Misc. à Minuit

I love this piece by Klimt because it's so uncharacteristic - I guess I mean that it is not at all like The Kiss. But I also like it just because I like it. The man who painted it described himself: "I am not particularly interesting."

I'm in a mood, somewhat contemplative, mostly scribblative, which I'd like to exploit in journaling and letter-writing and some on -the-page puzzling in my mother tongue. 21 pages of archaic French lie in wait (we've just begun un petit extrait de Les Misérables), but I've been taking my sweet time with Fielding's Tom Jones, C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, and a slew of sociology readings. Memory and Identity is burning up my highlighter. I wish the packet were book-bound to add style to my future shelves. I'm working on ideas for our individual research project ... various floating fancies in re: comparative studies. Letters as agents of identification in community, practices of memorization (poems, verses, etc.), or grieving processes and communal mourning.

I've been interested in the roots of "nostalgia" - in 1688, a physician called Hofer coined the term from the Greek words for returning home (nostós) and pain/ache (álgos). He used it to describe the condition of Swiss mercenaries pining for their native lands. The idea of nativity is not, I think, far removed from an empathetic modern understanding of nostalgia. If we consider nostalgia, not as the "pervasive failure of imagination" ridiculed by modern critics - according to Plessner, "anonymity, itinerancy, [and] dispersion" alone offer the modern man a new "horizon of possibility" - if we throw that definition in the dust-heap, we might be able to consider just what our yearning for particular aspects of past history elucidates about our real condition. For all this mitigated media - and even, perhaps, by means of it - an urge for community remains and is expressed. Despite economic inviability and the often brutalizing consequences of attachment, attachment is just what we most want to cultivate. Only now we have particularly shammy ways of going about it. I'm veering from nostalgia in the direction of my own jugular - no one is more hypocritical than I am when it comes to Facebook.

Which leads me to a Lenten promise. For the first time, as a Presbyterian, I'm giving up something. And good grief - it's social networking. 46 days sans that particular foothold.

I've been experiencing a strange phenomenon lately: if I have a quick interaction, in a hallway, in a dining hall, if it ends too quickly, I have difficulty conceiving that it happened at all. Something feels fundamentally off-kilter in these brief glimpses, something more than shallowness. I was diagnosed anxious and stressed, but maybe I'm more inundated than either. And with a natural thoughtlessness to my character, that inundation breeds disengagement. Another memory reading seems to fit here - the cognitive analysis of buying bread.

Repetitive actions such as trips to the grocery store are basically only differentiable by the date of the occurrence. So our minds jumble all those operations together, and we end up remembering just the first and last times we purchased a loaf. Something like that seems to happen to me when there is an undifferentiated projection of self in social situations or online - if I'm telling the same story, repeating the same lines, or behaving in a "coded" way, my conversations seem to fall into that same cognitive heap. This is obviously destructive. Eliminating an element of my life that feels particularly shallow and undifferentiable, and therefore frankly dangerous (oh, I have sermons on Facebook, and I must preach them to myself!) would be wise for a time. And free up more of those moments for writing, reading, throwing open my doors, and reinvesting my energies. I want a better attention span, honestly, and a more generous engagement with my community (also quite selfish, but why not beg the real things?).

Now, I'd better do homework. It's after 1 AM and foreign languages just get harder. I have a mix CD called Homicidal Mourning: Criminal Approaches to the Exercise of Grief. I'm going to play Counting Crows on repeat. If nothing else, I'll write something for my second fiction meeting, scope the local bookstore website for good kids' stuff. I have a gift card, and that is ice cream money, man. If you didn't earn it, you can spend it on a smoothie or a pop-up book, or a journal to write lists in. Lists are also a topic in Memory and Identity - and I've no reason to wish them gone. Currently, my screen displays a folder filled with artwork I love. Currently, I'm reading an article called "Mediated Memories in the Digital Age." Much ado about the physical fact of photographs, so I'm going to print those pieces. For the moment, the top of this post bears evidence from the file, which also featuring Degas - and Corinne Serfass. My friends are really an inspiring bunch.