And and and and tell us Stephen, how is uncle Si?

"Know, whoever asks my name, that I am Leah, and I go plying my fair hands here and there to make me a garland; to please me at the glass I here adorn myself, but my sister Rachel never leaves her mirror and sits all day.  She is fain to see her own fair eyes as I to adorn me with my hands.  She with seeing, and I with doing am satisfied."
-Dante

i keep feeling like i need to engage an audience, and i keep trying to start, but i always keep feeling like there is a better way that i haven't found yet.  so, i will just start with "hello," here.  hello.

there are two words i would like to talk about.  one is gnostic, and the other is agnostic.

agnosticism, for some reason, seems easier to understand than its antonym.  it's simply someone who does not believe that any one person can have a complete knowledge of any given subject in this life.  this extends from the existence of god to philosophies on life.  agnostics simply claim that they don't know everything and there is a lot they are definitely not sure of- this doesn't mean they don't believe, they merely don't know.

on the other hand, gnosticism is knowing.  it's that simple.  gnostics know.

to see a little how gnostics approach life, i would like to talk about harold bloom's discussion about dante's divine comedy.  dante, the pilgrim, saw, in a vision, all the cantos of hell and was guided through the layers of purgatory and saw, finally, the beatific heavens in all their glory,  meeting a few of the souls who resided in each layer of the afterlife.  to say nothing of its influence as a poem and dante's influence as a poet, the divine comedy is big.  dante essentially created a third testament, after the new and the old, for many christians.

gnostics approach literature in a very determined way.  what they bring to everything they do or read is their own philosophy and ideas on life and religion.  they bring their theology with them wherever they go.  as gnostics read or engage with art, they have an agenda in front of their eyes; whatever they are looking at or doing, be it reading, watching a movie, talking to someone, etc.  as they read, any part of the text that does not comply with what they know is simply passed off as irrelevant or wrong or, depending on how much controversy or conflict said reading engenders, is fought.  (see: the struggle of christians in the united states to ban harry potter for its propagation of the practice of dark arts.)  so to a gnostic, good art is simply what fits inside what they already believe or know.

so gnostics, especially christians, bring their knowing to dante's divine comedy.  they bring the gospel according to thomas aquinas (as i understand it, the catholic philosophy) to the text and make dante a saint.  they make everything that dante says fit into their own ideology and theology.  and, yes, dante can be read that way- he can be read as a visionary saint who is above all pious and humble, a true follower of God.  what dante says can be read like doctrine.  the christian idea of hell and purgatory and heaven can be read in the divine comedy.

but this idea of gnosticism brings up some interesting questions to ask.  how does one know something?  at what point can you know that you know something?  what or who taught you what knowing is?  is knowing a feeling?  there are a lot of feelings (outside of happy, sad, mad...), what is the role of feelings?  does everyone, even people inside of the same faith, know differently?

another interesting part of gnosticism is that, in general, love tends to be the universal drive and agenda in art- it is the ultimate goal to be obtained, and if a work of art is lacking that, it cannot truly be worth anything.  on the other hand, others praise art for adhering to nature and reality.  dr. samuel johnson said this about shakespeare, whom johnson praised as being the best imitator of true nature:

"but love is only one of many passions, and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him.  he knew, that any other passion, as it was regular or exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or calamity."

gnostics know.  they bring that knowing to everything they do, and they make everything bend to fit inside their philosophy.  but what do they rely on to know that they know?  is what they bring to art true to reality?  does it need to be to be considered good art?

on the next post, i will talk about the agnostic approach or, at least, what appears to be the agnostic approach to life/art.  it may shed new light on gnostics, as well, when an agnostic's approach to the divine comedy is discussed.

flowers in my mouth

“That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” - Nietzsche

i am back, trying this thing again.  blogging is something with nearly unlimited possibilities, but on my first blog, i couldn't seem to break from the idea that blogs are soapboxes.  i used a blog to spout opinions until i was blue, purple, and orange-ish in the face.

there wasn't even any satisfaction in relating what i thought i had learned that i was trying to convey in my rants.  moments and ideas in my cognitive processes make me really excited, and i really want to share them.  however, i get to the blank page and start writing them down, and i feel miserable.  what i feel is akin to being excited to eat something that took hours to cook only to find it's flat and not delicious.  thus, the quote at the beginning of the blog from nietzsche.  there is a kind of contempt in writing and speaking.  words are just empty vessels falling from our brains, because our brains already digested whatever was palpable and good in the vessels.  see?  our brains are eating and feeding the best parts of us.  it's all in there.

so what i want to do with this blog is use it mostly as a tool of criticism for literature; i have been reading harold bloom.  harold bloom has a mind with cognitive powers way beyond my own and most people's.  he also retains the things he reads and so has the power to hold onto the works of many artists and can compare them to each other.  his mind and writings are really exciting to engage, and he has brought fresh life to my own.  i trust him a lot to teach me about aesthetics and true greatness because of his ability to retain what he reads in literature.  a person like that can probably tell me what literature is better than someone who can barely remember the book he read last month, right?  bloom has shown me a lot of things, but what i want to do with this blog is try to apply what he has shown me about what you can do with psychology in literature.

literature, especially the very best of it, or at least the most influential of it, is a kind of cognitive memory.  if one spends their time reading the main authors and poets of each period of time, it is easier to see where we came from.

before i went to college, i knew about walt whitman, and i even knew that i liked his poetry.  there is an accessible power to his work that needs no context.  however, as i have gone through school and taken survey courses that span the history of western literature from b.c. 400 to today, i see why walt whitman happened.  i can understand that america, at the time of whitman, did not have a foothold in any of the arts of the day.  there was no true "american" art.  so ralph waldo emerson saw the need and sent out a call for a Great american presence.  whitman filled the role.  so whitman is an answer and a result of needing an american art, and he is, but it's so much more than that, too, because it's history, and it's elusive because it just keeps on getting deeper and deeper as much as it gets broader and broader.  even so, one can get their foot in the door, and it's exciting to see the way that culture and needs and learning climate and artists all interact and produce art.  that is the cognitive memory that literature provides, and that is what i want to explore with this blog.  i also want to explore how people interact with each other.  i also want to become a better writer.  the hope is that i can find an idea that clicks with me as i read and share it in the blog, and before the words are overly dead in my heart, write some spontaneous things that connect from what i read and think as i'm writing.  that has happened before.

so i'm back, and i'm trying to read a lot this summer, and i want to show something for the reading i do.

read my blog and tell me how cool i am, because it's way better when i know i'm cool because i told you to tell me i'm cool.