Plato was worried about fair and foul: My mind fixates on fear and fitting

I recognize my own fear thoughts; I know that thoughts are not reality; fear speaks nonetheless to me like this:

What if the authority of one's interpreted spectation can only be legitimized if it claim's another's interpreted spectation as supportive if that interpretive spectation has been previously hierarchically approved due to the way it legitimized a previous interpreted spectation of another's interpreted spectation who has also been hierarchically approved by those who have validated their own interpreted spectations through those they approve?

If so, does this make the authority of my spectation spectacular or simply an empty spectacle for another to use to validate their own interpreted spectation?

I've this crazy notion that lived experience is a primary source. And that spectation is vicarious nonliving-living in which direct experience is traded for consumptive interpretation. 

Shoving my hands into the real, pushing and plying the materialities, experiencing the raw resistance and reforming, allowing the unexpected to connect up with things already tucked away inside me. I've always preferred production over spectation, which is why stepping into artist felt and feels like coming home. I do spectate from time to time with the intent to turn off my own experience, my own mind, and allow the empty spectacle of another's interpretive spectation carry me away. I negatively associate spectation as a form of disengaging  from the real. Perhaps interpretative spectation on the backs of other validated interpretations is a form of production. It just doesn't feel like it to me. I am not claiming my reactionary thoughts and judgments to be true or right. It simply sits here in my gut this way.

I recognize my thoughts as a highly reactionary judgment, loaded with dripping self protecting disdain. I unmask these and they are clearly not disdain or judgment but pure fear, fear that just as I was somehow unable to fit or adapt properly into the mold of upper-white-middle-class-female-*-*-* and * (note dripping disdain again = the reality of a sense of failure vs fear), even after a twenty two year adult attempt. And I did actually want to fit. Fear that I am inadequate to the task at hand. Fear of my own unknownings. I am terrified that my unknownings and inadequacies will prohibit my fitting upon this new stage upon which I have stepped. Admittedly I thought the stage would be a little different. I had a notion that my inadequacies and unknownings might find a fluidity of movement here. I had never even considered the notion to be scholar; I came for research and to watch the shape and moves it might take. I was following a question. I am ok with things being different than expected. I did come with a question, not an answer. At an important level, my art practice has proved again and again the joy and thrill of things going astray from the pre-imagined, leading to places unconsidered. The strayings have reshaped me in door opening ways. Ha. I recognize this as my own lived truth and can codify it in vague parallels to Plato's cave analogy, sort of. But none of this changes the that I am terrified that I won't be able to fit, that my being will be more foul than fair in this setting, and that terror binds up even the fair moves I knowingly could make. Fear speaks unfittingly.

--

In the same way that stepping into artist felt like putting on my own skin, I've hopes that on this stage when I look over at my fellow performers, I will experience a coming home, a kinship. These, these are my people. Sigh. Such a mundane normal human yearning. This is me pacifying myself as I emotionally prepare for my Plato spanking. Of course I do think I miss read him on the a bit on the cursory read, so my subarguments may be premiseless, but the larger spanking will most likely come from using my own voice, relying on my own reasoning and lived experience as a supplemental authoritative source. I am almost pacified so that I can try my hand again at interpretive spectation of others' interpretations without my normal knack for inserting the personal, my energy or voice. I hope I can lovingly push my brain the way in which it "should" at least temporarily go. If only my steel sieved memory capacity will comply.

Fear sucks dirty toad eggs.

I do actually see significant useful reasoning for noting the source of an idea which will allow another to follow it back for a more in-depth look or to take it an alternate direct. I get that...a lineage...a trace...a bread crumb to the author...of course the author is dead...in its place is a collective of collectives. I do actually understand that my own assumptions must be unpacked in how I am arriving at them and since the author is dead and no that these are not just magical notions that poof emerged in my mind. My magical assumptive notions are derivatives of the cultural histories I am embedded in. So I must unfold each garment from my suitcase and read each tag. My problem is that most the garments in the suitcase of my mind no longer have tags. I have vague notions as to the territory from which they originated but, ha, I do not know their author. Sigh. And though the personal is political it remains impotent in a social context that demands authorial validation--so in exclaiming my interpretation of my spectation I feel like the like girl that could only claimor that it is just so because argument my daddy said so...my dad is smarter than your dad. Who is my daddy? Paradoxes abound...

"intertextuality . . . undoes a hierarchical notion of tradition that give the past the most authoritative weight." Richard Deming in "A Cinematic Alchmy: Lawrence Jordan and the Palimpsest of Cinema." Apparently my interpreted spectation of my lived experience can be linked to others along the bread crumbs leading backward from my now.

Ha. Read this on 10/11/2014. Interesting the synchronicity that forms when reading from a diverse range. I love when an obligatory reading gives fodder for another courses paper. Thank you the powers that be!

"Danielle (Boulet) contextualizes transformative practices by looking at third-person, second-person and first-person research and knowledge. Most traditional academic fields focus on third-person research: finding out what people think, know or do on a particular topic, compiling and analyzing data. “In my own world, I have this huge criticism of the scientific paradigm and third person research and knowledge that can be stored, that can be written down, that can be transmitted,” Danielle explains. Instead, she recommends looking at what you want to know, why it’s important to you to learn this, and what it means to you — first-person research — as well as what/who you are in relationship to, the conversation between you and this other, and what happens in the space between you — second-person research. One of the writing prompts she often employs is “Je souviens…” — “I remember…” — to help people bring to the page what they’ve lived.“ The knowledge that we’re looking for is the knowledge that really informs the world, and informs our lives,” she says. “The key sentence I give to all my students is, ‘There is no knowledge without the knowledge of knowledge.'”" -- Goldberg, Caryn Mirriam. "Danielle Boutet: Alchemy, Art and Knowledge That Matters and Connects." Worlds of Change. N.p., 17 Feb. 2011. Web. 11 Oct. 2014.

Danielle Boulet has made it onto my lists of artists that have a writing practice that I will eventually get back to when I get to the research of my program.

*undisclosed flowing flooding judgmental disdain edited for my own well being.