Kaizen/Smriti Part Two (continued, obviously, from part one.)

More from the third sense of 'resolution:' a resolution of what is abstract into what is practical and direct. Or: what's Eros gonna do?

Despite my natural inclination to say, 'let's wait and see' (part of the idea of Kaizen, after all, is an embrace of the possibility and reality of constantly changing vision), I do at the moment have a sense of direction/function for this, or I wouldn't be doing it.

If time is a frontier there are no more modern pioneers, except in the individual case, as one grows through that orientation of mind. I would say that our pioneers are well beyond what we call the post-modern (should you have absolutely no conception of what these terms mean, my apologies, but stay tuned, I will be elucidating the distinction I am making between the modern and post-modern much in this year), but this is not so much my interest here, as I am not on the frontier in this sense. Having left our modern settlements to those who will grow through them, a sizable edge of our culturally contemporaneous adult humanity is laying the first solid foundations of post-modern society. Men and women have been here before, but not in numbers sufficient enough to establish a city, a genuine center-of-gravity. What we have seen in the way of post-modernity up to recently has either been exclusively individual or modernity in drag.

A major conceit of this year for this blog (or until I am disabused of it) is that we are at the endpoint of our culture's process of modernity, it has nothing new or surprising for us in a collective sense; we have turned over all of its stones, and large encampments of us are headed for or have begun establishing a post-modern city and society, a place still quite wild and undefined. This, as any process of growth, will be accompanied with great pain and backsliding, much of which we are watching in front of us now, and it is far from certain that we will be able to maintain a sustainable cultural presence there. If we do, it is because we will have been able to remake what it means to be human, individually and culturally, from this level of meaning. As a microcosm of the process, a young person still pulling himself out of the traditional cultural consciousness and family embeddedness, creating for himself an individual autonomous identity, while also reaching into the realm of the post-autonomous not only intellectually but in practical everyday life, I am situated well to document this and push it along. I see in myself the potential to be a city-planner for our new culture, someone actively exploring the implications of this consciousness in this world, and my greatest culturally valuable talent is in the kind of writing I am able to achieve occasionally on this blog, as a sort of essayist and cultural critic.

Practically, that changes little about the blog; it has always been a way for me to test out ideas and present them to whomever is willing and able to sift through them. In addition, though, I plan on a greater amount of engagement (the eternal plan...) as well as using the blog in companion to what I am reading, both for school and for pleasure, allowing me to remember what arguments others are making and how they fit into my angle of attack on the world, something I am terrible at (names), while also giving me the impetus to track through reading outside of my school's curriculum.

Also, as I feel I have a pretty good working sense of a personal philosophy but few opportunities to drag it out into the light of day where it can be challenged, and the blog serves this purpose as well. Not only can this philosophy be found in the accidental, what I happen to be reading or seeing online, but it is open to reinterpretation based on this, and based on the comments and participation of you. In my perfect world everybody is so willing to throw themselves on the table, recognizing just how permeable that thin layer of pretense is that separates our outside and inside world, but as this is not the case, engage me freely as you will, knowing that what you put in in intensity I give back; it is not a demand so much as an invitation to the constant questioning that is this Kaizen/Smriti, that is so integral to the post-modern meaning-making, and so vital a weapon against complacency, one of my pet sins.

With this in mind I hope as well to write at least an entry every day, though this is not a hard and fast rule, and the effort it takes to write some of my more involved entries obviously will prevent this from happening. The idea, though, being that having this in mind constantly, starting the day by starting an entry and finishing it by finishing one will help me keep this whole shebang in mind, Smriti.