Monday, April 18, 2011

Untimely returns

Somewhere deep down, the intention for this blog was to be part lectern, part confessional. The minister preparing a sermon or the Catholic child summoning sins to be forgiven both agonize over every detail preparing, because souls are at stake in finding the proper combination of words to speak before God.
It's time to betray that intention. The half-finished posts sitting in the queue, that never quite found the necessary perfection to be presented to the lord of the heavens represent too great a weight to leave behind. My return to writing is untimely because I don't have the time to craft perfect offerings, and I haven't since I stopped posting.
Yet here I am. Grad school doesn't make for free time and nothing is perfect in this life. I have nothing to confess, nor do I want to craft sermons. No souls are at stake. One of the imperfect thoughts waiting to be finished to be posted is about the impossibility of communication. Perhaps it went unfinished because if it were a perfect thought there would be no point in voicing it. New creed, then: cogito, ergo dico. I think, therefore I speak.
Thoughts unvoiced refract in idle minds. My brain feels like a marching band in an echo chamber sometimes. Every trivial thing gets caught in some network of ultimate significance that must be wholly uncovered before it can be made real. A silly mistake for someone who reads Nietzsche--it's stupid to theorize an ideal world when we live in a real one. Robert Frost might have put it better in For Once, Then, Something. The best we ever get when reflecting is a hint that something exists beneath the mundane. Stringing together discontinuities reveals only the continuity of imperfection. There's no value to it; at least not in the sense that the endeavor intended.
So, for an untimely return, this is a celebration of imperfection. May the ideal silence the real no longer. I write now in hopes that echoes become ululations; chaos become celebration; discontinuity become encounter. I hope you're along for the ride.

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