Skip to main content

forgetfulness

I need to work on capitalizing in my blog posts. When and why this started to slip, I don't know. But I correlate the disappearance of capitalization with an increasing self-consciousness about my own words. A sort of 'please don't take this seriously or hold me accountable for my words' approach to blogging. Rather like my actual speech - when I start thinking that I'm not saying anything important or interesting, or if I think my words might be easily contested or disapproved of, I let them mumble away into silence. Let's not do that here.

I know I'm always hyperlinking over to firstthings, which is silly since anyone actually interested in their articles would just read them regularly all by themselves. But yesterday, Reno was discussing this British band Show of Hands and he said something that seemed to clarify what I was frustrated about in previous post. (Removing random articles is not the same as uncapitalizing. It's more cute than careless. At least, that's my contention.)

He writes this about the direction of their lyrics: 'The minor premise is implied: England now encourages cultural forgetfulness rather than memory.' And that's just what irks me about our time. Intentional forgetfulness. We look back at the past and see only the mistakes of our parents and ancestors and nations and churches. And we condemn the whole of history for what we perceive as unredeemable error - then have the audacity to assume we can do better! Audacity is just another way of saying 'boldfaced arrogance' and there's nothing hopeful in it. I've never once seen arrogance produce anything beautiful or true. Arrogance and ignorance about the past has, as far as I can see, never produced any kind of wisdom.

It is another symptom (or is it the cause?) of our youth-centered society. We think of old age as a shame rather than a glory, and old age gets younger every year! despite our desperate attempts to cheat death with more and more years. This seems directly related to our contempt for our grandparents' ethics, our great-grandparents' traditions, our great-great-grandparents' faith. Nothing old can stay. We have forgotten that the test of time is the most reliable of all filters - because we are impatient - because it is an old test - because we are audacious. and foolish.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Can someone please explain why my Quicktime isn't working? Anyone with prophetic awareness of my little Atlas, none so old but recently behaving so?
because you were all wondering what I'm writing my dissertation on, here's a brief synopsis of my 'research context': When James Macpherson published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry in 1760, he went to great lengths to make the Fragments appear to be authentic remains of an ancient, heroic oral tradition. His reasons for this were largely political, and as such, influenced the content of the epics themselves. As an attempt to establish a particularly Scottish identity, the poems were quite effective. However, to do so required both a simplification and a manipulation of traditional mythology. Stripped of anagogical significance, the Ossian epics more or less represented an Enlightenment version of history, tradition, and mythic heritage. The stories themselves were changed by their very purpose and in turn changed the manner of representing myth in future narratives. Moreover, the emphasis on the Ossian epics as authentic tales from the past, as ‘fragments,’ served...
I just finished Shiver , by Maggie Stiefvater, the other day. From the first few chapters, I had every reason to expect this book to rival the other dark-teen-romance novels recently released (you know which ones I mean). And in a way, it did. There was nothing obnoxious about this book. The characters were mostly believable and endearing. The story was subtle and simple. Maybe a little too simple. At times, maybe a little too subtle. The best chapters were the ones from Sam's point of view, when he's a wolf. That doesn't take up a whole lot of the story, unfortunately. I mean, it would seriously hamper the progression of the plot if he was a wolf for much more of the time, but the writing was still at its best then. Perhaps because it seemed that the poetic, lyrical passages were justified. I like Rilke just fine, and I know plenty of people who compose song lyrics in their heads, but Sam as a human was just maybe a little too emo for me. It could just be that I'm almo...