Giving up the em-dash
"Working in philosophy -- like working in architecture in many respects -- is really more a working on oneself. On one's own interpretation. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.)"
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (p. 16)
I write to figure things out; things both internal and external. To me, a journal is primarily a means of sublimating the vapor of thought into a crystal lattice of knowledge. At some point in the last few months I stopped doing that, and the reason I gave myself was that I was just swamped: school was weighing heavily on my mind and my spare brain cycles were largely taken up by exploring a problem that's difficult to even summarize, let alone get a good analytical grip on. It's possible that I just needed time to incubate, but that's no excuse for not writing about any of the other myriad things knocking around in my head at any given time.
Before now I don't think I'd quite hammered it into my own head that this journal isn't just a luxury; writing is crucial for my own thought process, and if it doesn't happen I just spin off into nowhere land. At some point in the last 16 hours, a dam broke in my mind, filling it with a torrent of thoughts that propelled me back here again. So here I am.
I started this journal as an act of autopoiesis; at some level I realized that there were a lot of changes going on in my life, and I'd decided it was time to shed the old skin I was outgrowing and attempt to recreate myself in a shape more like the person I wanted to be. When it comes to the peculiar human kind of self-creation there's always an element of "faking it until you make it", and in this transitory phase the little things matter just as much as the big things. In what seems like a minor stylistic choice, I started to use "-" instead of "--", because it reflected what I wanted to be at the time: someone refined, who put thought even into seemingly unimportant details and was willing to spend a little extra effort to do something just so.
On the other hand, it's both anal and artificial -- if you multiply the extra keystrokes necessary to type "mdash" instead of a quick double-tap of the dash key by the number of times I use the symbol, that's a lot of flow disruption for a minor cosmetic effect. That's not who I am, nor who I want to be. I don't think I'll ever be able to say I've "made it" in the sense of having fully realized who I want to be (nor do I actually want to), but in this respect I think I'm ready to give up the em-dash proper, as a symbol of formality and of the barriers I put up between myself and the world. Going forward what this will probably mean in practice is a greater mingling of the personal and the intellectual in what you see here, because it nolonger makes sense for me to separate the two (if it ever did in the first place).
It also means you're going to see a lot more of this kind of fine-grained analysis of little details of my life going on here, because I think I'm long past due for an inventory. I've been living too much in my own head and not paying enough attention to my physical environent, my emotional health, and my habits. That needs to change. When my head is constantly in the clouds I end up perpetually unprepared for what's going on in the here and now; muddling through just is not good enough anymore.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (p. 16)
I write to figure things out; things both internal and external. To me, a journal is primarily a means of sublimating the vapor of thought into a crystal lattice of knowledge. At some point in the last few months I stopped doing that, and the reason I gave myself was that I was just swamped: school was weighing heavily on my mind and my spare brain cycles were largely taken up by exploring a problem that's difficult to even summarize, let alone get a good analytical grip on. It's possible that I just needed time to incubate, but that's no excuse for not writing about any of the other myriad things knocking around in my head at any given time.
Before now I don't think I'd quite hammered it into my own head that this journal isn't just a luxury; writing is crucial for my own thought process, and if it doesn't happen I just spin off into nowhere land. At some point in the last 16 hours, a dam broke in my mind, filling it with a torrent of thoughts that propelled me back here again. So here I am.
I started this journal as an act of autopoiesis; at some level I realized that there were a lot of changes going on in my life, and I'd decided it was time to shed the old skin I was outgrowing and attempt to recreate myself in a shape more like the person I wanted to be. When it comes to the peculiar human kind of self-creation there's always an element of "faking it until you make it", and in this transitory phase the little things matter just as much as the big things. In what seems like a minor stylistic choice, I started to use "-" instead of "--", because it reflected what I wanted to be at the time: someone refined, who put thought even into seemingly unimportant details and was willing to spend a little extra effort to do something just so.
On the other hand, it's both anal and artificial -- if you multiply the extra keystrokes necessary to type "mdash" instead of a quick double-tap of the dash key by the number of times I use the symbol, that's a lot of flow disruption for a minor cosmetic effect. That's not who I am, nor who I want to be. I don't think I'll ever be able to say I've "made it" in the sense of having fully realized who I want to be (nor do I actually want to), but in this respect I think I'm ready to give up the em-dash proper, as a symbol of formality and of the barriers I put up between myself and the world. Going forward what this will probably mean in practice is a greater mingling of the personal and the intellectual in what you see here, because it nolonger makes sense for me to separate the two (if it ever did in the first place).
It also means you're going to see a lot more of this kind of fine-grained analysis of little details of my life going on here, because I think I'm long past due for an inventory. I've been living too much in my own head and not paying enough attention to my physical environent, my emotional health, and my habits. That needs to change. When my head is constantly in the clouds I end up perpetually unprepared for what's going on in the here and now; muddling through just is not good enough anymore.