Am I getting stupid? - 1/9/2002

The thought came to me during a Lit class today. I was going over a poem (First Day at School) that I had talked about before. And I suddenly realised that the things I was saying weren't very insightful or interesting. In fact, they were mundane. I thought about it while they class was doing an exercise and rationalised it by saying to myself that I had deliberately pitched my comments at a level that the sec 2s would understand. I had earlier spent a torturous 20 minutes formulating a single question that I thought would be appropriate for sec 2s, when last year questions came off much faster. I think it has to do in part with this re-pitching of levels.

But what happens when you get so used to the "new" level and you stay stuck at "that level". An experiment - will I understand the stuff I wrote in the U ....

"Melville tries, by enacting the sacrifice of one author-figure to the death energies of desire, to latch the text onto those energies, without himself being utterly destroyed. But if one agress that to write for public consumption is to sell one's head, then Melville, while refusing that compromise in Pierre, by allowing writing to become energised by transgressive desire, has sold to the textual machine, his soul."

Ok - so Melville plays this balancing act, trying to use energy but not be consumed by it. Apparently in the formulations of D&G, the machine moves to a mode of the Body Without Organs where the tradiational psyche of the self (the soul/the heart as an organ in this case) becomes read, instead as individualised, becomes a movement point in a network of nodes, traversing a space that is more social in character.

Ok - I'm confusing myself with definitions I'm not even sure of .... sigh ... need to read D&G again ...