The trouble with being scholarly is that one is wont to self-scrutiny. Ah, this word, “self” has been short-circuiting my brain since at least last August if not longer. I do not even want to attempt a definition or a justification; I just want to rid myself off it. Alas, that will not be.
I have just concluded a course on autobiography, and might I say its been all-consuming. There is nothing else I see around me just shades and shapes clamouring for self-(re)presentation. Edward Said has written that writers and intellectuals “represent something to the audiences, and in so doing represent themselves to themselves”. While striving to be a Saidian intellectual I have embarked on a trip to understand modes of self-writing, life writing, representation and such like. Endowed with “a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public”, in the process of “scouring alternative sources, exhuming buried documents, reviving forgotten (or abandoned) histories and people”, I know I am searching for a means to represent something to myself.
Write my own “autobiography”?
Isn’t that what I am doing right now? Isn’t blogging, social networking necessarily narcissistic?
Maybe I should just put the theoretical questions aside, and just write for now. As someone has told me: over-thinking is more injurious to health than smoking. Just be.
No comments:
Post a Comment