Culture

I am ostensibly trying to write my publish-or-perish book again, and as I have done until now, ended up discarding most of my thinking on the subject matter. Also, as one of the topics is culture, I am having a hard time finding an approach to the subject without getting mired down in extant scholarship, so much of which I do not entirely agree with.
It seems to me that much "theory" (which can be less theory than doctrine - see Myers' writing on this; also see), to which I would add more recent theory, lacks full consideration of consequences. There is plenty of literature (the roots of which now decades old) that argue against "nation" as a construct. Empirically, there is indeed evidence of a back and forth (and other directional) exchange of ideas and ways of being among 'nations' today. It is argued that nationhood is a bunk concept. National symbols, in intercultural literature, are often presented as essentialist propaganda. Nationhood is argued as an outmoded concept to be "disrupted" for the betterment of an international flow of economics and ideas, or at least acknowledgement that this flow moves outside of older geographical patterns.

This is related to the problem of multiculturalism. A glance at my blog reveals a little bit of different cultures, but in my case, I actually lived in these places for years, have (or more accurately today, had) competence in the languages; have family members representative of these cultures. People like me are not uncommon today, and related labels have been coined, such as "third culture kid". I am explicitly making this disclaimer, because I have observed a superficial multiculturalism, or even careless cultural appropriation (see Root's book Cannibal Culture). I see people who praise themselves for their cultural awareness, but already from the point of view of hubris, this is problematic. What I prefer to call interculturalism is hard and often uncomfortable. It is also something that is very difficult to explain to people who have not been exposed to different cultures. Perhaps it can be compared to the idea of growing another set of eyes.
Not quite like this but similar is when you have a friend in palliative care, and on your runs you look for beautiful things to take pictures of to send: an extra awareness of surroundings can be gained, and once obvious things have been photographed, you begin to notice increasing subtleties, like how light itself can create beauty as it falls on or through segments of nature; how the wind causes foliage to drape like the expensive gowns of yesteryear. Awareness of another's being can call into relevance and sight more than what one had before. This can be explained by hermeneutics.
My favorite book on the topic of cultural 'knowing' continues to be Kristeva's Etrangers à nous-mêmes, because it ultimately brings the difficult point down to our virtue and responsibilities as individuals. This is different from the euphoric individualism that celebrates every last detail of the separation of person into their own unit. Rather, it draws from οἰκείωσις, the Stoic theory of appropriation which sees individuals as part of a greater whole.

This has been my experience of cultural exchange. I will never forget a childhood experience of being given a shell necklace in Thailand (this was back in the day when fair-skinned people were a sight to be beheld there; we got to these places because my mother spoke Thai) and feeling so inadequate at only having the little trinkets my mother had us bring; this act of giving what one has has stayed with me, and something I have looked to do myself, though any introductory class in anthropology will cover just how problematic giving is. Diseased blankets is only one example.
The model I try to follow is one of respect and listening to others.
In American history, the right to due process has played a very important part. I mention it here because of its role in listening.
But speaking of law, I read (via) an interesting Gibbon quote today that sums up quite well the practical difficulties of multiculturalism:

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter XXVI:

As long as the same passions and interests subsist among mankind, the questions of war and peace, of justice and policy, which were debated in the councils of antiquity, will frequently present themselves as the subject of modern deliberation. But the most experienced statesman of Europe has never been summoned to consider the propriety or the danger of admitting or rejecting an innumerable multitude of Barbarians, who are driven by despair and hunger to solicit a settlement on the territories of a civilised nation. 

Or consider the difficulties of achieving equality: would we be able to afford our laptops? Difficult questions arise.
To everything I write, I can hear people slapping potential labels on me. But I have rarely been content with labels.There are other ways of defining and looking at these matters.
I am keeping that for the book.

And I definitely have my biases, models I respect and wish to cultivate.
As a cliffhanger, I will note the existence of an early American text drawing on Varro in praise of agriculture and related  virtues of thoroughness and patience. Lessons from the natural world. Lessons only had through exposure to nature.
To illustrate, because I run long, I often pass one of the natural springs at the outskirts of the city where I live. At first, I was puzzled by just how many people would go to fill up bottles at that spring. But over time, and through increasing heat, I filled up my handheld there with increasing frequency and noticed two things. First, the taste, which is so good. Second, the water clearly contains minerals - I not only did not miss any salt, but found the water 'more nourishing'. As a result, I think a lot about water on my runs. How up to 60 per cent of the human body is made of water. How even twenty years ago, I knew people worried about the depletion of water tables. Water is important. Are we preserving its sources?
The etymology of culture has roots in the cultivation of the earth. I think this is important. The word gained its figurative meaning referring to collective customs only recently (according to Etymonline; I have not looked into this in more detail and my memory is not cooperating as I write this post - I am still working on how and where I store things in my mind). The thesaurus ends with a beautiful quote by Yeats, which I think will provide a sufficient if not conclusive end to this post:

For without culture or holiness, which are always the gift of a very few, a man may renounce wealth or any other external thing, but he cannot renounce hatred, envy, jealousy, revenge. Culture is the sanctity of the intellect.

Brush: misprinted type; png made from Vesuvian memento mori floor mosaic from grey ghost's pinterest (found via google images).

Meaning

The last post I wrote was ambiguous. I have been thinking about different "publics" and the problem of dialogue. Possibly because of my multicultural background (multi-culti being a word that can have as many negative as positive connotations), I am less interested in arguing and more interested in finding ways forwards for discussion.
My concern is that the devotion to dialogue is not universally shared.
I asked an expert on dialogue what to do if dialogue is not invited and, granted that the question could be construed as being out of place at a conference where the purpose of the paper was to extol the benefits of dialogue, I never got an answer. I am not an expert. And I am only beginning.
I just hope my beginning will not be my end.
Meaning: will I be afforded space in which to speak? Or will I be mowed down - the green, inexperienced grass that I am, immediately?
What is it that I want to say? That dialogue is a balsam, that it is possible to disagree without needing to destroy, that dialogue is like marriage: something for shared good, and because of this, is worth making some concessions to. One example of such would be the patience to listen to what the other side is saying. It can be difficult because sometimes we do not like the way that messages are packaged. But if we let the message wash over us, we may be left with talking points.
But sometimes I wonder if my ideal regarding dialogue is unrealistic.
For example, interacting with one who describes Plato as going off on "bizarre, loopy speculations" could make it difficult to have a conversation about Plato if one has a different understanding of the premise of life that one considers Plato to be exploring. Wondering about how one would come to such a statement (of the "bizarre, loopy") caused me to think that some texts function as a Rorschach test: this is an unformed idea as of yet, but what I mean is that for some, perhaps, interaction with Ideals/Ideas/Infinite (? - I need to figure out what I mean here, basically, deep abstraction) - where it ceases to engage becomes a Rorschach test. By ceasing to engage I mean entering into what I will call the hermeneutic suspension of disbelief. In other words, the entry into the meaning of the text, even where this will require difference from personal meaning.

Source: Old Hong Kong in Colour, Otto C. C. Lam, Chung Hwa Book Co. Profiled here.

While it is interesting how freely some use older works as inspiration for their own work, I am also concerned with the question of the work involved in getting as close to the original contextual meaning of a text as one can. But here is a fun exercise (by which I mean not so fun): try teaching a course in reading comprehension, and seeing how many (especially of the more intelligent!) students will take the time to write an accurate summary of an extract - when this is exactly what you ask for, after teaching strategies to check comprehension.
Maybe I should have highlighted that paragraph somehow, because I think it is actually central to my main point here.
It seems to me that some 'contemporary' work borrows more from the technique of the sophist: refusing to stop long enough at words and ideas to flesh them out, being more inclined to verbal gymnastics where words are in Heraclitian flux. But I mention Heraclitus, and I often wonder how equipped anyone not an expert in him and on pre-Socratics is to understand him. Still, the reason I bring him up is because I like how eloquently this popularizer of change being the only constant that seems to be the underlying component to much thought today also stressed the importance of wariness of opinion. Opinion is another 'problem area' that comes up in class.
Here is another 'fun' class exercise. Invite students to explore their 'opinions' with the qualification that merely stating it is not enough: asking that they support it, and then find a counterargument, and either refute or make a concession. The counterargument happens to be a feature of many business plans - which is to say that this should be a skill that is 'pragmatic enough' to warrant practise, but it is an exercise that is consistently met with resistance, despite how it is packaged.

Source: Old Hong Kong in Colour, Otto C. C. Lam, Chung Hwa Book Co. Profiled here.

On my blog, I have been wont to skirt around certain topics. In real life, because of the nature of my decisions and the early zeal I once demonstrated (ah, zeal, the trait of the puberty that some never grow out of), I am not so concealed. I feel sorry for the zeal, but know that I have been taking the path that I needed to take, that I am growing how I want to, given that this is the only life I am given and I only have a certain amount of time to pursue... I am going to say it... the truth. I find it fascinating how the acceptance of plurality that has emerged from cultural studies (in my opinion through the Boasian cultural relativism - though of course he is criticised for not being relativistic enough today) has come to mean complete denial of the validity of an attempt to pursue truth. I find it so necessary to do so much reading because this is one of those points where dialogue is shut down entirely. 'If you believe in the possibility of truth, you must be a bigot' the reasoning seems to go, 'how backwards you are and not aware of contemporary reality - you must be an enemy of progress.' But if applied to me, I would think such reasoning unfair. Among other things, I am quite a fan of the internet, and think it has renewed a Republic of Letters' type exchange.
I could be asked at this juncture why I care so much about dialogue. Why do I spend so much time reading "verbal gymnastics"? Firstly, I think there are many forms of communication and do not think that everything is to be read in the same way. Nietzsche, for example, may be viewed as a poet of provocation. One need not agree with everything he writes to see value in thought-provoking nuggets.

Source: Old Hong Kong in Colour, Otto C. C. Lam, Chung Hwa Book Co. Profiled here.

Further, as I only intimated yesterday, those of us who entered postgraduate work in recent times will likely demonstrate in the titles of our work - as Perloff noted in her PMLA address -  the markings of the effects of Theory in our work. Until I read that address, I had not fully realised the extent to which my approach is indeed something in between the before and the now. It is a fact that I was instructed to interact with Theory in my dissertation, though I was permitted to deviate. One thing I would like to point out is that while these older Theorists had the advantage of 'having' to read the works that I gave myself the task of reading (e.g. Plato), I do not see this as being the case today. I think pursuit of these texts is becoming a matter of personal choice.
So, this means that there is ever less potential for there being a 'shared language' of exchange. Some will immediately cry: good riddance! How oppressive to learn that Language! To which I would reply (taking a line of thought from Freire) that indeed it does take effort to learn, and time but (again calling on Freire) this does not mean having to deny your 'own langauge'; rather, it is to give you the chance to be bilingual.
My feeling is that while there may actually be a move to shut down bilingualism (whether explicit or not - Freire suggests that this is implicit and internalised, then reproduced), there is also a great need for it, for it is also understood - somewhere, and again, maybe not explicitly - that cross-fertilisation can be a great source of vital ideas that bear fruit.
I think it is very important to rid one's 'real life dialogue' of the banter of negative critique, because this quickly deteriorates into argument. The art is in taking the time to sort through the common areas, and consistently cultivate these.
I do not think I am ready to enter into public discourse fully, because I still need time to figure out where those areas are. All I know is that I do not want to be contributing to the argument: I'd rather give up ideas and tend to a literal garden before doing that.

Source: Old Hong Kong in Colour, Otto C. C. Lam, Chung Hwa Book Co. Profiled here.

Thinking Aloud In Public

This post has been updated: addendum added below.
A fusion of two texts I was reading in the same day gave me the idea that blogging might be considered as 'thinking aloud in public'.
The latter link takes you to an old Scientific American post by Bora Zivkovic, whose belief in the important place of the blog seems sadly idealistic almost ten years later, though noble. Like Tony of Renaissance Mathematicus lore, many of his posts explore the boundaries between science and journalism, like in this post with a wealth of ideas and links. Tony, however, remains an active blogger. My search for Bora's more recent work led me to his website page where he asks: what should I do next? "Blog some more," say I.
I continue to feel inclined to do my bit to fuel the idealism behind the web, which extends to its pedagogical promise, as outlined by the Revisiting the E-Quality in Networked Learning Manifesto. Incidentally, Bora's second post links to a visualisation of the Republic of Letters (as his blog posts gives his historical overview of the exchange of information) and is a wonderful illustration of the kinds of resources that the web makes possible. This in turn links to a 9-year-old Stanford digital humanities initiative which I mention because I found it to still contain some relevant kernels. Note though that many of these pages have changed their addresses and may need some extra googling to find.
But (after my extended absence from my own blog) it is occurring to me that it takes 'extra' work to keep this promise alive. Just like how the manifesto I linked to suggests that networked learning demands "greater professionalism in teaching and support for learning. Grafting on technological advances does nothing to mitigate this need for maturity in formal learning environments."
And I submit this as my reason why the promise of blogging has fallen short: it takes a lot of work - or, more specifically, time, which I seem to have less and less of (needing to read more and more: it just doesn't end). It is a luxury to be able to blog - which by extension leads to the interesting observation that hype rubs off on even bookish types.
But is blogging not a public necessity in some way? Sharing our thoughts in a somewhat visible way, to help each other sharpen our senses?
What I would like to sharpen my senses regarding concerns the question of whether it is possible to be bilingual in Theory and tradition. For many, that is already the wrong question to ask. To which I cite the ongoing popularity (in the public sense) of returning to dig into the classics, sans Theory, to get a taste of ancient Rome or a feel for Dante's Inferno. It is true that there may also be a fair share of inaccurate movies or misattributed quotes - but the introduction of such nonetheless tends to change the discourse, if momentarily and superficially.
Since the 1980's, it has not been required to do the requisite reading to claim some level of proficiency in both Theory and tradition. Among those studying the humanities, unless one has a very specialised field or focus, or attended a very particular college, I am inclined to agree with the statement that postmodernism is likely to be like the air we breathe: at least, bound to have permeated some approach we take. Or maybe this is only true of East Coasters and their equivalents. I am not married to these ideas...
Once upon a time, it was said during my career as an undergraduate, that one could forget about persisting in academe (to say nothing of progressing) if one were to openly pursue anything that smacks of a Christian line of thought. This is purely anecdotal and may or may not have anything to do with me. It does pertain to my question about bilingualism, though. It would hold - if the anecdote is true and assuming that higher ed instructors represent a range of types and also assuming that it is appropriate to equate this line of thought with tradition - that there would likely be some form of bilingualism extant, somewhere. 
When I was 20, I wrote: "[James] Clifford argues that 'a permanent and ironic play of similarities and differences, the foreign and the strange, the here and the elsewhere is ... characteristic of global modernity.' ... I agree with Clifford when he writes that 'Humanism ... still offers grounds for resistance to oppression and a necessary tolerance, compassion and mercy.' It is a noble goal, but so often the search for connectedness not only devolves into a search for similarities but also the eradication of aspects inherent to culture. Hybrids emerge."
It would seem that the answer is that bilingualism is not possible as it is transformative: to follow the line of hermeneutics, once there is an exchange, if it is a genuine exchange, both parties will be changed.
By way of conclusion: What if some texts and exchanges are in fact Rorschach inkblot texts? ADDENDUM: In my next post, I address why this blog was deliberately ambiguous. I am sorry for distressing certain readers.
ps. it is really funny how blogger's spellcheck indicates "blog" and "blogging" as incorrect.

Photo from: Old Hong Kong In Colour, Otto C. C. Lam, with an Introduction by Peter Cunich. 

For purchase at Chung Hwa Book Co.

Featured on HKFP Lens.

Your own people aren't always exactly your own people.

In the past month, in terms of the tough standards I set for myself, I failed at life (out of exhaustion over exponentially-increased teaching duties) in that I allowed myself to be surprised by certain human behaviour.
In one instance, this surprise morphed within me into the enemy of the human being, the feeling of injustice. Intellectually I know that righteous indignation is a dead-end street: called in some languages a "blind corner", which is exactly what I mean here. I don't know that I would be blogging about this quite in this way, had I not come across the sentence I used as the subject here: "Your own people aren't always exactly your own people." It is a fecund sentence for contemplation. One illustration could be of quondam parentals leaving children to choose their own adventure with absolutely no guidance after the first teen year, who later think they have a right to be critical of said children.
But there is another meaning of the quoted sentence that I have been musing over. Another could be related to patriotism. My family has members living all over the world; I have always taken it for granted that one can be both a patriot and a cosmopolite (who can be humble enough to learn from other cultures). To a certain degree (and to be not at all humble for a moment), I also thought that such a generous patriotism was easier for compatriots like myself than for people hailing from other countries (for historical reasons). Compatriots who reach cosmopolite status share a curiosity for esoteric aspects of other cultures and have the intellectual capacity for such appreciation (gaining, for example, expert knowledge of their antiques), and are crowned by a humility, in part stemming from a knowledge of the complexities of the history of their own country...

But today, this approach has come under fire. There is a new kind of patriotism defined in more narrow terms, as if, if one does not comply with these narrow qualifications, one does not love one's country. I can understand that somewhat - it is a kind of reactionism, not unlike my own of righteous indignation mentioned above. But on the other hand, such an approach would warrant if not a fail then a very low grade in not only my class on culture but also my composition class.
To begin with the (advanced) composition class, I set the intellectual exercise that opinions are not academically valid; what is valid is a thesis that has support and is able to articulate and respond to (through rebuttal or concession) viewpoints that challenge one's thesis. In other words, students are welcome to their 'opinions' so long as they can articulate them in terms of viewpoints that might challenge them (yes, this is derived from δόξα). Part of the course is built on cultivating an imagination that can articulate other viewpoints (which I - again not humbly - take to be part of the intellectual legacy of my native land). Similarly, my advanced class on culture demonstrates through examples that a single culture can be paradoxical, and is often comprised of myriad competing world views. This even came up in my intro class: through the example, for instance, of how not all former colonies immediately ratified the Articles of the Confederation. Unity does not necessarily mean unanimity.
How do we respond to scarcity of agreement?
For some, this means that it is no longer a time for the "college games" of dialectics; to them, it means war. Truth can come back another day.

So I ask myself: how do I talk to someone who from the get-go is approaching questions through their agenda? (The new orthodoxy of secularism, or of zealous liberalism, is no more tolerant or different than any religion.) Are you, readers, also wanting to ask me why it's a problem to approach life through an agenda? When I tried, with my interlocutors of late, to explain the complexities of statecraft and the importance of grappling - as contradictory as it may seem - with even abstract ideas like 'truth' in the practical business of statesmanship, if I dared call on Plato, my interlocutors' eyes would glaze over. Which I know from teaching means I need to change my approach. So, in answer to my question of how to talk with agenda-driven interlocutors, reason is not the way. Or, one must learn to package reason differently.
Since yesterday, every time I think about this, I am left with an anecdote from Rumer Godden's autobiography, A House With Four Rooms, with which I shall close this blog post. She writes of how back in the day, authors would often receive requests for an autograph and/or signed photograph. She explains that before she knew better to respond only to those who sent return postage, she would oblige at least the many signature requests though the postage was costly (obliging the photograph requests would have been far too costly). "I had a letter from America with the usual request, sent an autograph and a little later" she writes, "had a second letter; 'Thank you for your autograph. We have had your handwriting analysed. You are mean, petty, selfish and greedy.'"

The Cultural Literacy of Blind Bussardes

One of the meanings of "bussard," or buzzard, is, "A curmudgeonly or cantankerous man ... a mean, greedy person" - so, potentially, one filled with stubborn ideas and opinions.
I found the word in an excerpt of Roger Ascham's "The Scholemaster". In it, he explains the benefits of consulting commonplaces and epithets, which can "induce a man into, an orderlie generall knowledge, how to referre orderlie all that he readeth, ad certa rerum Capita, and not wander in studie". Yet he also warns of the pitfalls of the same, which can occur if study only involves those platitudes, without also developing discernment through methodical reading of the complete texts representative of the best knowledge.
"Bussardes" are worse than those who, thanks to commonplaces and epithets, know something one season but forget it the next (oh, how one finds oneself in the criticism!), but are instead trenchant in the shallowness of the learning that blinds them, having long ceased the pursuit of horizons of learning and thus having nothing to teach.

The excerpt reminded me of another extract - from J. M. Coetzee's foreword to Higgins' Academic Freedom in Democratic South Africa, which takes issue with the claim that "only the full apparatus of a humanistic education can produce critical literacy" because such critical literacy can arguably be provided by ("core") courses in cultural literacy - which I think are comparable to the function of commonplace books within the rhetoric courses of yesteryear. Here's Coetzee:

Can you not simply design a pair of one­-semester courses - courses in which all undergraduates, no matter what their career track, will be required to enrol - one course to be entitled "Reading and Writing", in which students will be trained to dissect arguments and write good expository prose; and the other to be entitled "Great Ideas", in which they will be briefed on the main currents of world thought from Ancient Egypt to the present? A pair of courses like that will not require an entire faculty of humanities behind them, merely a school of critical literacy staffed with bright young instructors. Basic courses in cultural literacy are not a new idea. They have been mounted at countless American universities under the rubric of "Freshman Composition".

As an alternative to the commonplace-approach to defending the humanities, he argues, "we need free enquiry because freedom of thought is good in itself. We need institutions where teachers and students can pursue unconstrained the life of the mind because such institutions are, in ways that are difficult to pin down, good for all of us: good for the individual and good for society."

In other words, and to draw from Ascham, if learning ends in platitudes, we will be perpetuating a shallow level of knowledge that can either be forgotten or, worse, lead to blind, trenchant opinion with no appreciation or feel for, say, nuance, context, or even, say, the speciousness of argument that has produced certain thought.
Platitudes are difficult to attain and maintain (though we are helped by commonplace blogs), but to make a claim on knowledge (brave or foolish) requires further, regular dogged revision of entire key and associated texts. Such is not for the "obstinately ignorant", to quote a 1774 entry on what the proverbial use of "buzzard" means.
According to the OED, the word buzzard is used "in names of other raptors regarded as unsuitable for falconry" - so it seems that the secondary meaning is a figurative transfer of the first. Incidentally, the second entry reads: "An ignorant or stupid person. Now usu. with the weakened sense, fellow, chap". So, today's chaps can't be trained; useless and greedy? Surely education is not to cultivate those.

Magazine in background: Marie Claire Maison.

Brazen Giant with Conquering Limbs

The title is from Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus", which was excerpted in Knopf's poem-a-day series in a passage from Esther Schor's Emma Lazarus. The passage reminds us of the initial mockery that greeted the monumental Liberty Enlightening the World, which bears in its title and land of origin the French ties to the New World. I think these ties highlight the problem behind contemporary claims to "world citizenship", which are levelling in their shared, "enlightened" philosophy.
While it appears that civilization has reached a philosophical ideal, I would argue: not so fast. Auerbach, in "Philology and Weltliteratur" explains a point that extends beyond literature, and which I will paraphrase for this larger context: the point of being a "world" citizen ceases to be "at once realized and destroyed" once this "world" is a standardized world that speaks a single literary language.
I got the impetus to write this post, which has been a long time coming (and will likely spill into further posts), after reading a post on this topic by a blogger I really admire. The post is nominally called "The Man from Nowhere" - but this formulation is a riposte to the Theresa May comment that, "If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere." It is important to clarify the provocation behind the post, because I am sure many will therefore question why I am taking issue with it. But I do have a point of contention: namely, world citizenship, in my understanding and experience, is less something that can be claimed than it is aspirational - read: ideal. Once it is claimed, it is levelled, beneath a "brazen giant with conquering limbs".
Tension and disagreement must remain: this is a prerequisite for "fruitful discourse", which is to be differentiated from "imposed uniformity" (I use Auerbach's terms). Plutarch's Socrates says he is a citizen of the world, wherein world is defined as comprising universal truths; but knowing Socrates' view on the attainment of truth, we should be wary of the implications of this affiliation.

It is no accident that the post on the topic of world citizenry that I took issue with was posted by a scientist (specifically, a historian of science).
Christopher Prendergast, in "The World Republic of Letters" explains that the enlightened 17th and 18th century "literary republic" - which, I'll add, often stands as the ideal of world citizenry called on to this day - comprised scientists and philosophers, and not writers and poets, which, I need to emphasize, is critical to recognize. Jebb, for example, writes in "Humanism in Education" : "there is a danger lest analogies drawn from studies conversant with different material should be pushed too far, and what is called the scientific spirit should cease to be duly tempered by aesthetic and literary judgement". Prendergast also emphasizes that these scientists of the "literary republic" were engaging in scientific dialogue, in which national characteristics were irrelevant.
That said, I don't think that co-mmunication can be possible without the existence of universals, which are what sentient human beings aspire towards. But expecting that they are a birth right or something some of us can call on from our global family legacy is presumptuous. From a cultural perspective, even natives can feel alienated from fellow natives; even those who ostensibly share the same universal beliefs can feel alienated through the manifestation of those beliefs.
It is important to distinguish ideals from reality; it is important to distinguish the universal from the standardized lest we are to be conquered by giants of our own making.

Brush: Misprinted Type.

Global Amnesia vs. Goethean Relevations

The blog Laudator Temporis Acti cited a few lines from Euripides today in a post entitled: "Transient Global Amnesia". The lines read: "What place did I leave to get here? How did I arrive?/ I cannot remember: my former state of mind has left me." I had written of my own experience of such on my other blog - but the lines reveal the state to be a predicament.
I am still busy, with troubled heart, working my way out of it - and coincidentally today read a beautiful explanation of the phrase τετιημένος ἦτορ, troubled in the heart at Sententiae Antiquae: To be troubled in the heart is essentially to be "occupied with [one's] own thoughts, living in an internal dream rather than engaging in the outside world".
The dreaming is prompted by being faced by a dreaded, constrictive future. The S.A. post ends with a suggestion of the way out from this: a heart that "grows" through "listening to the speech of other men". What speech of other men can cure the effects of global amnesia?
Firstly, it should be pointed out that not all global amnesia is self-inflicted. What of the lives of what I could call "hybrid babies" (taking the Bakhtinian word): those whose earliest and formative years were not steeped in the local? If transient globality is amenesia, what is remembering to one who never "left" to forget in the first place? Finally, what is the local to one who seeks to be a "citizen of the world"?
We know that Goethe, to some extent, popularized such concepts in more modern times. For example, in his Eckermann conversations in which he famously spoke of his idea of world literature, he said: "poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men." The poet is to present, "something higher and better" in a manner intelligible to a place and time (thence, Shakespeare "makes his Romans Englishmen"). There is no superficial adventurism here (we remember, "adventure" was scorned even by Barthes in his essay on "Neither ... Nor Criticism"). Goethe explicitly says the point is not to seek "unheard-of adventures" but to masterfully re-present the wisdom of the ancients. Western cultures should draw on ancient Western wisdom. This is an answer to "global amnesia".

This is also the alethia of "saying" something that "means" (I am quoting Gadamer): saying something that "serves to clarify something". The task of the modern hybrid person is to find such meaning, and I argue that the hybrid person has more at stake to find such meaning, because that meaning is the only home they will ever have. That person knows, too, like what Gadamer via Heidegger, says: "there can never be a total recovery of meaning" (emphasis added). But this is no modern idea! Hadot has done marvelous work in The Veil of Isis tracing the idea that some knowledge will always be concealed existed in various guises from antiquity until quite recently. Hybrid people feel their incompleteness: it is their τετιημένος ἦτορ. Hopefully, though, they find counsel in "the speech of other men" and, like Goethe encouraged, craft something new and "make something of a simple subject". Incidentally, I once blogged of the work of another graduate from one of my boarding schools who made something unique: Mrinalni Sarabhai, who made her culture intelligible to other cultures through dance. One wonders if she understood the needs of the foreign audience through her own early uprooting to that foreign culture, during formative years...

Book in background: Boucher's 1,000 Years of Fashion. Brush: Ewansim via DeviantART.

Beyond Myth?

Jean-François Champollion was the son of a bookseller, who by his teenage years knew Greek and Latin, and some Herbrew, Abraic, Syriac, Chaldean, Chinese, Persian, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Sanskrit. At 16, he presented a paper providing a clue to the Hieroglyphic script, based on his suggestion that Coptic was an ancient Egyptian language.
Literary critic Guy Davenport called Claude Lévi-Strauss "The Champollion of Table Manners" in an essay on the latter's The Origin of Table Manners. Davenport considers Lévi-Strauss, "the most dilligent interpreter of our time", "a reader of riddles and a rediscoverer of the primacy of human behaviour in our knowledge of the world". And the knowledge Davenport focuses on? "'It remains to be seen,' Lévi-Strauss writes at the end of this intricate study of primitive civility, 'whether man's victory over his powerlessness, when carried to a state out of all proportion to the objectives with which he was satisfied during the previous millennia of his history, will not lead back to unreason.' That is, have we moved irrevocably beyond the ethics encoded in archaic myths; and if so, where are we?"
Apparently, a similar point was also raised by Antonio Rosmini in Theodicy, of which I learned from Brandon's summary of a passage about how moral progress is not inevitable, particularly if new generations do not build on what has been learned from preceding ones. Lévi-Strauss' "out of all proportion" here means too much abstraction of concrete, particular expressions of virtue - if I may be permitted to rephrase a summary. If these expressions get lost, they have to be learned all over again, the hard way, by trial and error.
An example of particular messages that may be transmitted are those Davenport says may come to us through the power of myth: "how to marry, how to eat, how to be brave". He posits that when myth loses this power, "it becomes a narrative that does not know how to resolve itself. Everything, says the contemporary novel, comes to a bad end ... We are no wiser than man has ever been about our helplessness in nature. Our fate with love, death, despair, doubt, wealth ... is no different ... it is unanswerable to ask if we have remained human ... Our past is forgotten. We can forget it again."

Human existence is a riddle, which may be encoded in myth. To be beyond myth is to attempt to surpass the need to come to terms with humanity. Gadamer writes about this attempt at transcending conditionedness in Truth and Method, affirming that the focus on subjectivity is a distorting mirror and that history does not belong to us, we belong to it (278, there is no such thing as a point outside history from which the identity of a problem can be conceived). Also, the "overcoming of all prejudices ... will itself prove to be a prejudice." The way around this is to acknowledge one's own particularity, i.e., to know that one has a horizon: learning to look beyond what is close at hand by seeing it better, not by looking away from it (303-4). In a passage that I think beautifully explains the relevance of historical texts, he writes:

When our historical consciousness transposes itself into historical horizons, this does not entail passing into alien world unconnected in any way with our own; instead, they together constitute the one great horizon that moves from within and that, beyond the frontiers of the present, embraces the historical depths of our self-consciousness. ... Our own past and that other past toward which our historical consciousness is directed help to shape this moving horizon out of which human life always lives and which determines it as heritage and tradition.

The emphasis here being on collaboration, as man is always subject - to history. To discount or deny this subjectivity is actually to forget how to speak. To discount the story as Forster did is to deny the answers that are attempted in narrative (he called it primitive: "The more we look at the story, the less we shall find to admire ... Neanderthal man listened to stories…"). Gadamer writes, "It is not that the understanding is subsequently put into words; rather, the way understanding occurs ... is the coming-into-language of the thing itself." (370-1)
Stories and myths are this birth place, and there are myths that are as sophisticated as dialectics.

One anthology of stories on human comport that does not presume to rise above the conditions when it was written, that rather speaks to them, is Valerius Maximus' first century Memorable Deeds and Sayings, which I learned about most through Henry John Walker's introduction to his translation: "It is his very refusal to perform a historical critique of Roman ideals that makes Valerius Maxiimus such a valuable historical source for the worldview of the Romans." Indeed, Walker notes that Maximus does not claim to present an accurate description of the past (which Walker's footnotes reveal) but to provide moral guidance for their inner lives. Walker quotes Maximus' preface: "What person in his right mind would hope that he could record the course of Roman and foreign history, which has been treated by previous writers in an elegant style, and do so either with greater attention to detail or with more striking eloquence?"
We learn from Walker's footnotes that the liberties Maximus takes are quite amusing, for example, he calls Aristotle "thirsting for glory", allowing his "student" Theodectes to publish his work on rhetoric as his own, later revoking this honour - when really, Theodectes was his predecessor, and Aristotle had written a summary of his work, later referring to this summary. Perhaps this is an example of what Walker defines in the beginning as the Roman "fairness" in citing "foreigners" where they were great, yet at the same time, often portraying the same as being boastful, compulsive liars, and corruptly decadent. And as such, a portrait of the Roman world is achieved.
This may demonstrate Gadamer's point of the use of not looking away from - if not looking beyond.

This week I was musing over the number of guidebooks for behaviour that I know of from the ancient world (nb. dilettante that I am). Memorable Deeds and Sayings was one such guidebook, but another that I learned of from Lendering's AHM (which I'd like to plug) is second century Aulus Gellius' Attic Nights. It begins similarly to Maximus' work in its modest claims. In an entertaining passage on the titles of other books, he explains that his is "merely from the time and place of my winter's vigils; I thus fall as far short of all other writers in the dignity too even of my title, as I do in care and in elegance of style." He explains that his work is to furnish "a quick and easy short-cut" and "lead active and alert minds to a desire for independent learning ... or would save those who are already fully occupied with the other duties of life from an ignorance of words and things which is assuredly shameful and boorish."
Indeed, it was once boorish to be without knowledge of tradition.
But as I was typing all these things down, prepared to add to a list of books on behaviour works like the Enchiridion, it occurred to me that all of these books bear a stoic bent. Which may be just coincidence as this list is random and not reflective of a knowledge of the field - but does raise the question of who is concerned with "the riddles of mankind" and the objectives of his quondam ethics (for, ethics are often the part left unsaid in modern narrative: the unsaid being one of the features of modern prose).
What one derides as priggishness another calls the economy of action, according to which freedom, like the horizon around a person, comes with limits, e.g. the concessions a ruler must make to retain power - to return to the message that Champollion deciphered. Though it sounds like an old story, the only reason I can think of why we would find "less to admire" in it the more we look at it is if we were tired of the human experience and horizons; of having a place and speaking from it.

Book in background: Amy Butler's Midwest Modern; 

brush: fall foliage by Creature Comfrots.

Shock Value

Heidegger's words are stinging in my ears: "Everything looks as if it were genuinely understood, genuinely taken hold of, genuinely spoken, though at bottom it is not; or else it does not look so, and yet at bottom it is." He writes in Being and Time (217) about an ambiguity that disempowers us, tempts us into a groundless floating. "Idle talk" and the "public" confuses and distracts us...so it is that we think we know what we do not, and vice versa.
As I think about this, though, I wonder at how much bombast has obscured some souls throughout the ages, warranting several passages even in Longinus' centuries'-old On the Sublime. Leaving aside the wonderful examples he criticises (which remind me of Aristotle's criticism of some verse: to my nescient eye, sometimes this verse has merit - though "vomiting to heaven" does sound "burlesque"), he writes, "Such expressions, and such images, produce an effect of confusion and obscurity, not of energy; and if each separately be examined under the light of criticism, what seemed terrible gradually sinks into absurdity."
Longinus attributes these faults in writing to "the pursuit of novelty in thought". The attempt to "apply this principle to literature" is the cause of success and also failure. Longinus differentiates between "the true and the false sublime". It seems to me that man keeps rewriting such manuals, updated to the latest sophistry, following the novelty factor. An earlier example could be Plato's Euthydemus, which juxtaposes eristics (the practice of refuting any argument) with elenctics (Socratic questions that promote what is today called autonomous learning). Socrates says of those who would criticise the two brothers who demonstrate eristics although these critics would be unable to hold their own in conversation with them that they have "colour rather than truth" (305e). Yet one might observe this same "colour" in the brothers in Euthydemus: they "care not a straw for what they say, but merely fasten on any phrase that turns up" (305a). We remember Heidegger: "Everything looks as if it were genuinely understood". It is not understood but it has colour: it is not the voice of the philosophical initiate who can converse with novelty, even at the expense of looking stupid sometimes (Longinus explains the inevitability of such), to ultimately expose any legerdemain.

Legerdemain means to be sleight of hand, quick to perform a trick. And maybe Plato plays one on us - for the man Socrates criticises at the end for having colour, not truth and for being half-versed in everything and so not well-versed in anything bears the same traits as the two brothers, who he describes in the beginning of this dialogue as "all-round sportsmen" who have acquired "such a faculty ... for wielding words as their weapons and confuting any argument as readily [272b] if it be true as if it be false". Still, Socrates finishes this passage by saying: "However, we ought to be indulgent towards their ambition and not feel annoyed, while still judging them to be what they actually are. For we should be glad of anyone, whoever he may be, who says anything that verges on good sense, and labours steadily [306d] and manfully in its pursuit." Emphasis added: there is to be some criteria, acknowledgment of the existence of the legerdemain.
Gadamer writes, "a sharp distinction needs to be drawn from mere trick and legerdemain. Even in them something is to be understood. It can be conceptualized; it can be imitated. It even tries to be adept and good. ... The dividing line between a work of art and piece of artifice may be quite fluid, and often contemporaries may not know whether the charm of a production is a mere trick or artistic richness."
An illustration of what may require such discernment could be Sokal's Hoax, which I admittedly have only read around, and which seems to be encapsulated in the title of a book Sokal co-wrote after writing a fake paper that was actually published in a journal although it was a satire seeking to expose Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science.

I read scientist Steven Weinberg's assessment and was struck by one passage: "I don't mean to say that this part of Sokal's satire was unjustified. His targets often take positions that seem to me (and I gather to Sokal) to make no sense if there is an objective reality. To put it simply, if scientists are talking about something real, then what they say is either true or false. If it is true, then how can it depend on the social context of the scientist? If it is false, how can it help to liberate us? The choice of scientific question and the method of approach may depend on all sorts of extrascientific influences, but the correct answer when we find it is what it is because that is the way the world is. Nevertheless, it does no good to satirize views that your opponent denies holding."
(How reminiscent this is of the "method" Socrates professes to learn in Euthydemus, where he is instructed to answer to the meaning he conceives in the words even though he cannot tell what he is being asked 295b-.)
The issue at stake, the social and the scientific, is important, particularly because a unity has been claimed, even though not so long ago, C. P. Snow reluctantly assessed there were "two cultures", literature and science, giving many arguments as to their mutual alienation. He concludes by arguing for social truth, which brings us back to Plato's Socrates. Or Heidegger's warning that we understand what we think we do not and vice versa. Where is the trick - we know there will be a school of such: it is illustrated in Plato and Longinus and cautioned against in Heidegger and Gadamer.
We know it will be manifest in the language, and will attempt to say something new and even attempt to astound. Just like any good metaphor, one might add, the trick aspires to be the mistake that sets things right. Or maybe the metaphor is just a mistake!

Longinus, pre-echoing Heidegger, as it were, writes of the importance of loftiness of the soul (viz. "venturesome souls") and cites an example from Plato: "They, therefore, who have no knowledge of wisdom and virtue, whose lives are passed in feasting and similar joys, are borne downwards, as is but natural, and in this region they wander all their lives; but they never lifted up their eyes nor were borne upwards to the true world above". A characteristic of writing that "takes a strong and lasting hold on the memory" is the poetical image which is "designed to astound". Longinus continues: "When we survey the whole circle of life, and see it abounding everywhere in what is elegant, grand, and beautiful, we learn at once what is the true end of man’s being ... he keeps his hommage for what is astounding".
That may be man's promise. But he also warns of the "gorgeous exterior" that is a "mere false and clumsy pageant, which if laid open will be found to conceal nothing but emptiness". Accordingly, this phrase should induce some sort of shock - like the violent encounter of enemy soldiers from which the word "shock" derives. There is value in that which is laboured "steadily and manfully" but the question is to whom the value goes. Maybe, in the strange economy of language, with its legitimate worldly exchange rate, it goes to everyone.

Ghosts Abroad

This post has been revised. 
A word possibly derived from a Medieval toponym, of the place where horses were raised that were hired out for work, hack, I think, is a word that could be applied to many people who travel today and seek to make money from their "observations" sold to any genre of publication. These people do not see the irony of living at enclave addresses or gathering at places approved by Facebook: even offbeat venues play to some tune of conformity, just like the average traveller of Victorian times would follow in the footsteps of those who wrote travelogues. Perhaps those journals are more transparent than ours that claim everything: we can ask ourselves how much of the local was experienced in the 18th century when ladies were travelling with their own baths (portable amenities today are tiny by comparison). I write as one whose childhood travels involved my mother learning and teaching us native languages and one who learned to keep balance on two planks over deep pits. The family shunned tours, once almost driving off a cliff in a rented jeep in Thailand because the map did not account for recent landslides.
We are 鬼佬; "ghost geezers" (white people), but my father joked at one of the 西貢 restaurants that his wife was the only white woman in the room. Maybe we became ghosts too well, not even seeing ourselves, silent cultural observers always looking to pass through barriers (to thought).
But sometimes it is we who block out all the wrong things: we composite narratives, like stereotype blocks, and it takes courage to discard it, so hard to give up ideas or furniture one has become comfortable with, and begin again. For example, one might feel as if the foreigner is often the target of a kind of hellish treatment and feel isolated, or resentful. Then one fine day, one might discover that even locals are exposed to this same hell, Dorothy Parker's "fresh hell."
Rather than travel in the ruts, it is necessary to be exposed, like the teeth of yesteryear. While I doubt ghosts have a need to laugh, already relieved of terrestrial gravities, the "west ocean ghost" seeks endearment through deprecatory humour.

And it is precisely the haughtiness of so many of today's travellers that is irksome. They think they can live in a place for a few months or years and know it. Stereotypes are set. This is not a new complaint, and is its own stereotype: in Innocents Abroad, Twain criticises the tourism industry that manufactured and sold history.
Still, there was a period a few decades ago marked by the eccentric traveller who never promised objective accounts but the symbiosis of whatever their extreme personalities, or specific context and character, would bring out of a place (Gore Vidal, Jan Morris' geographies-some invented, Marguerite Duras), rather like the travelogues of Montaigne, who brought descriptions of his bodily functions to a place, always him in it, no claims of mind over map, but him moving through scenes.
If "abroad" means away from home, the hearth, then perhaps this is why the ghost gets nearest to new destinations. Some aspects of a place will always remain invisible, and this is what the ghost knows, this is why the ghost is suspicious of the stereotype, preferring instead the furniture that blocks out empty spaces. A place, like a person, is always only just coming into itself, to that clearing where something can be defined, before it shifts. So the stereotype block, which looks like a means to save time, to make things easier, is only confusing things.
A passage by Antonio Rosmini reads: "Knowing where the problem lies represents an important stage on the way to the attainment of truth, which cannot be assailed in its hidden stronghold unless the fortress defending it has been inspected from all sides." The ghost can pass through these sides, but the person, stuck in the dimensions of the body, can not always maneuver that well. As Gadamer pointed out in Truth and Method, man can never attain entire objectivity precisely because he can never leave his body.
To travel receptively is to be at home with ghosts, to be one. It is only scary insofar as it is sometimes less words than white spaces.

Brushes: Pfefferminzchen at DeviantART; Lauren Harrison.

Calling It, Not!

Tacitus begins his Annals with the remark that, "fine intellects" were "scared away" by "growing sycophancy" (gliscente adulatione). The Latin word conjures the servile movements of the dog, in other words something that man is not. The English word stems from a harsher Greek meaning, "false accuser, slanderer." In other words, again something that is not. Posturing, lies. The fine intellect retreats where words lose currency, which is precisely the stimulus for other intellects prepared to trade semblances and passing desires, flourishing in chaos where there is no stability on which to meaning may be built. C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, calls this the difference between propaganda and propagation.
The book contains an appendix in which the "objective truths" shared by various cultures and religions are collected in categories entitled, "The Law of Justice," for example, with subcategories, Sexual Justice, Honesty, Justice in Court, &C., or "The Law of Mercy." These laws correspond to the objective truths or values he calls the Tao, by way of shorthand - which is reminiscent of Robert Neville's "parallel sensitivities." Neither claim the cultures they are considering are the same, but argue that there are very real correspondences in man's experience or understanding of life. Lewis writes that the Tao is wrongly being put on trial by Conditioners who seek to condition mankind to ostensibly conquer nature but in actuality to make man into a raw material not to be controlled by man himself but to be controlled by nature, i.e. the appetite that is characteristic of nature.
In contrast to this is the Tao according to which values are preferred to impulses. It is like a tree "branching out ... into ever new beauties ... of application" and is in this way the Tao is something "in which to participate ... to be truly human". It is passed down from generation to generation, a measure that man can seek to live up to. It is clear in this system what man means, but Lewis writes about the modern attempt to judge these values from without, though these values can never be understood if they are to be asked for their "credentials" - they are but premises. Criticism has its place, but from within, by those living the Tao: otherwise, what looks like criticism is actually just hostility, because without participation in the Tao, there is no way to know what it is. Lewis calls the difference in criticism organic (i.e., from within) vs. surgical (i.e., from without). His criticism of the 'outside' critics' attempts to build a new system remind me of Gadamer's thorough critique of the impossibility of the objective viewpoint when applied to humanity in Truth and Method. There is no such thing as a constructed conscience; man is a subject - Lewis writes of the Tao.

The Tao is implicit even in that which is used to attack it (idealism is a fragment of the Tao "swollen to madness"), just as truth-seeking was part of science before the leading spirit of the same became to "subdue reality to the wishes of man". Man may have gained power in the plane or wireless, but he also became a target of both bombs and propaganda. He became a target due to lack of consideration of value. "When we understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own convenience, we reduce it to the level of 'Nature' in the sense that we suspend our judgement of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity."
Indeed, it is easier to play the sycophant than to be that stick in the mud who continuously stops to ask questions and reevaluate the values inherent in a situation. Yet it is precisely where humans share similar abstract orientations that stability affords the construction of meaning. Man in this instance is not abstracted (he is the Tao tree, branching out in new beauties of application) but shares an abstract vision, such as general orientation for what it means to be "good".
If there is no agreement on that, then we cannot speak of "good" workers in the workplace; the concept became redundant and is replaced by an insidious shifting landscape suited to adolatio, but this means that those getting by may not be just - or qualified for their jobs, and shoddy work will eventually emerge. I read something similar in a National Review Online article that considers the Confucian 正名, the concept of the rectification of names: "If language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success." And, "the demand for justice is first and foremost a demand that words and reality come back into alignment". Here is the misalignment as described by Lewis: "Man lives by bread alone, and the ultimate source of bread is the baker's van: peace matters more than honour and can be preserved by jeering at colonels and reading newspapers."
In other words, the abstract space for growth shrinks; and within this deformed network of tsantsas, "virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism". It is an interesting claim: there is nothing wrong with integration, per se; the problem arises because it has been substituted for something it is not. The sycophant is not, in the essence of being, a dog.

Book in background: Amy Butler's Midwest Modern. Brush: Lauren Harrison.

Experiments in Change

In 1968, Leonard Nimoy in his eponymous album Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock's Music from Outer Space, changed a line at the end of Max Ehrmann's "Desiderata" from "Be Cheerful" to "Be Careful."  What an apt amendment to the text to reflect the change of man as he reaches beyond the atmosphere of childhood.  Caution is certainly learned through expectations that are molded through experience, though the latter is often a source of fear and as people get older, they become more fearful than disinterestedly cautious.  A friend once wrote that the young ought not be dismissed because they are less full of fear and that precisely because of that they are important to us. The thought could be extended to say that the young seem freer to experiment; the truth being that we can all continue to experiment so long as we are alive but few of us want to bother with the oblique glances of the Joneses.  Experimentation can be rather necessary, particularly if one finds oneself in a situation in which one's hands are tied.
Consider this ever-frequent scenario where one may even take on a mercy job with a deadline and not be sent the material, like copy, in a timely fashion.  Linguistic and copyright standards are further infringed by the speed and thoughtlessness of a certain kind of communication that began with the facsimile, which means make similar; it's other appellation, telecopying, seems the harbinger of today's activities that take the prefix 're', e.g. retweet.
Instead of becoming angry at irresponsible people who are not entirely honest and disregard one's requests to honour terms of work, one might wish to read about the state of the industry.  A gem of a resource for anyone working with the printed word is "For Editors" at writersandeditors.com.  Among the links posted there and repeated several times down the page is the once-popular aphorism, "Cost. Quality. Speed. Pick any two."  Good work takes time, so what if one has no time?  I propose that out of such unhappy situations, one merely claim to those who question one's poor output that the job was one's very own Persian carpet, and that one has a collection of such (to reference the practice in the weaving those carpets to intentionally leave or make a mistake).
Much can be said about the need as a professional to refuse any work that will not let one's talents shine through in order to establish a good reputation.  But it is becoming a platitude among some today that to stand in such a light is a privilege because where most people are standing, economic necessity is the star of the play and its curtains for them.
Silly word play is one thing but it is another to recognise the number of advocates for relaxing rules (e.g. retiring restrictive relative clause distinctions); some such advocates are esteemed editors, such as John E. McIntyre, whose now pens a Baltimore Sun column, You Don't Say.  Rules change and are therefore not to be reverenced but regarded.  It seems curmudgeons, of which I am sometimes one in my professional life (this blog is recreation), need to get with the program.

In general, experimenting allows for more leeway in getting the strange combination of components to a life in harmony.  We do not all learn at the same time; one may admire Victorian polymaths but this admiration cannot form one's foot to fit that crystal shoe.  The crystal may always have been, anyway, not so much in that which one knows, per se, but how willing one is to engage with those multiple aspects of life that have something to teach.  The experimenter becomes excited by a problem, wondering what on earth all that ugliness will have to impart.
Bertrand Russell in The Conquest of Happiness recommends that one think through all the terrible consequences one can foresee in one's worries until one eventually becomes bored by those thoughts and therefore entirely uninterested when such worries recur.  He generously shares anecdotes from his own life when he was not at his best, such as his early lectures, which incidentally helped him develop a technique of invention that involved thinking deeply about a subject, not thinking about it at all for some time, and then returning to write a lecture about it; the ideas would fall into place and the only time he made any changes was when the idea was not clearly expressed.  He admits to having come to the wrong conclusions about some things, and it would be hard not to notice that even in that book is support for ideas that have since fallen out of fashion.  But such is dwarfed by his acclaim in other areas, for his having, generally speaking, a great mind.  Russell also reminds readers to put their own lives in perspective: no one is the centre of the universe, in fact, everyone is almost incredibly minute.
One can truly feel like a speck of sand and feel bound to circumstance not of one's own design; despite all one's work, one realises that one depends on waves if one is to get out to sea; one may reach a moment when it seems futile to impose one's will on that landscape.  Things will not be the way one wants them to be, expensive mistakes can be made, deceitful people encountered, one may even stagnate for years and be tempted to believe such is deserved, but the impositions are also those restrictions that the imagination sometimes loves like ivy takes to wood lattice; expensive mistakes (that may cost time) are easy to remember; deceitful people are cause for the stories of most panache; stagnation is an illusion so long as one is aging and also there is a beauty in the slow life if one can train oneself to see it.  I will never forget as one of those small children sent to summer school going to an office to drop one activity in favour of another and thinking the organizer had little time so immediately made my request.  "And good morning?" he asked, and I burned with embarrassment.  All these Persian carpets!  Good morning, world.

Brush: Galaxy by GIMP.