What We Leave Behind
Jun. 6th, 2010 11:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hobgoblinnWell, the FL cut has really made checking my list less overwhelming. Then again, I have not let days/ weeks/ months go by since my last check. Too soon to tell if I can keep up with every day. The input of others is part of the conversation writers must have to generate and refine their ideas.
But part of me thinks about the later life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was apparently quite the conversationalist, but never produced any writing of note-- perhaps the verbal interplay scratched the itch enough for him by then-- that, and his drug addiction probably sapped his creative strength. It is much easier to say brilliant stuff off the top of your head than sweat through various stages of writing it down and revising it. Especially when you get the same payoff either way.
I'm reading The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins just now. Sometimes he wanders very far off topic in proof of a Universe without design-- I see now why he complains so much about being misread and misrepresented. But the digressions make sense to him in his field of expertise and are often fascinating in their own right.
One such is the long discussion of DNA and RNA as replicators of coded information, and how it's this that is passed down the generations-- how all the apparatus of life is pretty much incidental, from an evolutionary perspective, to this transmission of gene codes into the future. It's a kind of immortality, the way these various codes persist in the genetic code of all living things. Not that the code itself is in any position to appreciate this, of course.
But I wonder if there's a principle about life here that we self aware humans unconsciously try to copy ourselves. We have this funny drive to leave bits of our thoughts and self behind for the future: in our art, our buildings, in our letters, in our books, and yes, now in our blogs. Like the DNA code sequences, it's really a very small part of who we are, yet we are willing to devote huge amounts of time to leaving our marks like this, and many of us are fascinated at stumbling upon these evidences of life and thought from our past.
Keats captures this well in a poem written in the margin of "The Cap and Bells":
This Living Hand
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed--see here it is--
I hold it towards you.
Writing like this is why I got into literary studies to start with: that, and I was clever about picking up on patterns authors use and being able to write about them. I love living in Cincinnati because there's so much evidence of the past here-- it's a town awash in history.
I guess that's enough rambling for today. It has got my brain cells jump started a bit, I think. Now I have to come up with a lesson plan that will give my Basic English students a fighting chance at being able to write me a 5 paragraph essay in the next 2 weeks. Oh Lord.
But part of me thinks about the later life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was apparently quite the conversationalist, but never produced any writing of note-- perhaps the verbal interplay scratched the itch enough for him by then-- that, and his drug addiction probably sapped his creative strength. It is much easier to say brilliant stuff off the top of your head than sweat through various stages of writing it down and revising it. Especially when you get the same payoff either way.
I'm reading The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins just now. Sometimes he wanders very far off topic in proof of a Universe without design-- I see now why he complains so much about being misread and misrepresented. But the digressions make sense to him in his field of expertise and are often fascinating in their own right.
One such is the long discussion of DNA and RNA as replicators of coded information, and how it's this that is passed down the generations-- how all the apparatus of life is pretty much incidental, from an evolutionary perspective, to this transmission of gene codes into the future. It's a kind of immortality, the way these various codes persist in the genetic code of all living things. Not that the code itself is in any position to appreciate this, of course.
But I wonder if there's a principle about life here that we self aware humans unconsciously try to copy ourselves. We have this funny drive to leave bits of our thoughts and self behind for the future: in our art, our buildings, in our letters, in our books, and yes, now in our blogs. Like the DNA code sequences, it's really a very small part of who we are, yet we are willing to devote huge amounts of time to leaving our marks like this, and many of us are fascinated at stumbling upon these evidences of life and thought from our past.
Keats captures this well in a poem written in the margin of "The Cap and Bells":
This Living Hand
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed--see here it is--
I hold it towards you.
Writing like this is why I got into literary studies to start with: that, and I was clever about picking up on patterns authors use and being able to write about them. I love living in Cincinnati because there's so much evidence of the past here-- it's a town awash in history.
I guess that's enough rambling for today. It has got my brain cells jump started a bit, I think. Now I have to come up with a lesson plan that will give my Basic English students a fighting chance at being able to write me a 5 paragraph essay in the next 2 weeks. Oh Lord.
