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I have a blog?

Posted February 10th, 2011 at 6:47 PM by Esper

So I realized that I had a blog recently. I’m not sure how long it’s been there. I don’t normally read people’s blogs even when I remember PC has them. While I was thinking about what, if anything, I would write about in it I also thought about what to name it and this got me remembering a conversation I'd had with a friend not long ago.

I had been talking with this friend about our mutual dissatisfaction with our creative endeavors and somehow I turned the conversation over to the idea of the Uncarved Block. This is an idea I first read about in a class I took on Chinese literature. I’m not a proper scholar, philosopher or historian so my understanding of the idea is sure to be inaccurate, but the Block is a kind of ideal natural state for a person to be in, one which contains limitless forms and is therefore not bound to any particular form or pattern of thinking. (If you’ve seen Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium you’ll know what I mean. It’s the block of wood that Natalie Portman’s character has.) For my friend and I, as we talked about it, it also took on the meaning of a state of mind one is in when one isn’t ready to commit our ideas to paper. These ideas are in a kind of perfect state as long as they are in our minds. We don’t have to confront the imperfections of realizing them or having them (gasp!) change into something we didn’t intend. But I still like the image of the Block. As much as it forces me to recognize how much of a procrastinator and worrier and perfectionist I am, it also fills me with a little bit of joy. That’s because I love the idea of having a long term project to work on, something akin to a bonsai tree which I can slowly prune until I get the result I’m looking for. In this sense I’m talking more about a sculpture than a block of wood, but the ideas are related, in my mind at least. It’s completely at odds with what the Uncarved Block should mean to me, which is that I shouldn’t be afraid to let the result of my actions be something I didn’t intend, but I’m okay with holding contradictory ideas side by side.

So with that, I’m starting The Uncarved Blog, something which I hope to work on bit by bit, but hopefully without preconceptions as to what I should do with it.
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  1. Old Comment
    Rogue planet's Avatar
    I look forward to reading.
    Posted February 11th, 2011 at 8:21 AM by Rogue planet Rogue planet is offline