\nwhat are we going to do? now it’s all been said
\nno new ideas in the house and every book has been read<\/i><\/p>\n
I think part of the reason for my recent writer’s block is the desire to write something new. Truly new. Of course this can never be accomplished since to have any knowledge that one is creating anything new, whether in written form or in any other, one has to have a knowledge of everything that has come before, otherwise how can anyone say anything has never been done before? That’s part of what’s intimidating about it. I sit down and as soon as words begin to form on the screen I’m overwhelmed with the thought that they’re just thoughts and attitudes everyone already knows and feels and I’m just regurgitating them.<\/p>\n
I’m reading Augustine’s Confessions<\/i> at the moment. As a convergence of philosophy and faith, or even as a form of rudimentary devotional, it’s the precursor to most everything we find in the “Christianity” section of the neighborhood Barnes & Noble. Reading it, one would think that the source had been found, a spring from which flow most of the streams and tributaries of modern Christian thought. But even Augustine built on a solid foundation of Greek philosophy, early Christian theology and biblical phraseology, and reading the book, in addition to the comfort of the knowledge that what I’m reading is a purer strain in many ways than the interbred philosophies descended from it, makes me want to go back even further, deep into Aristotle and Plato, who up until now I’ve only dabbled in. But how far back can one go? Where’s the purpose in the study that defines the extent to which one studies? Should that purpose define the depth of inquiry? Should there even be a purpose at all or should the study be self-actualizing and sustaining (“just because”)? Where does it stop? It has to stop.<\/p>\n
I think even among the diversity of disciplines available for study, the one constant among them, no matter how extensive or deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness they are, is their finiteness. Granted, no single one of us may able to wrap his or her mind around the whole of a particular discipline, but in the end any human thread of inquiry is constrained by the boundaries of this world and the limitations of our powers of understanding. It may be no less overwhelming for that knowledge, especially within disciplines with a great deal of academic history (“one step back from infinity”), since we would need a thousand lifetimes to ingest everything available concerning even a small area of human thought. An equilibrium has to be reached wherein we’re not paralyzed by the weight of the vault of thought that has come before us, yet not ignorant of the long strides toward understanding taken by our predecessors. So the finite quality of any realm of human thought should come as an encouragement through the realization that there will always be something left to know and share, and that a particular discipline can at least be defined in terms of a system with which our limited minds can relate, minimizing the overwhelming nature of the body of knowledge already accumulated.<\/p>\n
An example of this would be a grasp of the central concepts employed in most philosophical circles (relativism, absolutes, truth, reality, the mind, and so forth). Having a least a rudimentary understanding of the building blocks of philosophy equips one to approach most any philosophical theory with a certain framework in mind, and the concepts encountered do less abstract floating in space and more interfacing with our then-current understanding of the discipline, enabling us to relate to them better and internalizing them. Not only does this corral the untethered concepts into some semblance of a system, it enables us to know when a fresh concept, which at first may appear to be directly related to the discipline at hand, is instead revealed to only be tangential, and really transcends the system and redefines at least a part of it. I think that’s as close as anyone can come to the realization of something truly new, but I’ll take it. I can run with that.<\/p>\n
every artist is a cannibal
\nevery poet is a theif
\nall kill their inspiration
\nand sing about the grief<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}