Your Truth

From the reading for September 10th
"You must believe that your truth is every man's truth"

I thoroughly enjoy Emerson and most of his ideas, but this one really did not sit with me well, particularly since it is a constant argument that I have with my boyfriend. He is a firm believer that anything he says is automatically "fact", and I have on multiple occasions had to teach him that there is a such word as "opinion". I'm glad that he is confident in himself; that is something that I often wish for myself. However, political and religious conversations get old very quickly (they do in general, because those are things that you are not going to change for someone...why bother arguing) because he is completely unwilling to listen to anything else. I don't know why he is determined that what he learned is THE answer, because while I think that now I have finally found my own truth, it is certainly not being a left-wing Catholic (an oxymoron, at that). But with all the different religions and political views, how can we think that a personal truth can possibly be the truth of everyone?

Selling Out

From September 8th's class discussion:
What constitutes an artist selling out? It is more often talked about in the music industry, after a really good underground, fight the man band or artist goes public (ex Liz Phair. Seriously. WTF.) But as was brought up in class today, the visual artist can "sell out" by going into advertising. One controversial advertising technique that Carly briefly brought up was the new Graffiti advertising. She was promoting it, but I found a great article that highly disagrees. Taggers feel that this new scheme destroys the realness of their art. Activists used graffiti as advertisement for their cause in the 70's, but it was a completely different type of slogan, and still typically by youth culture. There is even the line between types of advertisement as to what people feel is and is not selling out. When we hear a classic Beatles or Led Zeppelin song used in a car commercial, we all scream obscenities. When a punk rocker starts selling real estate, we groan about the bullshit economy. It's becoming nearly impossible for one NOT to "sell out", so why is it so controversial and upsetting? And why does the term selling out still exist? We are all still searching for something real and it may never again be found.

Is it possible to truly understand anything that you have not experienced? This question was only briefly mentioned in the Plutarch excerpt, and its real purpose was to prove another point altogether, but it got me to thinking about art, particularly writing. Even an incredibly good writer with vivid description and extraneous detail can often not convey an event or an idea to someone who has not experienced it or has not been through something similar. Though Plato told men still in their youth of things, if they perceived the meaning at all, it was well into old age.
With artificial language and discourse, nothing is going to be properly received by the audience. However there are still very well written accounts of experience that will in no way be understood by anyone else. It's like an inside joke from the popular girls at the lunch table, where you just had to have been there. Unless you took the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, you won't know how it felt to be Further. What are the limits to what can be described in literature? How far can we take someone? It's not something I've figured out yet, but it's definitely something I'm going to test.