I recently happened to participate in a session which talked about complementary areas or domains that combine especially in steampunk art. During this talk someone brought up the idea that romanticism believed in the idea of complementary domains. It got me thinking as honestly, i did not know what romanticism was. I looked it up and seems to be a literary and artisitic movement from the 18th century and some of the poets from that period thought to me seemed to be existentialist (once again history is not my strong suite and I am going by my feeling of the poetry than the period that defines romanticism or existentialism). This led me to try and look up what the overlap is between romanticism and existentialism. I do not know yet I am just trying to dig for fun when I find time.
Thursday, May 30, 2024
Sunday, May 26, 2024
Certainity/Uncertainity
This one will be short. A couple of JW missionaries chatted away yesterday while I was tending to a few weeds on the garden wall. I am an agnost and think God is an imaginary construct. I also think lot of other things such as gender are a societal construct and this in itself would be a post. I need to find time to write that, one day some day. Coming back to this, they still left me their card and told me I could take a look at their website and the section on bible and science. I said probably I will not but ya I could just for curiosity. Today out of that curiosity I opened their page and landed on a section on a few scientists explaining their faith. One thing in common in my opinion seems to be the need for certainity or to explain certain things that cannot be explained. Got me wondering, why is there this need to know. A recurrent theme seems to be nature and biology are complex , to explain these concepts that are unknown the idea of a grand creator seems to provide comfort. I understand that which is why it is a subjective faith and not applicable to everyone. The poet in me wonders, why we cannot let things just be. For now we do not know, one day we might or we may not but they are there and we can still look at them with awe?. I see where this is coming from.
Monday, May 13, 2024
Slambooks
I was finishing high school to move to university. These were times when slambooks were a thing. For those of you who do not know what a Slambook is, it used to be these notebooks of sort, with a few questions that allows your friends to write about you and about them with respect to you. The questions were cheesy and the idea of it all was to have a means to stay in touch or just have some memory of the people close to you. Though in reality the book would get passed around to everybody and usually one would have a generic response for people you barely knew though you were in the same class. So slambooks were like facebook post of yesteryears where one asks you to leave some memory of them in the comments for example.
Now, to give you some context, there was a friend of mine who was friends with another person, who would bully her. This friend would not stand up for herself but put up with her. I would tolerate this bully in common circle of friends and she was not specifically nice to me but i was non-existant for her. This person decided to give me her slambook to write in as if it were a peace offering of sorts now that we were leaving school. The slambook had a section what is the one thing that you would want me to change and there, I wrote, you would be a much better person if only you were not a spit fire.. Ain't proud of myself there but it was what it was.
And I remember her coming upto me and not being happy about that comment. She asked me to change it to which I said no I would not. But she could fill my slambook with whatever she wanted, which she did not want to do.
And guess what, I was iced out by my friend and she still wanted to be in good terms with this person. Well, people and their choices. My friend and I, moved to different universities and still went on to have some semblance of a friendship over the years, till it completely fell apart. Looking back, I would probably not write that comment in a slambook (or probably I would still) but other than that I would not change a thing.
Some of the recent incidents brought this incident to my mind.
Thursday, May 09, 2024
Mending walls on my mind
Since a week or so, the poem of Robert Frost's has been stuck in my head. The mending wall... Brain worm as always and somehow, some conversations with a few people i do not even know, made me realize the most probable why.
Good fences make good neighbors and it is not so much about the fence or the wall but what we fence in or out.
And sometimes in the very attempts at protecting certain things, we let people in who take it as a permission to trample onto whatever you have fenced in, but then you, redefine your fence, and recalibrate and move along. Wall feels rigid a fence feels more flexible but then its subjective ;)