The secret of education still hid itself somewhere behind ignorance, and one fumbled over it as feebly as ever. In such labyrinths, the staff is a force almost more necessary than the legs; the pen becomes a sort of blind-man’s dog, to keep him from falling into the gutters. The pen works for itself, and acts like a hand, modelling the plastic material over and over again to the form that suits it best. The form is never arbitrary, but is a sort of growth like crystallization, as any artist knows too well; for often the pencil or pen runs into side-paths and shapelessness, loses its relations, stops or is bogged. Then it has to return on its trail, and recover, if it can, its line of force. The result of a year’s work depends more on what is struck out than what is left in; on the sequence of the main lines of thought, than on their play or variety.
The Education of Henry Adams
Month: December 2021
I am your shadow
new moon in sagittarius
what makes the fantasy of tearing it all down and setting off along some line of flight into unknown territory so alluring? it seems that for most people this impulse is tamped down with regimented self-destructiveness at a lower frequency, via substance abuse, binge television, etc., or else it’s sublimated into a quote unquote “healthy” process of change, deliberate and sustainable, aimed at concrete goals.
it’s hard for me to deny what blind intuition and whim have done to make my life more pregnant with meaning. the world will of course intervene into anyone’s stability eventually, but Life won’t be experienced in all its splendor if timidity, inertia, and fear of pain dominate one’s existence. in his Education, Henry Adams argues that chaos is the natural course of the universe, order a fiction of human consciousness; “chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.” the sense of thrill, the thrumming energy felt when interrogating potentials unforeseen, not yet realized, and just beyond comfort, is an indication of one’s nearness to, as Clarice Lispector (Dec. 10) calls it, the coração selvagem, the wild heart of life.
this naturally leads to the counterquestion of whether courting destruction is necessary. the impulse to shake things up, loosening structural supports, all for an imagined and, by nature, unsecured different way of being, is, if you squint, or maybe even without squinting, merely the desire for death, an end to the life lived up to that point. obligations can be impediments, blocking the way to higher experience, or they can deepen the value of one’s present conditions. as I write this I’m wearing a t-shirt bearing the misunderstood William Blake (Nov 28) quote, “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” is this a moral imperative urging that we embrace excess and search for what is above and beyond conventional, predictable existence? do we brave the inevitable pain and violence of such a decision? or is Blake saying something else? Philoctetes, enduring his poisoned wound, may serve some as a model for how anguish and destruction can be ennobled, with his convalescence proving essential for mastery over the bow of Heracles. Or, it’s the story of a man needlessly exiled for a decade only to become proficient with implements that cause further suffering.
I might go and throw my phone into the lake, yeah/It ain’t hard to quit carin’ what you think, yeah
100 Gecs (Laura Les [Dec 2], Dylan Brady [Nov 27])
I’m not quite lighted out for unknown territories, nor did I throw my phone in the lake, but I did deactivate my Instagram. a small step towards acting on the conviction that unmediated contact with Life’s wild heart is still possible.
Henry Adams on copyright
Adams wanted to escape the terrors of copyright; his highest ambition was to be pirated and advertised free of charge, since, in any case, his pay was nothing. Under the excitement of the chase, he was becoming a pirate himself, and liked it.
The Education of Henry Adams