Saturday, September 4, 2010

Through Curiosity Comes Clarity

Going through the day, I look down at my fall schedule and suddenly am caught in a trance of memories. I see that one time in which my confidence was shaken and through a new perspective did I find strength. I see the time when I took “the journey less traveled” and the time I followed the crowd. Life is full of making decisions, finding a new angle, and discovering the characteristics you truly value. Well, this may be a personal anecdote; I bet that somewhere in someone’s life they have gone through quite similar experiences. Trying to gain a bit of understanding of exactly what modernism is, what post modernism is, I cannot help but think about my college career.

Coming in as a freshman, I had my own practice and understanding of the world around me. I had my own traditions, my own history and forms of expression, and personally I was quite content with the bubble that surrounded me. However, these first few chapters of my story were trapped in modernity. They were stable, concrete if you will, and I was entirely coloring within the lines. Nonetheless, college is not quite as clean cut as this and thus I entered into a condition known as postmodernism. I walked outside and I did not see the bubble that I spent my first eighteen years in, things were just different, and I was in my own form of Yeat’s Second Coming. William Butler Yates writes of a time in which “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold […] surely some revelation is at hand.” While this poem carries much more depth and understanding of the global atmosphere emerging in the 1940s, my interpretation is more personal and directed at a time when my life started to turn directions. Things were not necessarily falling apart and the center was not necessarily losing strength, but a new foundation had begun to be built. I would have to find that revelation, that Avant-Garde of thought and experience, and look inward in order to really understand what I believe.

Postmodernism is a time when thought was called into question and stability was a term of the past. The universal rules and forms of understanding that I followed every day were about to rupture, about to change. I am not challenging the world the way the early postmodernists did, in fact I still am in the stage of trying to comprehend the theories themselves. However, I know that college is all about finding instability and constantly reinventing one’s own element because at the end of the day, it is through this unsteadiness that I find strength; it is through the curiosity that I gain clarity; and it is through deconstruction that I build a stronger foundation.

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