and I hate it. I’m essentially a reclusive ascetic content to spend my days and my time in the comfortable research of what it means to be a human. Every so often, however, it crops up in my research—and in my existence in general—that part of being human is all wrapped in being a part of humanity: the community aspect. Roughly, I am engaged to be functioning in society (as opposed to the gentle autocracy I wield over myself in my own residence) every evening for the next week.
These times are always important for me, and they remind me of how lucky I am that have the opportunity during the other times of my life to pursue those things which seem to fulfill me most fully: study and practice. However, study without application and practice without the game are exercises in masturbation. So it is that these moments of putting what I’ve been studying and practicing have special meaning for me.
I hate the fact that I have to get myself away from practice, but practice is very safe. If you screw something up, nobody’s watching you and quietly saying to themselves (and sometimes yelling loudly): “You suck.” That’s the beauty of practice. It’s the quiet advancement of the self in whatever area you are attempting to improve; however, it is in the game that what you have been practicing for so long really makes itself known.
Okay, it has just occurred to me that what I am differentiating between when I say study and practice is precisely what Plato is always on about: the visible versus the intelligible realm. When I talk about study, it is the reading that takes up some of my time every single day of my life. Whether it be a novel, an academic work, or language acquisition book, the thing I am exercising is my intelligence. When I talk about practice, it is the physical labor involved in acquiring any kind of skill. So, my practice is going to the gym three times a week, playing guitar/singing, and walking.
This is kind of strange, but my intelligible realm and my physical realm seem to have awkward counterbalances… damnit, I’m looking at myself through a strange lens… I would say that walking and language acquisition make up a duo, going to the gym and reading a novel are a duo, and playing music and reading academia are a duo.
When I go walking, I tend to do so at a particular pace and with the express purpose of being in the midst of a walk. Every time you go walking, you can find something new. Oh, that restaurant looks awesome, I’ll have to come back here. Oh, that’s where the library is. You’re picking up the language of the place where you are. The language of where everything is. You’re drawing a map inside your brain by engaging with the physical reality of the thing. This is what the acquisition of language does. Language is the drawing of maps with the mind toward meaning. When you “get the lay of the land” by actually traversing the land in question, this can be likened to getting the lay of the land of language: the more you traverse it, the more you feel comfortable with it. The bulk populace: temperance/consciousness
Going to the gym is something that happens three times a week, and it’s basically always the same. It’s comfortable. I know what I’m going to do. I know how it’s going to feel. I know that it is going to require some effort, but I know that kind of effort all too well—thanks to years and years of practice at it. In short, it’s become something that is basically just a part of my existence. Having spent the last ten years of my life almost insatiably reading novels—for pleasure or for academic purposes, my life would feel naked if it was void of a novel to read. In short, reading novels is comfortable, I know how it’s to be done, I know how it’s going to feel (especially if it’s a good novel—Proust was an exception (I’ve never felt anything like that from a novel)), I know that it will require some effort (or, at least, it should), and I know that effort all too well. The auxiliaries: courage/the body
The practice of music and the study of academia are paired because of the strenuousness of the activities. They require more effort than the others because this is the active attempt to learn something, to change the way I think about myself and the world at large. Music has the special, magical affect of being effective to the mind as it watches harmonies and melodies fall into place. It is basically sensory practice: it has a look, a feel, a sound, a touch, and (in some cases) you can almost taste it when it’s done well—perhaps that’s why we call some music tasteful and others disgusting. Reading scholarly works performs the same actions for the intelligible realms. It helps the mind see more clearly, feel more appropriately, hear what people are saying more thoroughly, touch the inner recesses of the self, and taste what it means to be human. The guardians: wisdom/sub-conscious
It occurred to me (and Gad how I love how writing does this) that writing pervades them all. They are all doing their jobs, and writing is somehow related to all of them. Walking is one of my greatest sources for writing fodder, and one constantly learns about themselves at the gym (if they are paying attention), which means words to be made. Novels are chock full of meaning that needs to be struggled with, and there is nobody out there who would deny that acquiring a second language doesn’t affect the way we write and what we write about: we are language. Finally, the deepest sources of writing whathaveyou comes from the strenuous exercises of practicing music and studying scholastically. The community: morality/spirit
I am just a writer who is doing the job that I’m most fit to do, and it is with this in mind that I bear the labor of pulling myself away from my practice and study in order to gain the knowledge that comes from the combination of theory (that which results from practice and study) with experience. I will bear the inanity and mundanity of a society that has moved away from a desire to truly know what it means to be human and finds itself floundering in a world of trivialities involving which celebrity is wearing what designer and wondering what it must feel like to be a millionaire. I will taste the fruits of the lifestyle I’m battling against in just the same way a flu shot works: a bit of the infection so the body knows what it is fighting against; and I will breathe the air of a freedom that looks good on the outside, but bears inside itself the seed of slavery that will one day ripen. To be the slave of a slave:
Brannigan: I'm de-promoting you, soldier. Kiff, what's the most humiliating job there is?
Kif Kroker: Being your assistant.
Captain Zapp Brannigan: Wrong. Being *your* assistant.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Teacher and Student
These two labels seem to follow me around and lurk in all the corners of my world. In this moment I’m a student, and fifteen minutes later I’m playing the role of teacher. Even in the sub-conscious realm that writing comes from, it becomes apparent how I see myself:
“I’m a student.”
Vs.
“I’m playing the role of teacher.”
I don’t feel worthy of the title of teacher. To be a teacher is an incredibly important job. It means that the lives of young people are in your hands. I am absolutely certain that the importance of the role of the teacher has been almost completely lost in the bulk of the civilized world—although it might be preserved somewhere in the uncivilized world (although I can’t say for sure). We’re talking about a person who, for an extended period of time, is in control of how our children are learning to think. Imagine the importance of that. Is school important? Hell Yeah! I’m afraid that both schools and teachers have been tainted with a healthy dose of economics and politics, which basically serves to render them impotent.
(In a side note: if you are interested in a world where the educational system is something else, check out “The Glass Bead Game” or it’s alternate title “Magester Ludi” or it’s German title “Das Glasperlenspiel” by Hermann Hesse. It’s… educational, and it won a Nobel Prize for a good reason.)
Being a student is one of the greatest situations you can find yourself in, and what I call “terminal students” are all over the place. I once new a guy who was just heading back to school in order to get his third Master’s Degree. Don’t get me wrong, what I’m talking about here is the fact that I absolutely love being a student, but what I have learned in the last couple of years is that there are most definitely two different kinds of students.
One of the greatest pieces of advice that was ever offered to me, was given by a college professor, and it was just as I was finishing my Master’s Degree and trying to decide whether or not I simply wanted to continue on with my PhD or do something else before jumping right back into academia. She told me that being a professor is more difficult than it looks. Apart from all the academic knowledge that you must be up on: proper ways to make your paper comply with the MLA, tidbits and factoids that you must know, metaphor analyses, and language components (she was definitely an English Lit teacher), there was the fact that so many students from so many various backgrounds walk into your office, and, in a way, it is part of your job to ensure there success somehow. This goes for all subjects and all levels of education, but it is especially true in the studies of the humanities.
With that advice in mind, I embarked on a quest to become a student of life.
Of course, the ironic part of becoming a student of life is that to do this I became a teacher in Korea, but I’m going to be very honest and say that teaching English in Korea is not the most academically intensive occupation one can do.
I have been a lot of places and done a lot of things in this life already, and I feel confident that I have experienced enough to be able to teach some people some things; however, I don’t want to simply be a teacher, I want to be THAT teacher. You know the one, right? The teacher that actually affects their students. Oh, you accept up front that you won’t be able to affect them all, or, what’s even more depressing, even most of them, but I know that I remember the name of my high school English teacher to this day—well, one of them. I don’t know how many teachers I actually had throughout my education—countless perhaps?—but I know that I only remember the names of a few of them, and I’m sure that this is the case with most people.
It is with this goal in mind that I set sail for some of the most random occupations that are available. When I tell my mother that I’m going to be a long distance semi-trailer truck driver for a while and then I’m going to be a farmer, she is—as is certainly appropriate for a mother who is concerned about the state of her offspring—*ahem, concerned. You can imagine the conversation:
“You’re wasting your education. You should be teaching not farming.” Etc.
I know that she means well, but I am getting my graduate degree in living right now, and once I have that, then I can return to the world of academia knowing that I will be well-prepared for the baggage that students will be carrying with them into my office.
Everyone’s path is different. This is the struggle that maintains the parental/progeny battle. As soon as parents understand that their children must be allowed to go their own way at some point, the sooner the world crumbles. They never will and never should accept this because they ARE the owners of years of extraordinarily valuable experience, and it is their job to be the voice of reason that their children disregard but come crawling back to—or not. They represent a path that has been taken, tried, and found acceptable. Children naturally rebel against this path. They want to find themselves, so they must move away from the teachers and be what they’re going to do, be their own teachers, and become students of the world.
Here I sit: studentteacherstudent. I learn daily from Plato and William Thackeray and the guitar and exercise and run-on sentences and inappropriate lists and my students. Meanwhile, I teach the nuances of essay writing, grammar, reading, listening, and writing to some eager and some not-so-eager young faces. Then I come home and try to learn from everything I do.
What I want most in the world is to be a conscientious student, but I find myself to be lazy sometimes.
Have you ever wondered what happens to a mind that is constantly engaged? I want to be very clear and state that engagement and entertainment exist in different realms. Because I have a Korean girlfriend at the moment, last weekend I went to see Step Up 3 in 3D, and I quickly realized that when something is visually stimulating or impressive, the story, the engagement, the challenge (which is a word that I would love to have perpetually associated with the word engagement), and the effort are not necessary. If you’ve ever seen a movie from Hollywood, you can guess the story from the first fifteen minutes.
I digress… Engage the mind and see what happens. It responds remarkably well to challenges. Remember all those people that said they wrote twenty-page papers in one night and got good grades on them. That’s the effect and power of adrenaline mingling with the brain juices. You can accomplish a helluva lot when pressed to do so, or you can accomplish nothing with a lot less effort. Something or nothing seems like a pretty simple choice to make, but effort is something else. For now, I will remain mostly student and look forward to the day when I will be able to say that I am mostly a teacher. Until then, I am always a writer.
“I’m a student.”
Vs.
“I’m playing the role of teacher.”
I don’t feel worthy of the title of teacher. To be a teacher is an incredibly important job. It means that the lives of young people are in your hands. I am absolutely certain that the importance of the role of the teacher has been almost completely lost in the bulk of the civilized world—although it might be preserved somewhere in the uncivilized world (although I can’t say for sure). We’re talking about a person who, for an extended period of time, is in control of how our children are learning to think. Imagine the importance of that. Is school important? Hell Yeah! I’m afraid that both schools and teachers have been tainted with a healthy dose of economics and politics, which basically serves to render them impotent.
(In a side note: if you are interested in a world where the educational system is something else, check out “The Glass Bead Game” or it’s alternate title “Magester Ludi” or it’s German title “Das Glasperlenspiel” by Hermann Hesse. It’s… educational, and it won a Nobel Prize for a good reason.)
Being a student is one of the greatest situations you can find yourself in, and what I call “terminal students” are all over the place. I once new a guy who was just heading back to school in order to get his third Master’s Degree. Don’t get me wrong, what I’m talking about here is the fact that I absolutely love being a student, but what I have learned in the last couple of years is that there are most definitely two different kinds of students.
One of the greatest pieces of advice that was ever offered to me, was given by a college professor, and it was just as I was finishing my Master’s Degree and trying to decide whether or not I simply wanted to continue on with my PhD or do something else before jumping right back into academia. She told me that being a professor is more difficult than it looks. Apart from all the academic knowledge that you must be up on: proper ways to make your paper comply with the MLA, tidbits and factoids that you must know, metaphor analyses, and language components (she was definitely an English Lit teacher), there was the fact that so many students from so many various backgrounds walk into your office, and, in a way, it is part of your job to ensure there success somehow. This goes for all subjects and all levels of education, but it is especially true in the studies of the humanities.
With that advice in mind, I embarked on a quest to become a student of life.
Of course, the ironic part of becoming a student of life is that to do this I became a teacher in Korea, but I’m going to be very honest and say that teaching English in Korea is not the most academically intensive occupation one can do.
I have been a lot of places and done a lot of things in this life already, and I feel confident that I have experienced enough to be able to teach some people some things; however, I don’t want to simply be a teacher, I want to be THAT teacher. You know the one, right? The teacher that actually affects their students. Oh, you accept up front that you won’t be able to affect them all, or, what’s even more depressing, even most of them, but I know that I remember the name of my high school English teacher to this day—well, one of them. I don’t know how many teachers I actually had throughout my education—countless perhaps?—but I know that I only remember the names of a few of them, and I’m sure that this is the case with most people.
It is with this goal in mind that I set sail for some of the most random occupations that are available. When I tell my mother that I’m going to be a long distance semi-trailer truck driver for a while and then I’m going to be a farmer, she is—as is certainly appropriate for a mother who is concerned about the state of her offspring—*ahem, concerned. You can imagine the conversation:
“You’re wasting your education. You should be teaching not farming.” Etc.
I know that she means well, but I am getting my graduate degree in living right now, and once I have that, then I can return to the world of academia knowing that I will be well-prepared for the baggage that students will be carrying with them into my office.
Everyone’s path is different. This is the struggle that maintains the parental/progeny battle. As soon as parents understand that their children must be allowed to go their own way at some point, the sooner the world crumbles. They never will and never should accept this because they ARE the owners of years of extraordinarily valuable experience, and it is their job to be the voice of reason that their children disregard but come crawling back to—or not. They represent a path that has been taken, tried, and found acceptable. Children naturally rebel against this path. They want to find themselves, so they must move away from the teachers and be what they’re going to do, be their own teachers, and become students of the world.
Here I sit: studentteacherstudent. I learn daily from Plato and William Thackeray and the guitar and exercise and run-on sentences and inappropriate lists and my students. Meanwhile, I teach the nuances of essay writing, grammar, reading, listening, and writing to some eager and some not-so-eager young faces. Then I come home and try to learn from everything I do.
What I want most in the world is to be a conscientious student, but I find myself to be lazy sometimes.
Have you ever wondered what happens to a mind that is constantly engaged? I want to be very clear and state that engagement and entertainment exist in different realms. Because I have a Korean girlfriend at the moment, last weekend I went to see Step Up 3 in 3D, and I quickly realized that when something is visually stimulating or impressive, the story, the engagement, the challenge (which is a word that I would love to have perpetually associated with the word engagement), and the effort are not necessary. If you’ve ever seen a movie from Hollywood, you can guess the story from the first fifteen minutes.
I digress… Engage the mind and see what happens. It responds remarkably well to challenges. Remember all those people that said they wrote twenty-page papers in one night and got good grades on them. That’s the effect and power of adrenaline mingling with the brain juices. You can accomplish a helluva lot when pressed to do so, or you can accomplish nothing with a lot less effort. Something or nothing seems like a pretty simple choice to make, but effort is something else. For now, I will remain mostly student and look forward to the day when I will be able to say that I am mostly a teacher. Until then, I am always a writer.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Why do we want to feel fear?
Amusement parks specialize in the peddling of safe fear. The reality is, of course, that on any given day, at an average of 10 minutes per trip with (roughly) thirty people, that math is something like:
30*6=180
180*12=2160
So, more than 2000 people EVERY DAY ride those “terrifying” things. In a year, it’s hundreds of thousands. Those statistics ought to be enough to make one feel absolutely secure in sitting down on those death machines, but why does your stomach still turn and your heart rate jump exponentially?
It’s because—apart from the “being freed from gravity”—there is always that possibility that something will go dreadfully wrong.
Human beings love being that close to danger.
It’s the same in love. We are at once willing and yet unwilling at the same time because we know we’ll be at the precipice of potential disaster, but when it comes to matters of the heart we can be even more unwilling to let our guard down.
As it turns out, most things depend almost entirely on the attitude you take into them. If you take an attitude of arrogance and entitlement into something, you’ll find out pretty quickly that this particular attitude can be quite off-putting to quite a lot of the population. If you take the attitude of genuine interest and enjoyment into whatever venture you’re wandering into, you’ll find that people respond in kind.
I don’t have many opinions that matter. Socrates was right, we’re all ignorant, and it’s because there is too much to know. The amount of things that I know for sure could be counted on a hand that’s been maimed—and indeed that image seems most appropriate—while the things I don’t know couldn’t be compared to all the sand in Hawaii.
It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that I should start to believe in things other than human nature, but it seems like the investigation of that one thing could occupy a body for the entirety of a lifetime. It encompasses everything, see. Politics, literature, art, music, science, math, culture, economics, morality, ethics, sensuality, sexuality, language, and knowledge all fall under the umbrella of human nature.
But it’s unimaginably complex, and that’s a bummer? The structures of exactly how a human goes through its world can be broken down into types, but there is always room for jockeying, and that one piece of information means that there is always room for jockeying in everything.
I teach students how to write long sentences, and it makes me happy when they write nonsense:
Fat Eli and ugly Benjamin almost always drink dirty soju, which is delicious, over the moon, but crazy Alice and stupid Peter powerfully sleep in the subway, which is loud.
Does it mean?
Music means something, I think.
I wonder sometimes whether or not politics in the modern sense of the term has anything to do with the politics as the ancients envisioned it?
What kind of effect does the population size have on the method of governing?
What does it mean that almost all philosophers and political theorists and religions forget about the ground of their theories: is-ness.
Without the body there can be no mind. Without the land there can be no country. Does the mind actually create? Or is it perpetually a step behind?
Right now I feel compelled. That’s all.
It seems like I want to cry, and my stomach hurts, and I’m confused about why it seems like there’s a car horn honking in the next room, and all I really want to do is play the guitar, and I keep wondering when my bowels will unleash the hellish bind that I know is in there, and my computer died, and I don’t know what to do about the future, and how the hell am I going to send all these goddamned books home, and when will I finish my studies of the Korean language, and what do I do about the feelings I feel for a girl I know (and she knows) I’m going to leave in a couple of months, and why do I find myself in that position, and why do I think I actually want that particular situation, and why does it feel safer to love at a distance, and why do I believe that I am (as yet) incapable of loving because I still don’t know myself well enough, and I’m pretty sure I know about four people (probably more) who would hate that statement, and I don’t believe in a Christian god, and I know about a million people who would hate that statement, and what kind of arrogance does it take to know something that’s impossible to know, and what’s wrong with having a belief that’s different, and there are so many words I don’t know, and the decadence I’m dealing with in my life must be remedied, and what’s so decadent about using the air conditioner, and I eat leftovers all week, and survival seems like a more worthy goal than the acquisition of free time, and it is a belief I have that most of the free time across the world is spent exceedingly unproductively, and that makes me very sad, and TVs in taxis makes me even more sad, and the more I understand what is possible for people in general the less I understand people generally, and when will parents learn that their kids inherently want different things than life-givers, and when will kids learn that their parents have that most incredible of all of life’s little educators: experience, and when will humans learn that it doesn’t matter whether we know these things or not it is precisely that conflict has always existed and is necessary and productive when understood as a method for growth and development, and I fucking hate war, I hate war, I hate war, and I don’t understand why people are so bad to each other, and I’m sorry I got into an argument with one of my best friends, and I feel like I need to talk to her, and I had a dream about her the other day and we were in Venice with my father, who looked exceedingly sad as he was perpetually attempting to get away from us while toting (very literally) two babies with him and I wandered off on a walk—which happens so frequently these days that I sometimes get very scared to step foot outside my door lest I wander around for hours and stare in rapture at the fact of existence, and I miss having meaningful conversations, and sometimes it feels like I’m a dinosaur investigating my own extinction, and sometimes I just want to be quiet, and half of my time is spent recovering, and the other half is spent ailing, and I don’t know what from.
30*6=180
180*12=2160
So, more than 2000 people EVERY DAY ride those “terrifying” things. In a year, it’s hundreds of thousands. Those statistics ought to be enough to make one feel absolutely secure in sitting down on those death machines, but why does your stomach still turn and your heart rate jump exponentially?
It’s because—apart from the “being freed from gravity”—there is always that possibility that something will go dreadfully wrong.
Human beings love being that close to danger.
It’s the same in love. We are at once willing and yet unwilling at the same time because we know we’ll be at the precipice of potential disaster, but when it comes to matters of the heart we can be even more unwilling to let our guard down.
As it turns out, most things depend almost entirely on the attitude you take into them. If you take an attitude of arrogance and entitlement into something, you’ll find out pretty quickly that this particular attitude can be quite off-putting to quite a lot of the population. If you take the attitude of genuine interest and enjoyment into whatever venture you’re wandering into, you’ll find that people respond in kind.
I don’t have many opinions that matter. Socrates was right, we’re all ignorant, and it’s because there is too much to know. The amount of things that I know for sure could be counted on a hand that’s been maimed—and indeed that image seems most appropriate—while the things I don’t know couldn’t be compared to all the sand in Hawaii.
It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that I should start to believe in things other than human nature, but it seems like the investigation of that one thing could occupy a body for the entirety of a lifetime. It encompasses everything, see. Politics, literature, art, music, science, math, culture, economics, morality, ethics, sensuality, sexuality, language, and knowledge all fall under the umbrella of human nature.
But it’s unimaginably complex, and that’s a bummer? The structures of exactly how a human goes through its world can be broken down into types, but there is always room for jockeying, and that one piece of information means that there is always room for jockeying in everything.
I teach students how to write long sentences, and it makes me happy when they write nonsense:
Fat Eli and ugly Benjamin almost always drink dirty soju, which is delicious, over the moon, but crazy Alice and stupid Peter powerfully sleep in the subway, which is loud.
Does it mean?
Music means something, I think.
I wonder sometimes whether or not politics in the modern sense of the term has anything to do with the politics as the ancients envisioned it?
What kind of effect does the population size have on the method of governing?
What does it mean that almost all philosophers and political theorists and religions forget about the ground of their theories: is-ness.
Without the body there can be no mind. Without the land there can be no country. Does the mind actually create? Or is it perpetually a step behind?
Right now I feel compelled. That’s all.
It seems like I want to cry, and my stomach hurts, and I’m confused about why it seems like there’s a car horn honking in the next room, and all I really want to do is play the guitar, and I keep wondering when my bowels will unleash the hellish bind that I know is in there, and my computer died, and I don’t know what to do about the future, and how the hell am I going to send all these goddamned books home, and when will I finish my studies of the Korean language, and what do I do about the feelings I feel for a girl I know (and she knows) I’m going to leave in a couple of months, and why do I find myself in that position, and why do I think I actually want that particular situation, and why does it feel safer to love at a distance, and why do I believe that I am (as yet) incapable of loving because I still don’t know myself well enough, and I’m pretty sure I know about four people (probably more) who would hate that statement, and I don’t believe in a Christian god, and I know about a million people who would hate that statement, and what kind of arrogance does it take to know something that’s impossible to know, and what’s wrong with having a belief that’s different, and there are so many words I don’t know, and the decadence I’m dealing with in my life must be remedied, and what’s so decadent about using the air conditioner, and I eat leftovers all week, and survival seems like a more worthy goal than the acquisition of free time, and it is a belief I have that most of the free time across the world is spent exceedingly unproductively, and that makes me very sad, and TVs in taxis makes me even more sad, and the more I understand what is possible for people in general the less I understand people generally, and when will parents learn that their kids inherently want different things than life-givers, and when will kids learn that their parents have that most incredible of all of life’s little educators: experience, and when will humans learn that it doesn’t matter whether we know these things or not it is precisely that conflict has always existed and is necessary and productive when understood as a method for growth and development, and I fucking hate war, I hate war, I hate war, and I don’t understand why people are so bad to each other, and I’m sorry I got into an argument with one of my best friends, and I feel like I need to talk to her, and I had a dream about her the other day and we were in Venice with my father, who looked exceedingly sad as he was perpetually attempting to get away from us while toting (very literally) two babies with him and I wandered off on a walk—which happens so frequently these days that I sometimes get very scared to step foot outside my door lest I wander around for hours and stare in rapture at the fact of existence, and I miss having meaningful conversations, and sometimes it feels like I’m a dinosaur investigating my own extinction, and sometimes I just want to be quiet, and half of my time is spent recovering, and the other half is spent ailing, and I don’t know what from.
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