Rationalising the irrational

I remember with fondness the exaltation, the joy and the pleasure I felt when I first forayed into literature. (I also fondly remember the various 'brooding spots' - park benches, groves, hilltops, etc. - where I read them!) Borges, Cortázar, Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, Joyce etc.! Here I had finally found the intellectual stimulation that school had never provided to me!

And this was before I started studying literature academically. (In fact, I found GCSE English so mind-numbingly tedious that I never paid attention in class and truanted from most of the lessons.) In those days, literature for me was never something to analyse. It was irrational - and perhaps that was part of the charm. Dostoyevsky, for example, makes small details and scraps of dialogue play off each other in an incredibly intense and exciting way. With Borges, I was perhaps less interested in the intertextuality and philosophical subtexts than I was with the fabulous imaginative landscapes that he conjures up. My mind was fucked up at the time and literature was the ideal stimulant to heighten my excitable - and corrosive - consciousness. Like the music I listened to, it was cerebral sex.

 When you study literature academically, one of course has to rationalise the text. One has to do scrutinise the most minute detail, do close readings and, most crucially, parse some sort of thesis. Your personal connection to the text is of no importance; one has to remain objective and aloof!

I have actually grown to like this, namely because literature as an academic discipline is so wide-ranging. You can read a text whatever way you want; there are no right or wrong answers. Literature covers every single facet of human existence, so is so interdisciplinary that you will find yourself reading about history, philosophy, psychoanalysis etc. etc.

Whatever the case, human creativity is a very mysterious activity. How do I know where these words come from as I write them down? Whatever the progress neuroscience has made in analysing causation, there can be no way of certifying how or why an author has chosen to write a book. You can take it away, deconstruct it and offer some sort of interpretation but, ultimately,  the cognitive processes that contributed to its finality are very nebulous indeed. The greatest irony about human creativity is that we can never be truly sure what leads to our actions. The analyses of creative praxis in many ways are an attempt to rationalise the irrational.

Herne Bay

I have lived the past year in Herne Bay. It is located in the South East of Kent, it is a 45 minute bus ride away from Canterbury and it overlooks the North Sea.

Generally, it's been lovely. When I go to sleep I can hear the tides ebbing in (which I think induced a spate of wild dreams).

I'll be moving back to Canterbury next year. It's been worth it, though. I can now say I've lived by the sea at some point in my life. I'll also miss the silence and the tranquility (I haven't lived in a student house). The pictures below are not indicative of what it's like most of the year. Usually, it is grey, windy and cold!