Not the End

I've really enjoyed the space and the time to take what I've been learning in this course and follow the threads of it along lines that intrigued me. I've tried, in my journal posts, to show some of the journeys it took me on.

I enjoyed having a blog journaling companion along the way. Zannie, a classmate, also used a blog as her tool for this assignment and I enjoyed the feeling that we were running a parallel course across the sea of learning.

I tried to justify why I felt that it was possible for a writer to go beyond the bounds of their own culture, if only a little, when writing about people and places in non-western environments.

I also explored, as truthfully as I could, why I write, and tried later to understand how that might bear on what I wrote, and how.

I met Derrida, who brought up the spectre of not only the unreliable narrator, but the unreliable writer, and most of all, the unreliable text. I found that there was a great potential for creativity in the gulf between what we hope to mean, and what is understood.

A quirk of fate took me all the way back to Plato, who inspired me with how much these dialectics are less a line than a circle. Only in my lifetime, more than two thousand years later can gay men sit around after a dinner and openly discuss the meaning of erotic love without fear of persecution. It's a good place we've landed, I think.

A link in the course prompted me to revisit a book I'd read many years ago, and see it in a new way. The long dark silence between us and Plato was not really dark. Umberto Eco introduced me to the bonfires of intellect in the intervening centuries, inspired me to be more of a model reader, and introduced me to the privileges I have, as a writer, to ask my reader to open their encyclopedia of understanding and add a few more entries. I'm on the lookout for my own strange unicorns and water-ducks now; more vigilant of the way I frame my own approach to the texts of others.

This led me to Foucault, and the proposition that names often get in the way of engagement with the text. It isn't always helpful to spend too long gazing at the well, it can interfere with drinking the water.

As a writer and a reader, as elusive and arbitrary as it might be, it is meaning that matters. The pursuit of it is at the core of the interchange between the players and the text.

And looking back on this journey of a journal, I think this has been a worthwhile exercise, and one I'm not sure I want to end, here, in week 10 of the course. So this blog will live on, and I'll continue to chart my journeys on it. Who knows? The ship might go down and someone might want to know why: beyond here be monsters.