Aesthetics

Rhonda Prince has a quote on her site today that has me thinking (too much).

Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
-Jorge Luis Borges

Of course, the culture clash of recent history is about the concept of self, whether there is such a thing as the old, stable ego, that essence that defines us from cradle to the grave, the thing that we take to be "I." We are a collection of voices, hold some critics, that speak through us. Thus, we are not the authors of our identities but are a battleground of contending ideologies.

Of course, that may be what Borges had in mind.

I feel like the battleground recently. I've listened to too many voices, I think. Contending ideologies. I can see the value of each of them, the validity. They sit on my shoulders like the angel and the devil I saw in old cartoons, one spurring me on to this, the other holding me back from that. Since my life is fairly boring now, it has nothing to do with how I live my life from day to day. My life seems like the movie "Groundhog Day." As one of my professors once said to me, "My life is so boring I can't tell one day from the other."

No, it is not about that. I think I live my life by a pretty strict code that I have formed over the years.

Rather, it is about aesthetics and value and privileging. And this is where it gets difficult for me. There is such a din inside my head that I am moved toward catatonia. Too many times, I tell myself, I let critics lay waste to what I wanted to do. I have lost many projects to those contending voices. Aesthetics. I must stop my ears, I think. Too many voices, too many agendas.

The monk meditating in a mountain retreat alone with the moon and the stars and the sun. No voices. No contending ideologies. The end of desire, the end of aesthetics?