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poetica2
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Name: Katheryn
Birthday: 11/2/1987
Gender: Female
Interests: Reading, writing poetry and prose on the intricasies of trying to live, studying philosophy, and playing/watching soccer. I also dabble in music composition and linguistics (having studied the following languages: Latin, Greek, Old and Middle English and Hebrew. This summer I'm going after Russian). Some day I want to travel a lot and learn more living languages, plus study other philosophies than the classics.
Expertise: Being bitter.
Occupation: Student supervisor
Message: message me
Member Since:
3/2/2004
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| So, being the absolute nerd that I am, I cannot contain myself to purely fictional reading this summer. I started re-reading the Physics (Coughlin translation) and the essays in the back. I could write my thesis on it! The entire first three books have so many interesting facets.
Firstly, comes the question of "What the hell is being?!!?" which I've still got leftover from last year (how could you fail me, Aquinas?). Thomas made me feel like being is a kind of actuality derived from God as pure actuality, but considering how many more modern philosophers try to rid us of physical reality, a.k.a. matter, I wonder if being (at least our being) is more made of potency. This is deeply related to the doctrine of substantial change, which I'm still unsure of. It seems as though the only real substantial change happens when something goes from absolute potency with no actuality to something with actuality, a bizarre concept, let me assure you. All changes from a being with mixed potency and act seems to be accidental, but as Dr. Coughlin points out, there has to be a per se change in order for there to be an accidental one. For what a per se change might be, see the above bizarre concept. Oddly enough, the esse of ens seems to be more potency than act for us human beings, its this potency that allows so many differences in personality, and physical makeup. Let me just say, I thought of existentialism when considered this. It might also explain why so many philosophers think non-being is so deeply rooted in our existence, as long as one takes what they call "non-being" and consider it as pure potency.
Take a moment to consider what "nature" might be, and how it is related to motion and final ends as a cause.
Skip ahead to Aristotle's idea of luck and chance. Wow, when I read these chapters I thought they were completely boring and unimportant. However, certain implications follow from the aforementioned idea of difference in personality and physical makeup, the differeneces in which are caused by "luck" you might say, with Darwin in the back of your mind. The train of thought doesn't stop here, luck implies that other actions are goal oriented. Are we ourselves in a way goal-oriented from the moment we're born? Regardless of whether we believe God exists or not, it seems that we at least have the urge to self-preservation.
*short intermission of looking at weird photos* www.awkwardfamilyphotos.com
Its weird to think of whether or not we exist for an end, and whether that end is for our sake or for the sake of something else. I can't decide if either of these imply a creator. Furthermore, does having a nature imply being created??????
Next random thought, in order: what is motion? And does Aristotle's definition actually describe steps in a process in which a potency has gone to a kind of actuality, but only partial actuality, that is, as potency as such. Does that make any sense? No? didn't think so. I need to find differing definitions of motion, because, as this whole tirade has pointed out, the existence of nature before or after being seems to hing on what motion is. For motion is in the definition of motion, and motion implies coming-to-be, but coming-to-be implies potency, potency implies being, being as something implies disposition, disposition implies nature, but nature as created implies creator, which implies that for the sake of which, which comes to fists with Darwin in the form of luck and chance and Aristotle's semantics....and all of this leads me back to Existentialism!
The circle also goes backwards, starting at saying existentialism doesn't work, and yet does....depending on how much you want to follow Sartre......My brain just might explode!
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| what is this, this slow decay
that keeps the sun from bringing day?
hiding sunlight from my eyes
defying every nerve to rise
Dripping tears of cloudy ink
the gloomy days, they try to sink
and swallow every drop of sun
from day is dawn till day is done
So time has become a day
cloudy without a shinning ray
dark, depressing, tired sight,
strains through lenses, looks for light,
But no pair of glasses can magnify
the little bits of light that come to I
and so the lenses slowly rust
changing hope to blackened dust
and eyes that hope to see fade dim
and hearts that wish, they will grow grim
and minds thinking only of one thought
grow thin and weary over what is sought
So light is lacking, wanting bright
and sleep is lacking, only at night,
all things pass -not clouds as these
that bend the will, and wilt the trees
speaking words to space and time
whose presence is a fiction, mine
darkness drapes its drought on all,
and drearied hearts will ever fall,
sleeping deep in lonesome abodes
dead, the waking hope to call
who walks the foreign sightless roads.
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| Why does the snow seem so lonely?
Is it because each flake falls alone?
Winding downwards from the sky
-Oh, why should I try
to explain the world around me?
I am as far from it as it from me
Falling in a separate city,
each and every one
swirled and whirled as the wind
has always done
Confusing road and cloud and sky
into tilted strata of the earth
darkness looking to rain upon your road
as a drunk wobbles to walk upon it.
The clouds tighten and spread
the sky glowers, dank,
the earth opens, wet from drink
and everything spins away
a flit of whisps of clouds
swallowing the day
and so the clouds grow darker
swollen with their liquor
now the earth grows paler
falling in its squalor
mountains making leveler plains
baring their rocky teeth
crusted over with plaque
and hard from calcium dreams forgotten.
A harsh wind blows,
this the devil knows
will clear the way for many things to come
and so the clouds part
to reveal a sky rivaled only in blandness
by the earth that lay below.
Every hue of the sky seems to betoken
mediocrity on its wings
and a summer most insipid
every masked portent brings.
How could a sky so angered
bring an evening so benign?
and craddle in its arms
solemn death, and only mine?
But all this seems a loss,
a wasting of my vowels
every thought is a barren weed
which wavers and is trod
a comfort only to myself
and where the rain drops wrinkle
on the windshield of car
I know I've travailed many miles
but my words wont make it far. | | |
| The Summation of My Last Don Rags:
You're smart, just not on paper.
Story of my life, I am never going to get any job worth having.......
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| I find myself falling into an existentialist pothole. It doesn't help that I've been reading Sartre and Camus, and I really loved Garden State in all its existentialist nuances. I find myself really applying myself to the things that follow from the principles of existentialism, though I am having problems with some of the principles, oddly. I've fallen to an either/or situation, in which either existentialism, even in a Christian application, has fundamental flaws, or I need to do more research. The problem I'm having is very simple, if its true that existence comes before essence, that denies that God had the essence (or something analogous, perhaps even just the idea) of man (or anything else) in his mind before he created. The very little I've read of Sartre, though, says that man comes to be and then defines himself, but I do not understand what he would say how man comes about always and for the most part the same. This seems to imply something before which determines their form. Even from a physical aspect, man begets man, so there is something before, obviously the existence of the father is necessary for the son, but this seems very different from what Sartre is talking about. All things seem to say this is wrong, but for some reason I wont give up.
Furthermore, I read Catcher in the Rye, and having read it after all sorts of thing from Sartre and Camus, it makes an intense point I think most high school students who read it miss. My favorite line says something to the effect that the sign of an immature man is that he would die nobly for a cause, and the sign of a mature man is that he would live humbly for one. Wow, even though at first that sounds rather contrary to Christianity, nevertheless, how many Christians today have the chance to die for their faith?
I'm too impatient to write anything else, at least my pre-eminent anxiety for doing taxes and financial aid stuff is gone.
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