Truth & Artifice: A Return to Form

Having started this blog in the 'tween of my undergraduate and graduate careers, where the mundane repetition of the real world seemed to open a void that called out to be filled by thoughts and the good cheer of diversions (in my case, mainly music), my return to the academy spelt its eventual demise (as can be witnessed in the gradual drop in posts beginning September 2006).  I am not yet sure if my loss of voice ought be attributed to the discovery of my own ignorance, as if my encounter with the university was akin to that of the citizen of Athens with the great Socrates, or if, rather, it was the product of an increasing sickness of the Word itself brought about by the loquacity of mealy-mouthed academics whose strutting and fretting upon the stage convinced me of the nothingness of signifying and the significance of nothingness.

It is the irony of the academy that I have seen many with much to say say nothing and those with nothing to say take centre stage.  The survivors of the academic process that demands "publish or perish" convert their every passing thought into scholarly currency, spinning straw into gold these Rumpelstiltskins covet and secure the professorships of the nation all the while devaluing the stock of knowledge everywhere.

The sickness of the Word is the presence of this very knowledge and yet to recognize it and face it elicits no courage nor calm.  The cure lies in the very disease itself, in the Word, in putting pen to paper and making thought actuality whilst not losing oneself in the (im)materialism of academic honourship.  A conviction to return to the pen, to out ideas as charlatans if they alone thrive in the recesses of the mind, and to prepare the way to contribute something, if only one thing, to the intellectual activity of the world.  This is my task.