January 27, 2003

  • For a while now, I've been at a loss as to what to blog about. So I've decided to post the writing exercises I do as warm-ups. Don't expect complete stories, although I tend to reach closure, nor expect profound thoughts each day. But it's something to read.

    Here's the first of the series:

    5-minute random-word freewriting exercise:
    PURE
    Without contamination. Purity and contamination are opposite ends of a continuum, part of the illusion of duality, like good/evil.
    Unicorns are said to be pure, and so are virgins, which is why the 2 get on so well together. But what is it that makes either of them pure? Unicorns - a fantasy animal - I don't know. Virgins, on the other hand, are pure because they have not yet had sexual intercourse with a man.
    It's weird - it has always been thought that women were the unpure ones, the ones who were unclean and could corrupt or contaminate men with their sexual wiles. But if a virgin is pure already, it must be that the male of the human species is the impure and unclean one, who spreads this impurity to the female.

Comments (3)

  • i've never thought of things that way before...i like that.

  • Mmmm... A thinker!

    BB, Bryluen

  • Somewhere in my blog, buried in many past entries, is a comment I once made about one of my roommate's friends who stayed with us for a weekend.

    If you think about a different take on the idea of purity and pollution; take a look at the Hindu idea of castes.  I don't approve of a priori judging and categorizing of people, but there is one academically, intellectually interesting thing about castes.  The idea that an object touched by someone of a lower caste is therefore pollute and that those of higher castes, in an effort to avoid this pollution, must therefore not use the item.

    It sounds snotty, and downright batshit crazy.  But on some level, it makes some sort of instinctive sense.  Have you ever met someone who was utterly vile and who you despised?  Assuming that that person was 100% healthy, so that anything rational and biological is not an issue, I'm sure you still wouldn't want to share a cup with this person.  But then take someone you are in love with.  When that person drinks at spot X on the cup, you might want to also put your lips there-- a sort of symbolic kiss that makes you happy.  It is VERY different and yes, people can leave a kind of pollution.

    So my roommate has this guest and he's a nice guy, kind of square and dull, but a decent human being and a gentleman.  However, he USES MY SOAP.  Now he didn't have any skin diseases or anything like that, but I was very offended!  The bar of soap goes everywhere on my skin, all parts of my body.  Why would I want symbolic contact with this dullard?  So I relegated that bar of soap to being my foot soap.  So if I should ever have sweaty feet, I'd use that bar of soap to wash my feet and keep it sequestered from the soap I use for the rest of my body.  (And again, our hands probably are germier than our feet, and our mouths, even germier, but symbolically, our feet touch the ground and are seen as a 'dirtier/lower' part of the body.)

    At any rate, I think this associative word game that you play is excellent.  That's enough rambling from me!

Comments are closed.

Post a Comment