Her Eyes

This composition was drafted for a writing class.

They flutter open. Well groomed lashes framing eyes that shine like sapphires. One glance is all it takes to be caught in their mystic trance.

She smiles. The corners of her lips make graceful shapes as her eyes open wide.

Light dances. I could watch it dance all day.

She notices, and blushes slightly, but the smile stays in place on her elegant lips. Her lips are light and small and go well with the way her chin is gently angeld. She never wears lipstick. They always look best when she smiles.

But the best part of her smile is her eyes. Sometimes when she gets embarrassed, she will make a face at you, but her eyes laugh so loudly you know you not have to worry about her.

Her eyes are like pools of silver blue sunshine in the sky. They are so warm for being such a cool color.

She never has to dress them up. She wears only mascara, which makes them sparkle even more brightly. Even without makeup, her eyes always draw yours to them. They were the first thing I ever noticed about her. They are still my favorite thing about her.

Her eyes are kind and loving eyes. One look and you know you can trust her. They have that honest, yet confiding look to them. You know you will be safe as long as you can look into them.

When I am away from her, I miss being able to look into her eyes more than anything else. When I get to look into her eyes again, I feel like I have returned home.

The Death of High Culture, part 2

Today’s topic is Memory.

Memory is an interesting thing. The more I am educated, the more fascinating the concept of memory becomes to me. There are many ways that you can remember things. I was going to try to set down a few examples of how people remember data, but that is difficult to do.

I would like to say that most people think of memory as a set of concrete facts or statements that we can make about the world that we have stored away in our brain. These can range from things as simple as ‘one plus one equals two’ to more abstract concepts like ideologies and philosophies. I would say that this is largely what I think about memory too.

The way people use memory today largely involves briefly storing data in their minds for the short term. Especially in the educational world, people gather knowledge for a semester, then discard it at the end unless they have to take the next part of the course the next semester. This is referred to as “cramming.” We stuff information into heads in a sort of hurried refrigeration. We do not usually take the care to preserve the knowledge we take in, like carefully canning or deep freezing the information. The difference between the two is largely learning strategy, whether you take the time to learn stuff or just try to pass a class. That is a different story, though.

In the past, people were much better at retaining the data that they came across. They had stronger memories, and much of that was due to the lack of modern conveniences. However, they still were able to produce many knowledgeable people who were well versed in many fields.

In the past, knowledge was passed on by word of mouth. This is what we call “oral tradition.” I may speak of this more some other time. Often, people in the past would listen to a speech that some other person gave and be able to come back and quote back the speech quite accurately (thanks Ben Crosby, I know you don’t have to cite blogs, but the Lit major in me would kill me if I didn’t). This is a fascinating concept. Most of the time, when we go to hear someone like Obama give a speech, we will come back and say, “Oh, he talked about health care, and he said such and such.” We then will summarize in maybe four minutes a twenty minute speech. We are so good at condensing information these days. Largely, being able to summarize a speech is an important thing. You need to be able to take away the key ideas so that you do not walk away without learning anything. However, these guys from the past used to be able to give the whole speech to the next guy in much the same way as you would be able to if you captured in on a cellular phone and posted it to your blog.

That brings me to my next point. We often use technology as a replacement for memory. Yes, a replacement. That is critically important to understand. Now, I will concede that technology can help you remember stuff better, such as recording a lecture to listen to again later. However, setting up a Google calendar is not helping you remember anything. It is remembering things for you, and with our lazy human minds, we tend to let these calendars remember everything for us. Calendars are useful tools. I need them just as much as anybody. I would like you to consider for a moment what it was like before paper was widespread, or even literacy was widespread. How then would you remember your mother’s birthday or when your buddy’s party is? You would have to rely completely on your own memory. That is what the old school guys did.

Now this sort of memorization extends far beyond speeches and dates. It applied to any sort of information you could store as knowledge. People who are considered experts today still carry out knowledge like this. On the flip side, people can also be considered experts without all this information committed to memory, meaning that if they had no Internet access and no library access (meaning all books), if they were completely on their own, they would be much more ignorant people.

The reason I bring this up is that I am studying rhetoric right now, and there are five canons of rhetoric, meaning five things that you have to address and master to do well rhetorically. The fourth of these five is Memory. In the rhetorical sense, Memory means that mastery of the material that you will be presenting on. Displaying this mastery would mean that you can immediately provide information to support your statements or answer the questions of those you are speaking to without having to “look up” data. It is all in your head. Now, it is allowed to not know everything, but I know that I tend to struggle with this so much. Whenever I am in a deep conversation with someone, I often feel like I do not know what the answer is but I know where to find it. Most of the time, it is information that I have come across before but failed to commit to my memory. I know that this problem is becoming more and more common these days. I know that I am still young, and that when I am older I will be “wiser” because I will have committed to mind more of the lessons of life. Yet I know I have passed up many lessons because leaving the knowledge in a book or on the Internet was easier.

My next point is that we are all experts if we have access to the Internet. That is really how we act. We read about something on Wikipedia, and we act like we have a doctorate in that field. Ok, I am exaggerating. The truth is that internet has become a sort of hive mind for us. We all have our own little access to it, access that is become more mobile every day. So many of my friends will have questions about some piece of obscure information, then whip out their smart phones and remember it. I am too young to remember the day when you had to remember things. Books have always been too inconvenient to carry, so I do not blame them for our loss of memory skill. I think they may have contributed slightly, but not nearly on the scale as the Internet.

I wish I could go in more depth on this topic of the Internet, but I am not expert. I would like to say, though, that people tend to “research” more than “memorize.” I say that “research” is not a bad thing, but it is looking to find the answer to one question then move on to the next. Many times it does not save the answer unless it is somehow involved in the next question. “Research” lets us go back and re-research the topic if we cannot remember the answer. True memorization, true learning would have us remember the answers to our past questions. However, we are but mortal and finite and far from perfect. It is allowed to forget things. I just think that we are getting lazy and forgetting things on purpose. I would even say that we may be not learning altogether on purpose because the information will always be right there.

And so another important part of High Culture has died.

Apology and Announcement

Dear Readers,

I apologize for neglecting this blog. I have no computer at the moment, and I am attempting to adjust to a hectic semester schedule. Hopefully I shall be able to resume posting shortly. I will put up one post today.

I also would like to announce that I am going to start another blog. Ideally, I would like to post on one or the other once a week. The reason for a new blog is that this blog has become a socio-political commentary for the most part. At least that is how my bloggish postings tend to be. I do have thoughts on other things, but they tend to be more religious. Because of the political nature of this blog, I believe it would be best for me to publish my religious ideology elsewhere. I do not want to blend my controversial political viewpoints with my Christianity. They are not related, at least not much. I believe that leaving religion out of politics helps prevent discrimination. People say America is a Christian country. I feel that that is true in a very small, unimportant sense. I believe that America must first behave as a free country before it can even hope to claim Christianity. That is my opinion at least. That is also the most I will likely blend relgion and politics. I would like to primarily focus on the concept of freedom based on the concept of free will. I do not think you can deny free will, even if it is a relgious concept (at least from my end). Everyone has a choice. Almost everyone agrees on that.

Anyways, I apologize for that tangent. My relgious literature will be posted on a sister blog. Poems of a religious nature will still be posted here, since they (hopefully) are artistic. I myself have enjoyed the poetry of those who have differing religious views and conveyed those views through poetry.

The address for my new blog is medalsofhope2.blogspot.com

Discrimination and American Literature

My last post was on racism. There were some other thoughts that I wanted to bring up, but I had become rather long winded. Perhaps this post will be shorter, but I can never tell. Hopefully it is, because I am just taking a study break at the library right now.

American literature is about finding identity. From the very beginning, a significant percentage of writers and works have had that theme. A lot of this quest for identity has to do with forming a recognizable literary presence that was not overshadowed by the great writers of England. For a long time, American writing largely was seen as an imitation of English literature. Many times this was true, but a lot of the issue with creating an independent and American literary form was due to the unresolved question of who or what is an American?

Personally, I believe that the advent of the transcendentalist movement was where American literature became independent. This is why I consider Walt Whitman to be the founding father of American literature. Sure, he was preceded by Emerson and a few other transcendentalists, but Whitman was the first to really write about America in a literal and physical way. He was more than just a philosopher. He came out and defined what America should stand for.

Whitman preached a gospel of universal brotherhood. We all share a common bond. He promoted racial equality, and in the aftermath of the Civil War, he longingly wrote words to heal a wounded nation.

Whitman wrote of the beauty and humanity in everyone. He loved everyone. He wanted everyone to get along and see the positive qualities of each other. He snubbed no one, shunned no one. They all were equal to him, and they all were a part of him and his writing. He loved America, and he wanted America to love America.

Whitman was a poet who saw the divisions in the land that he loved, and I believe that was one of the driving reasons for his poetry. He tried very hard to bring everyone as equals. I do not feel I need to explain this any more, because if you read his works, this is all very clear. I just want to say that I see his pain in a divided nation, a nation that claimed freedom and equality yet turned on itself because it did not practice what it preached.

Now remember that Whitman was an early poet, from before the time that blacks were even considered fully human (yet he considered them fully human).

After Whitman, a lot of writers pop up searching for American identity as well as personal identity. There are regionalist writers who try to express the beauty of their area of the country, showing their own unique identity. This largely happened during a period after the Civil War when the country was having a hard time seeing itself as a homogenous entity. However, these displays of local flavor are what has come to define America, especially what we tend to refer to as "small town America." Here we see more of the American identity being clarified.

Entering the 1900s, a lot of American literature becomes centered on discrimination and acceptance. The Harlem Renaissance centers around the African-American and their search for equal standing in all aspects of American society. The feminist movement pops up. There are a lot of writers from ethnic minorities, gender minorities, sexual minorities, etc. Each of them wants to write their page in the history of America, to paint there picture on the canvas of American identity just like the regionalists before them.

African-Americans struggle against the superiority complex of the dominant whites. Gays and lesbians seek amnesty in a straight culture. Native Americans will not sit by and be ignored and undervalued any more. Mexican-Americans want to show that they are talented at more than just grunt work. Outspoken poets cry out for freedom and equality. The underprivileged and underrepresented strive to show the world that they are just as good as everyone else.

This is the story of modern American literature, and it all started way back with Walt Whitman. So many authors drew inspiration as well as courage from him. Take a survey class in American literature, and more than likely you will be just as apalled by the inequality as I am. History classes will try to make it all look like we are being progressive, but the truth is that no matter what we do or how we change, we always seem to be mistreating some minority somehow.

Racism and American Government

Either people talk about racism too little or they talk about it too much. I tend to talk about it a lot. When you study literature, it is very hard not to talk about racism. You see, one of the central themes of American literature is being accepted as an American.

It will be impossible for me to express all of my thoughts in one blog, but I would like to some day write a book about racism in American Literature.

One of the big problems about racism is that it tends to get the most face time of all of the forms of discrimination. I feel that religious discrimination tends to be more of an issue than racism is at times, and that a lot of racism actually comes from religious discrimination. Furthermore, discrimination according to lifestyle, whether that means sexual orientation or basic social preferences is also a big problem. I am so tired of this land that supposedly is founded on freedom and equality trying to restrict people's forms of expression and mistreating groups with different (not even opposite or opposing) viewpoints.

I do not have an interest in politics, but I do have an interest in people being treated with respect. I believe that God gave man a free will, and that man should be free to excercise that free will as he sees fit. I believe that the purpose of governments is to act as a shield to prevent man from using that free will in a way that will harm other people. Of course, I believe that some actions are wrong (what one might call a sin), but I have respect for the free will that God gave people, and I will not interfere with that, even if it contradicts my moral values, unless it is literally endangering someone else. For instance, I will not be against a person getting drunk if they feel the desire to (though I consider this to be a moral fault), yet I will be against driving while drunk because it endangers people. However, I do not have the same view towards drugs like cocaine due to the fact that the drugs themselves present a hazard to those who use them. If there are drugs that are safe to use with no forms of danger presented at all, then go for it. I have no problem.

I would, however, like to say that as I also have a respect for order. I believe that you should obey rules. If you are attending a show at a theatre, you should respect their house rules by shutting off your cel phone and not smuggling in treats. These are rules set up to promote fairness between people. Shutting off your cel phone makes like more pleasant for those around you, and refraining from smuggling treats is a way to show respect to the owners of the establishment (you could also view smuggling of treats as a harmful action toward them because it damages their profits; they are not out to get you). Government usually has similar reasons for the laws they create.

A lot of people think that our country was based on freedom. This is sort of true. Those who came and settle this land orignally were minority groups who sought to avoid persecution. However, when they got here, they more or less became imperialistic, trying to take over the land of others. That is not freedom. No one every called an invader a seeker of liberty. Also, when we rebeled from England, we did it for the money. As far as minority groups go, our new laws were comparable to the laws of England when it came to minorities. In fact, I believe that England progressed faster in relation to racism than America did. History confirms this. It really was all about taxation without representation, or fiscal liberty. Consequently, I believe that people's idea of "freedom" was largely influenced by their wallets.

I know there is a lot of idealism floating around in government, and I know there was back then. People wanted to make a better country than they had before, and if you take the interests of the people back then into account, I believe they did make a better country. However, I think there was too much greed interfering (again, all about the money) for people to really be willing to take up the cause of true liberty. The South did not give up their slaves. Greed. The North wanted to set up the rules to protect their goods. Greed. A lot of this was settled through the Civil War, but what did we end up with? A free country? No. We ended up with a violently racist country, and we still have not recovered from that.

As a result of the Civil War, America lost the freedoms protected by state's rights. Yes, I believe in state's rights because it demonstrates free will. People could move to the states that they felt best worked with their lifestyles. Unfortunately, now the national government and the Supreme Court feel that they can bully states into following political norms. Sometimes I agree with their decisions, though. Any loss of freedom for any group is wrong, unless it somehow literally protects others from a real danger. However, this situation gets a little dicey because then you are also restricting the freedom of another entity, local or state government. I think they still should have some say it what happens.

I have gotten a lot more political than I set out to be.

Basically, I believe everyone should have a fair shake at things and that government should not restrict that.

What I wanted to point out is that American government has been racist from the get go. Blacks were not considered completely human. Free blacks were not even allowed to vote, even if they had money. I am not exactly for discrimination against the poor, but I understand why they would want people to have money or property before they could vote. I also think it is a good incentive for people to get up and do something with their lives. Sorry about that tangent.

Anyways, blacks aren't humans, and Native Americans are not equals. Come on. Blacks are just as good as whites. Early colonial history could prove that easily. Native Americans were easily our equals. They were better than whites at warfare, even if they took cheap shots sometimes. They had the capacity to be just as "civilized" as we were. Heck, they could have created their own state and fit in just fine. Why did we have to run them out and over? We could have let them integrate with us, or even integrate with them! Same goes for blacks!

And why do we always think racism has to do with skin color? The Irish had a bum rap for decades and they were white. It did not matter about skin color, they just had to be not you in order for you to discriminate.

And we still face this problem of racism. The Mexicans are our new slaves. They face even more issues than the blacks did, because their situation is not as black and white as the earlier issue was (ok... bad pun).

But seriously, we have made the issues more complicated by trying to serve ourselves under the pretext of freedom. We make laws to protect America from future Americans. Why are they not Americans now? Because we don't want them to be. Oh, but we really do. Oh, but we really don't. And we never did. And that is why I hate it when people say America is a free country.

"You sit on a throne of lies."

America will only be free when everyone is treated equally. No, not in a socialistic way. It is not about the money. It is about the ideals and the values. When everyone has tolerance and respect for each other like the Ideal America would have, then America will be free. Right now its all about money and personal comfort. DC does not give a damn about you. They really don't. But we can change that by changing ourselves.

How?

Give a damn about the people around you. Learn to love them like yourself. It really is as simple as the Golden Rule. I don't care if you are a Christian or not. Follow it, and you will be surprised at how free our world will become.

Untitled Psalm

 For the most holy God
From a lowly psalmist
With all my heart I thank You, Lord
You are my God forever

I'm struggling in vain
Clouds of sin block my sight of you
Waves of guilty shame
Hide me from Your light. It's true
I'm going down again

Helpless I raise my arms
While evil Satan grins
The third time is the charm

 The just man falls down seven times
But I've failed You more than eight
Burdened down by all my crimes
In seas of guilty self hate
I know I am not strong enough
My flimsy arms will never do
And my spirit's beat by oceans rough
Lord, what I need is you

Lord, I breathe out this last breath of air
And with this breath my humble prayer
Lord, with your strong arms rescue me
And hold me in your hand
Lord, with your wings please shelter me
With your strength, help me stand again

Lord I am nothing and can never be
More than a failure without you
I was wrong, I now can see
How what You said was true

Lord, thank you for these trials
For carrying me those many miles
You are always only good to me
You're always there so faithfully

Lord, I am far from just
And I so many times will fail
But in Your strength I put my trust
And by Your strength I'll prevail

My lungs fill with new air
And my heart with a new song
My spirit with a thankful prayer
To the Almighty, my God so strong

-V

Guiding Virtues

Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love. 
-1 Corinthians 13.13 NLT

I would say that the three guiding virtues that I would choose would be faith, hope, and love.

Faith is an important guiding virute. You cannot make it through this life without believing in something. I do not mean just in a religious sense. There must be some fundamental ideology that becomes your driving force in life. It is something you believe in, and believing in something is faith. Even if you do not trust anything that all the people in the world of all time have to offer, you are expressing faith, faith that you yourself have a better way of doing things.

Hope is the bravest thing. In a way, it is derived from faith. Hope is waiting for what you believe in. It could be simplified by calling it faith combined with patience. However, this takes some of the beauty out of hope. Hope is a positive look on the circumstances of life. It is the belief in a better tomorrow. Those who lack hope do not necessarily lack faith, because one could litterally have faith in the failures of mankind.

Love is the greatest of all the virtues. Without love, there would be little beauty in the world, because love is choosing to look past the flaws and imperfections of humanity to see the simple and unique heartbeats of their existance. Each person has something special that they brought into the world with them when they were born, and love is being able to see that. Yes, they may look plain or even unattractive, but there is something more than meets the eye. Love brings that out of other people. That is why we make friends, because there are valuable things that we cannot bring to life without them.

I do need to clarify that self-love is not love at all. Self love is the only ugly thing in the world, because it chooses not to look at the beautiful things in the world. Loving yourself will cause you to have nothing to share with the world around you because you are hoarding it to your self. Life is to be shared. Hoarding is stealing. Self-love is a cancer that will kill the life and love of the world. That is why people make the distinction "true" love, because there is a love that is false. Those who love falsely, love themseves.
I know I took my answer from the Bible, but I think that this verse is right on. It certainly has helped me a lot, and I hope it can do so for everyone. Regardless, love is for everyone. Remember that.