Transition

Look, things have changed! What once was a terribly morbidly titled blog, "Existential Pathos", with a fancy Kierkegaardian quote, all foreground to blackness is now -- well, you'll see.

It's clear that this blog has suffered from neglect and a bottleneck quantity progression: early posts were long, didactic, dense, meandering, later posts are short, more transparent, poetic (crosses fingers), decked out with flesh and common sense. For the past few months while these thoughts have been their most shamefully skimpiest, I've been losing my grasp on an old ideal that's really, at heart, quite unbloglike: your thoughts must be long, systematic, and booklike before they're worthy of release upon the imaginary public (props to my two or three solid longtime readers). It took long enough for me to accept that blogs are, well, short and snippy, less monsoonlike and structured, more the fruit of immediacy, still warm from the former home of the writer's inner life, best expressed in a few paragraphs, unless the muse invites a longer authentic literary sneeze.

Hence the change. This blog was originally a reflection of my preconscious self-definition as a thinker, life settled as it was for me on the fringe of a hard and heavy philosophical reading list, but this label no longer seems to apply, not because I don't consider myself a thinker, but rather because I don't consider myself (or any self) to be realistically limited to a single label without being fantastically boring. The more I think of it, the more I really ascertain that who I am is no more definable by one quality than another, regardless of the time that these specific qualities find their home in me. I am as much a philosopher as a poet, a musician, writer, thinker, still-learning cook, and (what is bound to become my most etched out label because it will be what I do to pay the bills) a therapist. These are all constituents of my persona, nevertheless I am not defined entirely by these qualities; take one away, or take all of them away, and I remain myself -- at deepest divine and no different than anyone else, an ineffable, elusive You that both penetrates and hovers over the particularities that tag along with me.

The posts (especially further back) were previously deep, oftentimes obnoxiously obscure in my attempt to find a clarity which manifested itself solely in my mind's eye, and in the minds of those odd enough to grasp the crippled thoughts which should have been refashioned as smooth, swift Achillic couriers who did their communicative job by getting my point across, plus or minus a few layers of lyricism. But my mind has changed. I've finally equipped my persona with that wisdom I previously thought was hidden in the opaque water of Hegelian wells. Real wisdom is hidden more in the words of the essayists and soft spoken lyricists, more the essays of Virginia Woolf and the reflective fiction of Marcel Proust than the systematic, hard-knit words of Aristotle or even at times my beloved Kierkegaard. This isn't to say that these individuals weren't wise, for anyone who has read a whit of Soren's biography, he was among the wisest who has ever lived. It is to say that real wisdom has its own style of conveyance, with a smooth, unhurried, meditative expression rather than a cold, complicated mental cruise that burns the brain and leaves its reader too focusedly fixed on a single problem without attending to a more mixed, holistic route on life's way. If philosophy is defined as solving complicated problems without also aiming to open up more beautiful mysteries, it can't possibly be on the way to wisdom. That's why I'm not a philosopher by today's standards, even though the one-sided hardheaded push for crystal clarity will always be mixed with the blood of my veins.

So let me take this hypocritically long collection of phrases to signal the break to shorter sayings and a more aphoristic feel. Nietzsche would be proud, yeah; of all the preblog nonfictionists, he published his thoughts the most in blog form: short, simple, to the point, and on to another snatch of life, rinse, wash, repeat. This, my dear nonexistent readers, is now a blog about unabashed thoughts, regardless of color, size, or texture. No specific theme, no existentialist twist. Only the turn of inspiration through a cognitive maze towards a more clarified vehicle of words, so you can see how strange I am without wondering what the hell I just said.

And one promise that I ask God to help me keep. Four posts per month minimum, ideally one per week. For I can never, never, never, never get away from the endorphin rush release that follows that apparently meaningless task of tacking words on cyberspace paper. I am born to write, so let me be a writer (among other things, of course).

And begin.