A technological excavation
Jan. 12th, 2007 04:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tarigwaemirLowell House, on the Feast of St. Benedict Bennet
I have all these mysterious documents saved on my laptop with file names like "blah.txt" and "stupidity.txt" not to mention really long note files where I do the typing equivalent of talking to myself out loud while working on a paper. I thought I should take the bits and pieces I liked and store them somewhere before I purged the rest.
In chronological order:
Thought.txt
[When did I write this? O_O High school? I no longer have any recollection.]
I feel lonely. I save such loneliness in tiny flasks of hard black metal, stoppered with a steel cork; I dislike revealing myself without disguises, for masks, as you may know, have always been my forte. I am lonely, and I know why, but I do not want to dwell on it, so I stopper it and save it in a cellar for later, when I am better prepared to swallow it.
I would like to talk to someone who would weave equally complicated mazes and leave them for me to untangle. I used to enjoy picking out knots on old bits of string. Something small like that to focus my attention and draw my concentration--that would be very nice right now.
---
unsentletters.txt
[Oh dear, I wrote this almost exactly a year ago, and it's mostly sentimental tripe and purple prose.]
Right now I am sitting in my most favorite place in the world, the stacks of Widener library, looking out over Massachusetts Avenue through the great gate that leads into Harvard Yard. It is dark, the street lamps are lit, there is a glossiness to the black shadows of people passing back and forth and the black sky above. I can't see the moon, but I would imagine it to be a white so pure that it's almost blue, a virginal white glowing softly against the velvet smoothness of the night sky.
I always thought that love was a matter of finding a compatible person and feeling affection for them. Who knew that the affection would come first, that anyone whom one mysteriously chooses to love will be compatible simply because you love them.
---
meditation.txt
[Originally a list of fifteen reasons why I was unhappy at the time. I wrote this earlier in the semester.]
4. I am unhappy because I am graduating soon, and I don't know if I've done everything in college that I've wanted to do.
7. I am unhappy because I am not satisfied with who I am. The unhappiness comes both from the dissatisfaction and the fact that I consider my state of dissatisfaction to be weak.
12. I am unhappy because I have realized that there are only a few people to whom I really matter.
---
stupidity.txt
[I must have been particularly hormonal when I wrote this.]
A particular fantasy of holding and being held, face against neck, a loose and comfortable embrace, a sense of sinking into softness but being supported as well. That recurring temptation, the irresistible thought, of reaching out and touching the elbow, slipping my hand down to his palm.
But I said that I wanted reality not fantasy. I won't keep indulging in fantasy. I won't live in my head, I won't.
---
paper3notes.txt
[Haha, paper-writing frustrations. This one is actually rather amusing.]
Dear Foucault,
Sometimes, I just want to shake you and ask you WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. Use plain language. I don't know what you mean by "a theory of representation"--or rather I thought I did but I don't anymore.
Sometimes the urge for conversation is overwhelming. Sometimes you write simply because you can't bear the silence. It's like sitting all alone on a mountain and keeping yourself company by shouting and listening for echoes. But it's so unsatisfactory. You want a real live other person: unpredictable, opaque and unknown. You want to peel back their opacity, come to know them, in order to affirm your humanity--as opposed to your individuality--through communication. To know that you are part of a species.
The urge to write is the urge to consume the human beings around you. Or is it the other way around? The urge to consume becomes the urge to write? In the transformation of person to character, they become knowable, transparent, under one's control. Yet even then, as characters on a page, they retain their independence. To write a convincing character means to relinquish control. A humanity that exists beyond the text? Or is that too an illusion? Yet it is not beyond the text, only beyond the author. To relinquish control means to be at the mercy of the reader.
I read words and their meaning begins to break down.
Geez, whatever happened to the days when I enjoyed being in mental agony over a difficult idea?
I need to stew over this for a minimum number of hours before ideas emerge. Stew, mind, stew. Is there a way to get your mind to stew faster? Also by the time I finish stewing, I'm so exhausted that I can't write.
Understanding a concept means to take it apart and know exactly how every joint and screw and tiny squiggly part functions and fits together, then to reassemble it in one piece and be able to grasp it in your mind as a single entity, without losing knowledge of the inner workings.
The process of understanding is organization, or taxonomy, as Levi-Strauss would say. I am incapable of memorizing large collections of facts by rote; what I am capable of is memorizing their interrelations. If I know the shape of the connections between the elements--i.e. the structure--then I can recall the elements themselves. Understanding requires systematization. I used to think that I was good at this process of systematization, but college has shown me otherwise. Every course I've done badly in, I've failed to achieve complete systematization of the knowledge provided in the course.
Of course, systematization isn't sufficient for a paper. A paper, at least in theory, requires not just understanding but creativity. Analysis, when done properly, is a creative process, in my opinion.
...On a side note: what college has taught me about science. It is not a deductive process but an inductive one. It's hard to remember that, the way we're first taught in middle school and high school. But science is empirical.
The key is methodology.
---
On that note, I will go back to trying to "systematize" what we learned about developmental biology this semester.
Yours &c.
I have all these mysterious documents saved on my laptop with file names like "blah.txt" and "stupidity.txt" not to mention really long note files where I do the typing equivalent of talking to myself out loud while working on a paper. I thought I should take the bits and pieces I liked and store them somewhere before I purged the rest.
In chronological order:
Thought.txt
[When did I write this? O_O High school? I no longer have any recollection.]
I feel lonely. I save such loneliness in tiny flasks of hard black metal, stoppered with a steel cork; I dislike revealing myself without disguises, for masks, as you may know, have always been my forte. I am lonely, and I know why, but I do not want to dwell on it, so I stopper it and save it in a cellar for later, when I am better prepared to swallow it.
I would like to talk to someone who would weave equally complicated mazes and leave them for me to untangle. I used to enjoy picking out knots on old bits of string. Something small like that to focus my attention and draw my concentration--that would be very nice right now.
---
unsentletters.txt
[Oh dear, I wrote this almost exactly a year ago, and it's mostly sentimental tripe and purple prose.]
Right now I am sitting in my most favorite place in the world, the stacks of Widener library, looking out over Massachusetts Avenue through the great gate that leads into Harvard Yard. It is dark, the street lamps are lit, there is a glossiness to the black shadows of people passing back and forth and the black sky above. I can't see the moon, but I would imagine it to be a white so pure that it's almost blue, a virginal white glowing softly against the velvet smoothness of the night sky.
I always thought that love was a matter of finding a compatible person and feeling affection for them. Who knew that the affection would come first, that anyone whom one mysteriously chooses to love will be compatible simply because you love them.
---
meditation.txt
[Originally a list of fifteen reasons why I was unhappy at the time. I wrote this earlier in the semester.]
4. I am unhappy because I am graduating soon, and I don't know if I've done everything in college that I've wanted to do.
7. I am unhappy because I am not satisfied with who I am. The unhappiness comes both from the dissatisfaction and the fact that I consider my state of dissatisfaction to be weak.
12. I am unhappy because I have realized that there are only a few people to whom I really matter.
---
stupidity.txt
[I must have been particularly hormonal when I wrote this.]
A particular fantasy of holding and being held, face against neck, a loose and comfortable embrace, a sense of sinking into softness but being supported as well. That recurring temptation, the irresistible thought, of reaching out and touching the elbow, slipping my hand down to his palm.
But I said that I wanted reality not fantasy. I won't keep indulging in fantasy. I won't live in my head, I won't.
---
paper3notes.txt
[Haha, paper-writing frustrations. This one is actually rather amusing.]
Dear Foucault,
Sometimes, I just want to shake you and ask you WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. Use plain language. I don't know what you mean by "a theory of representation"--or rather I thought I did but I don't anymore.
Sometimes the urge for conversation is overwhelming. Sometimes you write simply because you can't bear the silence. It's like sitting all alone on a mountain and keeping yourself company by shouting and listening for echoes. But it's so unsatisfactory. You want a real live other person: unpredictable, opaque and unknown. You want to peel back their opacity, come to know them, in order to affirm your humanity--as opposed to your individuality--through communication. To know that you are part of a species.
The urge to write is the urge to consume the human beings around you. Or is it the other way around? The urge to consume becomes the urge to write? In the transformation of person to character, they become knowable, transparent, under one's control. Yet even then, as characters on a page, they retain their independence. To write a convincing character means to relinquish control. A humanity that exists beyond the text? Or is that too an illusion? Yet it is not beyond the text, only beyond the author. To relinquish control means to be at the mercy of the reader.
I read words and their meaning begins to break down.
Geez, whatever happened to the days when I enjoyed being in mental agony over a difficult idea?
I need to stew over this for a minimum number of hours before ideas emerge. Stew, mind, stew. Is there a way to get your mind to stew faster? Also by the time I finish stewing, I'm so exhausted that I can't write.
Understanding a concept means to take it apart and know exactly how every joint and screw and tiny squiggly part functions and fits together, then to reassemble it in one piece and be able to grasp it in your mind as a single entity, without losing knowledge of the inner workings.
The process of understanding is organization, or taxonomy, as Levi-Strauss would say. I am incapable of memorizing large collections of facts by rote; what I am capable of is memorizing their interrelations. If I know the shape of the connections between the elements--i.e. the structure--then I can recall the elements themselves. Understanding requires systematization. I used to think that I was good at this process of systematization, but college has shown me otherwise. Every course I've done badly in, I've failed to achieve complete systematization of the knowledge provided in the course.
Of course, systematization isn't sufficient for a paper. A paper, at least in theory, requires not just understanding but creativity. Analysis, when done properly, is a creative process, in my opinion.
...On a side note: what college has taught me about science. It is not a deductive process but an inductive one. It's hard to remember that, the way we're first taught in middle school and high school. But science is empirical.
The key is methodology.
---
On that note, I will go back to trying to "systematize" what we learned about developmental biology this semester.
Yours &c.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 03:34 am (UTC)(For Jenny versions of sentimental tripe, please see the "daniel" tag at my journal, hahaha.)
GOOD LUCK TOMORROW you will destroy dev bio with unprecedented ferocity!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 07:53 am (UTC)these are fantastic! i actually do this, too. mine are called "it's me.txt", "thing.doc", "dear ad board.doc" (hahaha), and "finaid.doc". the latter one is named so as not to tempt any passersby. and since you are braver than i am, these files will never see the light of day! :D
also congrats on gradschoooool! :)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-14 01:03 am (UTC)Hahaha, your file names are much more creative. I used to password-lock mine before I realized my parents just didn't nose around my computer at all, after which I got rather complacent. I definitely did a lot of censoring in this post though; some things are just too embarrassing to ever be exposed to the public. ^_^;;
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 02:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-14 01:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-14 10:32 pm (UTC)