What If? Heart of [Darkness]

Stories have layers and layers of complexities. There's an aesthetic aspect, a poetic aspect, a lingual aspect, a narrative aspect, etc. It's this kind of multiplicity that composes Heart of Darkness. Having an idea of 'darkness' also helps promote the sense of multiplicity. By having such a dissension of information pertaining to the meaning of actual darkness, we are able to explore how the various senses of darkness promote each other.

Throughout the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad the title word 'darkness' is repeated in other specific places. Conrad plays with the concept of darkness against light in order to add confusion and reflect the experience found in Marlow's disorientation and adversative perspectives. But what would happen if you took the darkness out of Heart of Darkness?

HEART OF by Joseph Conrad

A European seaman is sent into the Congo, a very happy place all the time. He meets a bunch of really nice vegetarians that attack him with a fusillade of love. A really sunny person named Kurtz happily shares ivory with everyone. He's really healthy. He talks about his Intended all the time. The last thing we hear him say is her name. 

Maybe not.

But in reality, the book would lack the crucial layer that really makes it what it is. Having this sense of darkness not only adds to the disorientation, but adds to the focus. When Marlow returns to Europe, we get the first real sense of how darkness has built the story. Thus far, we've thought darkness was the Congo. Darkness was the disorientation. Darkness was the world unknown. But once Marlow returns, he sees how ignorant the Europeans are. In a sense, they themselves are in their own sense of darkness and blindness--oblivion. Maybe it isn't the Congo that caused the darkness; maybe it's the Congo that caused the light. Maybe the darkness wasn't only a physical darkness, but a mental darkness.


Closing sentence is in the dark for added effect of confusion. 

Blogging Around Número Dos

First post of 2013! 

Jordan's blog post about her intellectual challenge with close-mindedness. She describes effects of being close-minded and why she wishes to change. 

Jordan, you address a challenge that I think a lot of us face. I don't think close-minded necessarily means being pessimistic, so don't fret! But I do agree that being open-minded perspectives usually lead to happiness. Being able to see a subject in it's entirety places less emphasis on the negatives, and leads to less aggravation. We can't know everything about our world, no matter how much we all admit to ourselves that we know best. When it comes to learning, lets be honest: it's hard to buckle down and admit that what we're learning will actually be beneficial to our intellectual experience. It comes down to our guiding question: "To what degree do I understand that which I'm about to reject?" As we face an intellectual challenge, it's easier to shut down. But if we focus on opening our minds we can see far beyond the challenge. Great post!

Kira's post reflecting on steps to writing her poem. She tells the story behind her poem and steps she took to make an emotional investment in the poem. 

I love the backstory to your poem, Kira! I really like the line, "Important moments do not equal important events".  Milestones in our lives are only milestones because of the journey it took to get there. And journeys are composed of little snippets of memories that may be simple or seemingly worthless, but are unique only to us. We tend to get caught up in the big things and don't stop to appreciate the little ones, people we've met, insights we've heard, the beginning to a love story like the one in your poem. Buried in those things are our emotions. I like that you took something personal to someone else and invested an emotional connection in it, making it personal to you too. Great post, great poem.

Metacognition: Poem

I've already written a post about my thoughts on poetry, so I'm going to try to avoid redundancy as much as possible. I regret not being able to explore different kinds of poetry in this unit. Poetry is difficult to learn and study because there is dissonance between every poet's voice. Finding your own voice in poetry is a challenge. It would have been nice to be able to explore different voices of different poets. In my English class in middle school, our teacher made us write down why we wrote. I wrote, "I write to discover". And that's always been the most important thing to me. It's more important to be able phrase my thoughts and learn from what I'm writing than to produce a final product that mirrors the example but isn't mine in heart. I really hope that my final poem reflected something of actual importance from me to the reader. 

For me, the hardest part of the poem was coming up with an idea and sticking with it. I'm a very impatient person. So when I get stuck, I tend to just give up. I don't let people look through my sketchbook because so much of it is filled with just half finished drawings I've given up on. I considered writing about a multitude of ideas and even wrote a couple horribly vague, disconnected poems. But I didn't like the direction any of my poems were going in. Once I finished my poem, I forced myself to continue to push it to the best it could be. 

But for something that's supposed to be specific, the editing process was incredibly intricate. Every single detail had to be modified in some way, and as a closeted perfectionist that really frustrated me. Some sections I ended up completely deleting because I had to come to terms with the fact they just didn't make sense.

When it came to working on holding a moment, I created a method that worked for me. I was struggling with elaboration. I like to write in ways that allow the reader to be able to interpret my work in whatever way would be most applicable to them. So, I drew exactly what I had written in the poem. If I couldn't draw a decent sketch using the details I used, I had to add more details. If there was an empty space, I had to draw something and describe it. If I had a detail that didn't fit, I had to manipulate it until it did.

All in all, I really like poetry. Poetry forces us to write in a balance between something that's real and brutally honest and something thats creative and imaginative. 

Metacognition: Get Organized

It was the Tuesday night before break and I had a flight to catch that required me to wake up at 3AM. "Hurry up and get all your packing done!" my dad said. Unfortunately, my typical procrastinating self hadn't even opened my suitcase. I instead decided it would be a good time to replace procrastination with productivity and start working on this blog post. I'll make my blog assignment easy on myself and just sort through my records, I thought. As I started sifting through the records, I not only got a few facefuls of dust, but got bored of trying to be neat. Dejectedly, I took a couple of my favorite records back to my rooom and attempted to at least sort those few. But as I got more and more into the project, I ended up completely reorganizing my room.

Not only is my room slightly less cluttered, but my mind is too. It's easier to focus on your priorities when you aren't distracted by your surroundings. We tend to get caught up with computers and work and friends. And once it's all simplified, the stress eases away and the way is paved to focus on what is really important to you at that given point in time.

At the beginning of the year we read "Memoria ex Machina" where the author talked about how he associated memories with objects from his past. This project forced me to look at the memories I associate with my own objects, particularly with art and music. I can recall the exact moment I first heard a song just by hearing the opening chord--I was sick the Christmas I played track 3, I still hated that album until I heard the 4th song, the first track played that time when I had slammed my door in some sort of angry cry for attention. And there's something memorable about the anticipation of the waiting for a record I haven't heard in a while to start playing, waiting for those memories to come back. The needle is set, the record is spinning, and any moment the first track will sound.

On my quest for a cleaner room I found a small plastic box with a ladybug sticker on the side. I had stuffed the box with old drawings and paintings and sketchpads.
I always took it for granted that those types of memories would always be there when I wanted to look back on my history. I thought could just start listening to a record I forgot I owned or flip through old sketchbooks with drawings from a wannabe troubled artist middle schooler and I would remember everything. But the longer the records stayed untouched and the drawings started to stick together, the more dust everything collected. I don't remember exactly what I was thinking or how I was feeling when I painted that picture. Maybe something about it seems silly looking back, but it was meaningful to me at the time. Though I can't recall what the meaning once was, something about it had an impact on how I grew to be who I am today.

And to future me, reminiscing on this blog--go listen to some of those old records. You never know what you'll remember.

Metacognition: Beginning Quarter 2

We're currently in that inevitably awkward stage between quarters where students have to face the question of doom: how hard do I actually have to try this quarter? 

There's a certain level of adjustment we have to go through each year. With new classes comes new responsibilities.

In a previous blog post, I described my style of thinking as a puzzle, how ideas in my head slowly come together, and more often I know the ending before I know the start. But there's also always been something off about the way I process information. In 8th grade, I had a conversation with my English teacher that prompted her to give me a book on synesthesia. I'm not claiming to be a synesthesiac, but I do link the information in my brain in a similar way that synesthesiacs do. I associate pretty much everything with colors; from moods to music to letters to words to days of the week. 

I wish I could be someone who could sit through long reading assignments and notes and lectures and absorb everything I'm intended to. But a lot of times I have to force myself to focus. I'm one of those people who always has to be doing something with their hands. I'm always drawing or scribbling during class discussions or notes so I have a way to collect my thoughts without being otherwise distracted. I craft new ways to do things if I don't understand the way something is taught; in music theory, I made up my own method of transposition, in Spanish, I made up my own way of explaining preterite and imperfect. I suppose it's not the most effective way to learn information. It's easier to just learn things the first time they are taught, not a trial-and-error of various methods.

However, if I attempted to change the way I think, I would lose hold of my identity. There's a tendency to make it seem like our actions define our character, but I think what truly defines us is the way we think. I think academy really gives us the chance to explore what that means for us as individuals. We have the opportunity to learn in different ways and utilize every part of our brain as we continue to grow and enrich our experience. But this requires an incredible amount of effort, dedication, and focus.

So how hard to I actually have to try this quarter? 

Very hard. 

Very. Very. Hard. 

Blogging Around

Dana's post about Education


Dana, I really like this blog post. I completely agree with what you're saying about education turning into a "forgotten issue". This video effectively demonstrates the important cause-and-effect changing the face of education can have in the future of our country. I've been focusing on education for our election coverage, and one of the major problems I've noticed is that it's pushed aside too often. Politicians tend to focus more on issues that they can change with direct results, things that help problems in the present. And while I'm not saying other issues aren't important, the value of education tends to be overlooked. Changes in education aren't something that can have results appear a year or two later; they're changes that take time to develop. If we want to be able to continue to grow as a society, we need to have the enrichment necessary for our future generations to reach their full potential. It's a bit of a cliché, but what if the person who has the ability to cure cancer was part of one of the 1.2 million that drops out per year? My cousin's wife started working as a teacher as part of a program of college volunteers set up to work in charter schools. She fell in love with teaching, being able to inspire kids every day, and now works fulltime for a charter school in Nashville. She sees how important education is in these children's lives, how she sees creativity growing every day. Every child should be put in a learning environment that allows them to grow as much as they can. And Dana makes a good point: it really is up to us to stand for education.

Kara's post about Poetry

This is a really interesting post, Kara. I love the line, "Words were not meant to be wasted on those who are unable to see past their surfaces." There's a craft that goes into poetry that's unique in it's own sense; words have meanings further than anyone can see. But there's also an aspect of poetry found in everything we see, especially music. Kara does a good job of really showing the poetry in music, how it utilizes all the aspects of poetry both in lyrics and in the actual music: rhythm, repetition, variation, imagery. And beyond that, our perception of poetry really doesn't have a great divide from our perception of the world. In retrospect, poetry isn't the usage of words in a certain form, but it's the way things connect, it's the way things are ordered, and it's the way things are interpreted.

iMedia: Sarah Kay, Spoken Word Poetry

In all honesty, up until about 5th grade, I hated poetry. I hated poetry more than I hated waking up in the morning. I hated poetry more than bruised knees. I hated poetry more than dog-eared pages and monsters under the bed and I even hated poetry more than gym class. And I hated poetry so much because as I read it, I heard this pretentious voice echoing in my head. This voice echoed meaningless, muddy words, that only could be appreciated by pompous adults that pretended to understand the meaning.

It wasn't until one day that we had an odd man as a guest speaker at one of our assemblies to read us poems that finally something clicked in my head. Maybe, just maybe, poetry wasn't this distant concept. It could be read in my voice, and it could be relevant to my life.

The spoken word poetry Sarah Kay demonstrates and teaches is a great way of turning perspectives on poetry. Poetry is such an easily accessible mean of art, but it will always be taught with echoed groans. Anyone could write and get energized about poetry if our education system didn't teach it as a chore. Poetry doesn't need to be a struggle. It doesn't need to be spoken by people with extensive knowledge of every particle in our world, and it certainly doesn't have to only connect to one person. Sarah Kay points out that poetry doesn't need to be indignant or arrogant. It can be relevant to you. Good poetry comes from the intersection of ideas.


I've never quite understood the way my brain seems to function. My thoughts don't extend externally. I don't tend to start with a simple thought and gradually grow words and string sentences together. My thoughts sort of start at the finish and percolate from all directions to finish the start. It's a lot like doing a jigsaw puzzle. You know what you're trying to create but you haven't quite gotten there yet--and then two pieces come together in one spot and two in another and two in another until eventually they aren't just puzzle pieces--they're actually part of a picture. Poetry has always been an outlet for me to express myself in that jigsaw manner, playing with the shapes and fits of words. As Sarah Kay says, "Look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of the human mind."