I come to this extremity due to the petulance of my brother, whose motto shall be: persistence builds chaaaaarachter.

I did the summer job thing, and while I have to say I'm sorry that I never posted stories about it on here, I will probably be slinging meat this Christmas Break in order to beef up the savings, so you can count on at least one juicy anecdote.  This summer was mostly overshadowed by the fun of New Management, which almost indubitably means Worse Management (it did).  I believe that all the good performers have been driven off -- hence the demand for me that has begun long in advance.

And now I am in graduate school for English.  This is a different world.  We put in 13 hour days sometimes trying to create print editions of obscure manuscripts, and instead of talking about how "there's a nice assonance at line 27," we ramble on about "the spaces created by the violence that man does to woman, white does to black, and the possibilities for reconciliation in this meta-aftermath" or something like that.  I quote, with only mild exaggeration, from a paper of mine.

I'm about to start a paper on Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  I hope you've read it; if not, check it out.  It's pretty much awesome.

I often retire before midnight and get up at 7:00.  That's right, the old partying me has been put to eternal rest.

Not sure what else to write here; if someone would like to start an argument about literature with me, I encourage her/him to feel free.

The last final, a big bruiser of a take-home, is now two-thirds done.  After that, I just have to touch up a French paper and lengthen it a little (hopefully only an hour's work) and then -- no more college!!!  I am so filled up with senioritis!  Looking forward to graduation, though.

And of course, to grad school.  But the summer will be a nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice rest.  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I can see graduation beginning to round the bend and loom large on the horizon.  I will not say that I am disappointed.

I think I am sick and tired of almost everything I've written prior to my senior thesis presentation paper, so maybe I should just post it ten times in a row.  We'll see.

P.S. If anyone is interested in funding a trip to the Greek Isles, give me a call and I'll see what we can work out.

the grounds of groundlessness

Of course, I'm being a deliberate provacateur with that title.  But, in reality, I've been asked indirectly about Truth with a capital-T and my relation to it as per my latest post.  I don't know how much I can comment upon this vast idea, and more likely than not I will just talk about things that come to the top of my mind.  But I'll at least try to spin a paragraph on the Subject.

By 'the grounds of groundlessness' I mean two things: first, what is the reason (the 'ground') for the evidently de-centered tone of my lst post; second, what is proper to be held as a 'ground' absolutely and unequivocally, beneath and beyond any protean flexibility of opinion?

Wait, this is philosophy and I don't know anymore if I'm equipped to talk philosophy -- it's a pretty rarefied discipline.  But in a word: the 'reason' for my de-centered tone is not a skepticism as to the existence of truth, or even Truth, but to its general treatment in the context of both the ossified gestalts of many of my peers, and the whining denials of naive postmodernists.  Truth is not a massive asteroid which bludgeons everything in its path; and even an asteroid cannot be seen from all sides at once.  We know from history that storylines read very differently depending on whether you are conqueror or conquered, and as soon as an event happens, totalistic verification is forever lost to us.  How much more so are the contours of the divine and the mysteries of abstractions hidden from our categorizing minds!

I don't mean to declare them entirely hidden: not at all.  I believe in the validity of revelation -- but I also believe that what is revealed is all we can say with confidence on the divine (and on the moralities mandated thereby), and I also believe that this revelation has to be interpreted somehow.  Nor will these interpretations always be One.  Some find that God works principally through individuals, others that He operates through groups and communities.  Is one 'right' where the other is wrong?  Probably not -- but how do we get off daring to make dogmatic generalizations about truths that are so out of the bourne of our experience?  The incarnation, passion, and resurrection of our Lord are the lenses through which we must view all of the world -- I see this as the Fulness of Truth.  They color all other (mostly neutral) truths.  But they are not a massive, pedantic rulebook with instructions on which political party to vote for, how old the earth is, how high a hemline may be, or whether justice is an abstract Form or not.  These are the things on which there must be debate.

So I suppose that answers both my proposed subjects: I'm sounding de-centered because so many people sound very centered.  And however much flitting and uncertainty there may be in the various truths of our world, and the ways in which we see them, there is always a core of revelation to guide us in the most important matters.  That said, it is important to realize that there is no unmediated knowledge, which means (this is not all it means) that we have to ruthlessly examine our own biases before making a dogmatic claim.

I even question myself: is what I have written above perhaps dogmatic too?  I'm concerned with self-knowledge here.  Can we know anything about ourselves unless we wish to change it?  Why else would we even notice something that accompanies us so doggedly?  I mean for my musings to be not schools, not assertions, but names of questions, as Derrida would have it.

I can't get away from the fact that things change all the time, and so we cannot help but love things that change.  Philosophy has told us to not love things things, instead to direct our eros toward abstractions and things that are presumably eternal.  But I wish with all my heart to subvert this idea and reject it (not the love of eternal things, but the rejection of temporal things).  Today I drove to Dallas from Waco, had beautiful conversation which I will never repeat, and saw some kind of anamolous dust-storm phenomenon create an eerie mist all over the landscape, and against it the sillhouetted shadows of thousands of birds, taking a thousand shapes in their various flocks.  I loved it then and I love it now, but not in the same way.  Memory is a new kind of love.  Behold, something is created.  Loving 'justice' or 'triangle' never yields the same kind of bittersweet regret at loss combined with joy at remembrance.  The stasis of the afterlife will be something entirely different from what we know.  Until then, I can't see how we can do wrong to revel in the layered obscurity we're given for the very short time it will last.  Seeking illumination should not make us hate all shadows.

But don't take anything I say too seriously ...