How is your Highness getting on with your Highness's roller-skating?

You know what's really frustrating?

Knowing that someone is in pain while you are in pain yourself.
Hearing the other's cries and wondering if he catches the echoes of your own.
Wanting to console and be consoled, but being held in check
by the (not unwarranted) fear that breaking the silence
will harm more than it will heal.

Let's go meet the pansies!

Look!  Under the tutelage of a more-experienced friend, I tried to use pastels!  This drawing might have made more sense if I'd put the stem in.

Don't worry

I don't scar very well, it turns out.  Last night at work, I managed to acquire some pretty cool-looking burn marks from some hot metal stuff, and today they're all but invisible.  Ah, well.

Some reflections on The Obvious

So, in my History of Psychology class ("Hist-o-psych," I like to call it), we've been discussing various levels or ways of knowing.  The most superficial (relatively speaking, of course) is explaining, which deals with facts, objectivity, knowledge based on/established in sensory experience, and such. 


The next level is meaning, which often involves existentialism (also nihilism, but we won't go there today)--but basically, it's where you draw or make your own meanings for things/people/events/life, regardless of the facts, because sometimes the facts leave you with nothing to live for.


Finally, we come to relational knowing, which is...about relationships.  This is something that's difficult to discuss, because this kind of knowledge cannot be shared with others; it only comes through experience with the other: learning that person--or rather, coming to know in the way of connaître, as opposed to savoir (the same principle happens in Spanish, and German, and Tagalog, and many other languages).  And when we try to give this kind of knowledge expression, we inevitably fall back on meaning and explanation, because that's all we can do.


And that's where I got distracted thinking about the poem of my previous post.  It seems that we might fall back on explanation and meaning not only to express our relational knowledge to others, but also to reassure ourselves that our relational knowledge is still there.

A horse (I mean, a poem) with no name

The title of this post has little or nothing to do with the upcoming poem, but I rather like the song by America. Seelenluft also did a nice cover of it in 2007, if you're into electronica. I am, apparently.