So I'll greet you with an admission: I've been trying too hard to come up with something new and refined to say- and omit the things I see as trivial. Consequently, I haven't posted anything- nearly abandoning a worthy project. I apologize if this is too unrefined, and the texture is inconsistent for your taste. I know this becomes valuable to someone- even if it's only me.
All in all, as a new semester has just closed behind me, so the pressure to produce is gone- and the desire for it has promptly returned. Despite fatigue, I feel it necessary to chronicle what exactly it is I've experienced.
Being as my thoughts diverge so greatly from nearly every person I've ever met- I have to conclude that I am a rarity. (You are too- you just might fail to believe it.) I'm not afraid of a lack in commonality- rather I fear the depreciation of the singular things because we have little or no reference to their beauty. Things I take for granted as common sense or mindless drivel can be a deep draught or novel flavor to someone else's taste. Likewise, I see the same must be for me too.
As Truth is the only trustworthy thing, solid in an undulating world, we seek to hold it for as long as it pertains to our surrounding. Our minds can only hold so many things at once- and so we methodically climb steps of truth to to heights of conscious awareness- letting go of lesser concrete ideas to let us go onward.
Because everything has its context, I find the greatest importance in communication. My writing becomes dense and hard to palate as i am stuck trying to wring out every fluid ounce of meaning in me. Because I have not yet the literary strength to purify clout from meaning, I hint at sorrow for the loss of my acuteness. We often tire of our own thoughts before we have the chance to communicate them. It's that, or we become hopeless that anyone would pursue our mind to the exhaustive point of its case.
This is why friendship is so dependent on close affections. Without that proximal intimacy we frustrate the meanings we wish to convey. We are too forgetful and temperamental to well muddle through to explaining the more ultimate thoughts. We are still very much like children- still comforted by the commonality of experience- but refined so much as to needing a much more substantial commonality to share. With our fate of learning and creating, our utmost desire becomes that of finding someone who has the same fate to learn similar flavors and nuances of thought. We desire the most unnatural type of love- one of mutual respect honor and strength. (Lewis 91,96,97,103, 104- The four Loves.)
When I read from C.S. Lewis and see the thoughts that I've put down (totally aside) mirror or parallel his- I can't help a gasp of surprise and a warmness of understanding. I have an agony that is perceiving the misunderstood. If I compare myself to a proven literary master, and am so weak and unskilled- I just prove myself foolish. If I don't associate the literal comparison, you have no foundation to empathize my situation in its most intimate parts.
I would like to say that these thoughts and preconceptions are often clutter- things we feel we need to concern about before we can get to the truth of anything. This is a falsity and a clarity in one. Sadly, addressing them is the only rudimentary skill we have at hewing out a basin to hold our argument. I must contextualize my world for you, or the relative nihilistic nature of our cognitive styles cannot communicate.
Though he cannot respect me- for his passing on- Lewis is now one of my dearest friends despite only "hearing" less than a million words to speak of his intellectual affections. Because I have a common bond- a place I've arrived at all on my own, and see he's been there too- it makes me feel that someone would understand my hopes for greatness.
You see, it is not that I doubt my capability for greatness that hinders me so strongly and dampens my wick- it is that I don't feel that anyone could perceive a change if i did become great. Greatness wouldn't do anything good if no one knew to be helped by it.
You can think me foolish to aspire- but I won't be mocked, for it is my genius to realize that everyone is purposed for greatness- not many accept the call, and still fewer persevere to the point. Anyone can take a picture- but seeing how the world speaks without words is a necessary vantage for a photographer.
How to have more thoughts than what you say, and show that the world speaks it, is the job of a journalist. And how to show anyone what that truly means is the miracle of a true photographer. So it is with our minds- and writers write to freeze one pictorial tangible truth. Many times we shoot short and the focus is off- or the main object is only partially revealed because the perspective is too close to consider the immensity of it. Still more, we must consider that some photographers of the mind have dirt in the lens of their scope- and so blot out vital details in the scheme of reality. In the end, beautiful things can be a blur without the right focus and attention to perspective. So it is with having many good thoughts- but until it's on paper, it can't be measured, weighted, and tested. Until a thought has reached a definition, it's still a relative rule.
Even if a picture is worth a thousand words- those thousand words (or more) must be thought by the artist before it can be materialized. Without the preset of cognitively forming our creation, our product becomes a thousand words of blah from whence it came.
It's a shaky thought, but I think this note is relative to the ideals of evolving the mind. Owen Barfield may be seeping out of me through exposure in the works of C.S. Lewis.
I feel like I am too out of shape- or my mind isn't sharp enough to cut all the way through the bonds that hold my thoughts to this mud. I tire far too long before I've reached my intended destination. Case in point-I had planned on linking these ideas to the phenomena in my life wherein I seem to have very well failed the most important/growing/imbuing/fertile/nutritious/fostering/cultured/powerful/poised/destined semester of school I've had so far. I've gained more this semester than all of the semesters before altogether, but could not be where I am without them. Still, I've somehow squandered my stewardship despite extreme efforts. I think my quality dwindles with my hopes of it ever being complete. I believe also that I am cursed with a sick will- a plague of lethargy in my soul. I have a song I must write down, but yet... it evades me to even think long of it. Times will come when I will make the best of what I should, and make the best of not doing what I want.
Thank you for reading-
Yours (as you know me)
