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.