Welcome to Philomathy.org (Fragment)
Danny from 2016: Re-reading this fragment (I don’t think I wrote this by hand, and can’t find more than what’s posted below), it’s stunning to me how much my motivation to communicate has changed in seven years. I understand everything I’ve written below, and while the diction is definitely highfalutin, I don’t think it’s imprecise with regard to what I wanted to express, and how it pleased me to express it. For a first post (for any post), it feels so unwelcoming, though!
At the time of this writing (December 22, 2016), I vacillate between feeling that I’ve lost something by not being able to command these kinds of words the way I used to, and feeling like I’ve matured to the point where abstruse usage is a kind of failure of consideration for my audience. I believe this describes a trade-off between merciless precision in rendering the ideas in my head (with their exact emotional flavours or intertextual echoes) and decipherability to anyone not in my head. I’ve definitely transitioned from valuing the former to valuing the latter.
Does that mean I’ve sold out? Does painting this shift as an act of compositional maturity, or even as a choice, allow me to deny fears that I’ve burned out and lost my spark? Facing these questions makes it even harder to read this stuff than the word-choice would suggest, and it makes it harder to write more. Tricky business.
I am subject to a socially-debilitating frisson whereby my inner narrative slows and distends: queued sentences fall into clauses, then words, then morphemes, and then sometimes, constituent letters (though this last happens with increasing scarcity as the incursion of spell-checking software further and further into my patterns of composition is eroding my orthographical confidence). The outward manifestation of this phenomenon is that I have lost my train of thought, perhaps because I have been speaking ex-proctologically (this is not always never the case), but witnesses concerned for my cognitive acuity and fitness may be cheerfully reassured that I am even then merely in the throes of a kind of lexophilic masturbation which involves them only peripherally at best. My frisson culminates in the spontaneous synthesis of long forgotten, or at least hitherto dissociated, etymological data into a personally novel insight regarding the use, significance, and varying aptness of a commonly invoked word I had been presently planning to deploy. Naturally, by the time I have sanitised and condensed my epiphany into a generally edible product, its sovereign relevance to the conversation has waned and I wind up looking like a weirdo.
Read MoreDanny from 2016: Here endeth the fragment. I probably continued in this excruciating vein until the end, but it still feels like a shame not to have the original, mindnumbing document for archival purposes. Ah, well.