coldhearted scientist وداد

All of these things are interrelated and if I had time I would explain to myself how, writing a nice little essay. Instead I will only put them together in the same post.

1. The key issue in Reeducation was the invalidation. You are not valid, your past is not valid, your present is not valid, and furthermore, you should not have goals. It is more challenging, but infinitely more pleasant and relaxing to be precise and striving, than to remain as in that primordial ooze, that goal-free and boundary-free zone.

1.1. Notice in the invalidation model, how much energy has to be spent upon self-repression. The effort at self-denial focuses on self and makes it and the past into a kind of prison.

1.2. In the precise and striving mode, I wear jewelry to type. I have beautiful hands with bracelets and rings. In Reeducation Mode nothing was worth decorating.

1.3. I think Reeducation was a kind of cult. There are some people in my yoga class who have a cult vibration to them and they terrify me. They want us to need our help.

2. I have a student who is very precise, in both creative and academic writing, and who manages time well and does interesting things, and is relaxed. Reeducation would say he must be hiding from something to be able to pull this off, but I doubt it. Indeed, I would wager the opposite. He does not know it but I am using him as a role model/implied audience. Someone told me once that they had used their image of me in this way for years. I found it odd, but now I am doing the same thing. I say, by the time I meet with Student on the next phase of his project, I must also be at the next phase of mine.

3. I wrote and published a small paper in a small venue last year, to recover from being cyber-stalked and also to dare to write about poetry again. It took a lot of emotional work to do it, for various reasons, and I want to reap some benefit from it by expanding the paper and publishing the expansion elsewhere.

3.1. I thought I should translate it to English (it was in Spanish) and head it for an English language venue. (In fact that is the right thing to do, I think, given the material.) Now I have a rough translation which needs a great deal of editing. I am not sure: given the amount of work there will be in that, should I just expand the original?

3.2. On the other hand, I am glad I translated it because only by translating did I realize how vague and unfinished it really is as a piece of thought and writing. This is partly because the Romance languages let you get away with that more than English does, and partly because when I wrote the original piece, I made a number of assumptions about audience that I cannot make for the English version. But the key point for now is how weak it is, and how I can see that, and how much stronger I am now than when I wrote it.

3.3. You have to write seriously every day to stay in shape, and to be able to do that, you have to be in shape generally. In Reeducation it was important to get out of shape so as to create limitations. Then I started this blog as a way to start writing in my own voice, on anything, every day. Now I am transferring that to other venues and it is very challenging. The piece I am working on is debris from this – it is half in my own voice, half not.

4. What I would have said to Reeducation before I was caught in its net was, it does not matter whether you are valid or someone says you are valid, it only matters to know what you are doing and have a nice day. This was “denial” in Reeducation but I do not think so. You really can just grow like the grass, which knows exactly how.

5. The grass grows and does not worry about it, or so I imagine. It grows along naturally and looks at the trees and sky. In Reeducation it was “denial” to look outward but I do not think so.

Axé.