Beginnings

I am terrible at titles. I agonize over them and generally spend more time coming up with a title than I do creating whatever piece the title is supposed to describe. So you can imagine what it was like to try and find an appropriate title for my blog.

Let me start first with what I almost called this blog: “Pierglass,” after one of George Eliot’s most famous metaphors (see above quotation). I am sure in some other post I will blog about the merits of George Eliot and why she is the most awesome writer ever, but for now I just want to point out what Eliot points out through this metaphor.

We tend to see life through our own perspective.

Radical stuff, huh? If you actually think about this for more than two seconds, however, you realize just how much this fact of our own egoism influences the way we go through life. It can be a jolting experience when we find someone with a similar perspective (if we thought we were alone in the world in feeling or thinking a certain way) and also just as jolting to discover that other people do not think like us and do not feel that things ought to be done the same way we do them (the “right” way of course).

Living a full life, has something to do, I think, with learning to hold someone else’s candle up to our mirrored reflection. I thought to name my blog this in an effort to keep the egoism, which has caused me to disdain blogging for so long, at bay and to indicate my desire to engage with many different ideas in these pages.

But that was a very long explanation of the title that I did not choose for my blog.

I came upon the title Lumia Compositions while reading one of those short articles in the “talk of the town” section of The New Yorker. It began describing the image that pops up at the beginning and end of the movie Tree of Life that has apparently been driving movie critics crazy. The image, entitled “Opus 161,” comes from light artist Thomas Wilifred’s “lumia compositions,” his creations that seek to sculpt light rather than use light to sculpt art.

Perhaps it was the fact that I have discovered this image, like many now will, through a movie set in Texas. I decided to start this blog in part to chart my transition from a medium sized town in North Carolina to a small town in Central Texas. I think why the title “lumia compositions” really caught my attention, however, was the way Gregory Zinman described the method behind Wilifred’s art. In his article Zinman says Wilifred’s artworks “are both feats of bric-a-brac engineering and ethereal works of art…to look inside a lumia instrument is to see an apparent scrap heap put to near-magical use.”

The combination of scrap and magic, bric-a-brac and ethereal captures, I believe, the very essence of life and being human. I am constantly amazed at the wonder that erupts from the most ordinary, mundane things (perhaps this is why I am obsessed with nineteenth-century realism). In a less momentous way, this combination also describes the process of writing and producing scholarly work: out of the bric-a-brac something ethereal, or at least hopefully something interesting, emerges. This, then, is the struggle every scholar and every person faces, how to turn the scrap heap into something magical. Or maybe we shouldn’t see it so much as a struggle but as the wondrous mystery of the creative process and of life.

This blog engages with that mystery by charting my academic experiences, transitioning from a recent graduate to assistant professor, and my life experiences, transitioning from the home and family I’ve been part of for eight years in Greensboro to see what awaits me in a new place.

You can read more about Thomas Wilifred and his art here:

http://wilfred-lumia.org/index.html