The primary reason I named this Cam Infinitum was to acknowledge the reality that, unless/until this becomes a legitimate source of revenue (sadly, it won’t!), this is, at best, a way for me to take a moment of introspection and exercise my creative muscles in the midst of my life’s “constant whitewater.” That's a concept born out of corporate risk management, one I was introduced to in the pages of Batman #526. When applied to one’s personal life, the term describes what happens when a trend of overwork (like juggling secular, chaotic familial, and other more important responsibilities) takes a quantum leap. And, just like whitewater rafting, life’s struggle is mostly about staying afloat. There’s plenty of math and so on that support hypotheses to that effect, but the short of it all is this:
It’s been a looooong year and a half.
And while I do need some more discipline in consistency with these posts, I’ve recently had the opportunity to hit ‘refresh’ with a lot of my major Life Stuff, so guess what? I am by no means at a loss for content for the foreseeable future.
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Yesterday I was rummaging through some digital archives and I stopped to reread a few of my saved academic papers. This past summer, I and my wife moved, and she encouraged me to embrace the purging spirit. (She is as enthusiastic about decluttering life as I am about caped crusaders.) During the purge, I sorted through every document I’d saved since my freshman year in high school.
“You’re gonna need a bigger Trapper Keeper.”
The vast majority of my saved papers weren’t even academic. I’ve had an idea for a book series kicking around my head and heart since I was 13, so there were tons of character notes, plot points, partial chapters, and the rest of the rigmarole associated with that endeavor. All of those have been since consolidated, scanned and uploaded to a number of digital storage centers. But I also kept my first attempt at a writers’ workshop about a short story from 10th grade (truly the only time I can use the phrase ‘short story’ with a clean conscience). Then, following my time at community college, I kept a few of my term papers and some bits of writers’ wisdom from a textbook. In fact, I plan to showcase some of these works in future posts.
And theeere went the last reader.
My three favorite papers were all from different classes: Critical Thinking, Composition and Literature; World Literature; and, oddly enough, Contemporary Social Problems (Sociology). The topics are as varied as the courses, but I absolutely love the conceit of all three of them:
• The English paper was an eight-page critical analysis of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but here’s the catch: the entire paper was based, not on the novel itself, but, rather, three separate critical analyses found in the end notes of the novel. The overall thesis of this paper was that considering multiple perspectives on a single work (Jekyll/Hyde) can help us better understand the central theme of said work (the concept of man’s duality).
Your face after reading that last paragraph.
Also, my wife’s face any time I use the phrase ‘(word)_OF SAID_(word).’
• The Sociology paper was a little shorter at six pages, but it was a bit more satisfying. I cannot help but grin like an idiot at the thought that the highly underrated film Josie and the Pussycats could be used as a mechanism for a sociological critique of the media.
• The World Lit paper is my favorite of the three, and not because it’s the shortest (three pages). Honestly, I’d have written three hundred pages if I’d had the time or energy. And not only do I grin like the Josie idiot mentioned earlier; I laugh out loud in pure, unadulterated creative joy (with perhaps a dash of hubris) at the notion that I pulled this one off: I wrote a case study comparing the themes presented in Molière's Le Misanthrope to the ones addressed in arguably the best commentary on mid-to-late-1990’s adolescent life: Daria.
Pretend you’re not singing ‘la la LA laa laa’ to a
rockin’ guitar riff in your head right now. Go ahead.
Those three pieces brought me more satisfaction as a writing student than most everything else I’ve composed. More than the essay about Batman that granted me an early graduation from high school. More than the essay about Batman that got me a passing grade in my first college English course. Even more than the analysis in Social Psychology that, while having nothing to do with Batman, still required me to examine myself from the "me" rather than the "I" perspective (that one was a trip)!
So I guess what I’m saying is this: it took me listening to my voice in print from eight, nine, ten—yeesh, even fifteen!—years ago to appreciate the value of expression. Not simply the everyday ramblings that all of you who know me have to put up with (i.e., “blah blah Batman, yadda yadda Director’s Commentary, something-or-other-On this date/time I remember . . .”). I'm talking about true artistic expression, and I can’t believe there’s actually a definition for that term, given the subjective nature of creativity:
art(-istic expression): The conscious use of the imagination in the production of objects intended to be contemplated or appreciated as beautiful, as in the arrangement of forms, sounds, or words.
That’s a pretty good way to sum up the matter. And you know what? The designation totally fits even if you are the only one who 'contemplates or appreciates your work as beautiful.' My arrangements may have changed throughout the years because the experiences forming them have, but my voice remains constant. And even though I’ve long tired of the audible sound of my physical voice, I’ll never turn down or shut off my creativity.
I will, on occasion, however, need to press Pause.
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