Identification

[degringolade]

Romanticism / Carl Spitzweg/ The Poor Poet

Just got back from my morning walkies.  I need to get up to five miles a day.  Shouldn’t be an enormous problem, but it will take a month or so.   Today’s “project” is bottling beer and cleaning up afterward.  Tomorrow I think that I will segue into making blackberry/blueberry jam.

So, let’s get to the discussion that I started by sending Michael a link to a piece that I found interesting.  Now, what I find interesting is the approaches taken by individuals with philosophical musings found in the nooks and crannies of blogoland.

When I read things online, I guess that my expectations are pretty low.  I don’t think that anyone has the answer.  Matter of fact, I tend to think that 99 and 44/100th’s (thank you Ivory Snow commercials) of the folks out there writing are like me, trying to get a handle on a world that is out of their control, was never in their control, and doesn’t look like it will come under their control anytime soon (read here: forever).

Mostly what I am looking at is folks like me that might have a clue concerning a small subdomain of the big picture.  Lots and lots of what I burrow through in my peregrinations though the web are just plain poorly thought out and try to isolate one aspect of the world and make that the driving force that overwhelms the remainder of the aspects that make up the complex ecosystem that is the human ecosystem as currently configured.

Look, our buddy William James talked about the blooming, buzzing confusion that is every infant’s perspective of the world.  It is my earnest belief that people never really manage to proceed much past that.  

So when I read a blog post from anywhere or anyone, I usually go into thinking that it is mostly wrong.   What I am doing is prospecting.  I suppose the people that I feel most in tune with are the prospectors out in the old west, wandering about, looking at everything and trying to see what is below the surface of value.  

But prospector’s had a tough life.  Most of what they found was in the form of isolated nuggets or a lot of low grade ore that had to be refined.  So when I read something, the best I can hope for is a well turned phrase that kinda fits into a set of philosophical/ideological lenses that I have spent decades constructing. 

I suppose that if one were honest, I suppose Michael and I are reprising the torture that Lavonne Lake (high school English teacher/sadist) assigned me in my senior year. Assigning Jane Austen to high school seniors in their last trimester is just cruel.

“Dear creature! How much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”

“Have you, indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?”

“I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocketbook. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.”

“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”

“Yes, quite sure; 

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey