Maggie's Farm

This is a seminal essay. I can’t quite organize my thoughts at the moment because I’m so excited by what I’ve read, but I’ll put a few bits out there in random order.

Over the last few days I’ve been thinking in terms of engaging my studies more resolutely. I’ve been thinking though that what’s necessary for my success is not greater resolve but passion. I have to change my pattern of studying. This morning I meditated on successful strategies I’ve employed in the past to study difficult subjects; if I create a game or make my work play, I’m engaged and more productive. I’ve thought in terms of animal offspring engaged in their educations with vital play. This morning I was thinking intently on this idea when I read this in Boyd’s essay:

"Play exists even in the brightest invertebrates, like octopi, and in all mammals in which it has been investigated. Its self-rewarding nature means that animals with flexible behavior—behavior not genetically programmed—willingly engage in it again and again in circumstances of relative security, and thereby over time can master complex context-sensitive skills. The sheer pleasure of play motivates animals to repeat intense activities that strengthen and speed up neural connections. The exuberance of play enlarges the boundaries of ordinary behavior, in unusual and extreme movements, in ways that enable animals to cope better with the unexpected.”

Synchronicities such as this always leave me feeling as though God is actually invested in me, like He’s communicating with me. I love that feeling—the feeling of being appreciated by the Creator in spite of my imperfection. It buoys me up. Still, the question of the divine associating with the merely mortal aside, the coincidence reinforces my conviction and spurs me onward. It’s didactic and inspiring.

My wife is a writer. She makes her living at it, which says a lot. The thing is she’s good at it as well. She’s being published in a hoity-toity publication this summer and she’s been published before. I read excerpts from the essay to her and expressed my enthusiasm and she’s very interested in reading the whole thing. I have no doubt she’ll find it useful. I can’t wait to hear her impressions.

I’m at a loss to explain why this is a wonder to me, but the notion of patterns in this context is a revelation. It’s something ever present and neglected in my reading. You see my education is spotty at best—my last graduation was in junior high—I’m piecing together what the better educated among you were ostensibly given in higher education. Perhaps many of you will scratch your heads in wonder at my jubilation, but this is a jewel. This is a jewel indeed. My wife encourages me to write fiction. She says I have a voice. I may try my hand at the hard work of writing, and if I do these ideas will be the footing for what I write.

Boyd’s insight into Nabokov’s writing are exciting and illuminating. He makes me want to read Lolita again with commentaries. Nabokov was a pretty amazing writer.

Paragraphs two and three in the essay speak to what I’ve read about postmodernism:

“For the last few decades, indeed, scholars have been reluctant to deal with literature as an art—with the imaginative accomplishment of a work or the imaginative feast of responding to it—as if to do so meant privileging elite capacities and pandering to indulgent inclinations. Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained.

“Literary academics have also been reluctant to deal with science, except to fantasize that they have engulfed and disarmed it by reducing it to “just another narrative,” or to dismiss it with a knowing sneer as presupposing a risibly naïve epistemological realism. They have not only denied the pleasure of art and the power of science, but like others in the humanities and social sciences, they have also denied that human nature exists, insisting against the evidence that culture and convention make us infinitely malleable.”

This is an intersection of postmodernism, political correctness and Marxism far too vast for investigation here. It reminds me of Lawrence Summers’ politically correct lynching at Harvard, though. A great deal more could be said, but time is my enemy now.

Thanks for linking to this article. It’s one of the most valuable I’ve read in some time.

It's a great article. Sorry if the comment was long and barely intelligible. When I’m amped I don’t edit a whole lot.