beauty, at times, of a phrase, or a sentence, or a paragraph'. He goes on to say that he doesn't know where meaning comes from....it builds slowly as he works on a novel or story. That's kind of counter-intuitive. Isn't that what writers do - they convey meaning through their writing? Isn't that what it's all about, in a way? 

I enjoy listening to David Foster Wallace a lot more than I enjoy listening to Franzen. To me, Franzen seems very aware of his own stature as a writer, but Wallace seems more tentative and more concerned with what is interesting in general and what other people think than with imparting some kind of writing expertise. Maybe I'm being unfair. After all, this wasn't an intereview of Don DeLillo - it was a conversation between two successful writers. I've read neither of them but I intend to...maybe if I knew their work I would find the conversation more interesting. Also, the topic of the conversation was writing, and people had come to listen to two writers have a conversation, so I can hardly blame Franzen for talking about his craft or being aware of his stature as a writer, which is the whole reason he was there having the conversation. 

Franzen and Wallace were friends too, so there's that. I haven't read any of them - Wallace, Franzen, or DeLillo, but I plan to...probably Infinite Jest first, because I've heard such good things about it, then Underworld by DeLillo, then The Corrections is Franzen's novel that I've decided to read first. 

|-|-|

sometimes I think....why am I still struggling with this?