Process and the Past

Despite the need to be working on various school and personal creative projects right now I find myself in the middle of a process of going back through past writings and making them more interconnected and available, in short a bit of personal house cleaning, which seems necessary for several reasons. Primarily I have just gotten out of a long term relationship and am realizing that, as happens when ones' life gets intimately wrapped up in that of another, there are many perspectives and interests that I've neglected over the last several years, that need to be dug out and tied back in to my current projects and perspectives before I can begin fully working on those things from a fuller and more integrated place.

Some things I've noticed while doing this: obviously the recognition of neglected perspectives, including poetic, occult, revolutionary, metaphysical, oneiric, and process-oriented views of the world, which have shaped much of my current stance despite getting brief or invisible coverage in my thoughts of late.

Secondly I noticed that I was apt in the past to spill out great amounts of personal drama and woe on the Internet, which more recently I've learned not to do. We all go through emotional turmoil at times, but don't necessarily need to present that publicly. This is not though just a choosing not to present these facets of my life, but a recognition that I and my writing have actually matured, so that these emotional contents do not press on me with the same amount of ferocious necessity that they once did; I can separate what I want to say from all the chaos that surrounds the thoughts and words. On the other hand, what is missing from more academic framings of thought is that ideas are always intimately bound up in our experience. To not discuss personal narratives and the experiential engagement with our ideas, that is, how we live out our thoughts in our real lives, is to present a too small and flattened view of what reality is. Our lives, despite our ideals and intentions, are messy, upsetting, and influence everything that goes on in our heads, and recognizing our fears and doubts and questions along side the theories and fictions is ultimately a more true representation of reality, but one that needs to find balance between discretion and disclosure.

It seems necessary to recognize these things in light of the words inscribed above the Delphic Oracle: know thyself. From time to time, life takes hold and we forget who we fully are, and must return to the process and the past in order to find out again, and again, and move forward from the present in full knowledge and being.