kenotron, noun. a kind of highly evacuated thermionic diode designed for rectification at high voltages. Derived from the greek keno-, empty, and -tron, an instrumental suffix. Increasingly relevant to a metaphorization of creativity as the emptying out or deflation of a (physical or especially psychic) vessel for the establishment of a directed flow of energy. Cf Stein:
“It is not extremely difficult not to have identity but it is extremely difficult the knowing not having identity. One might say it is impossible but that it is not impossible is proved by the existence of master-pieces which are just that. They are knowing that there is no identity and producing while identity is not.” (from “What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them?”, 1936)
I’m a fourth-year student of literature and theoretical mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just across the Charles River from Boston — a city that ironically has fewer twenty-four-hour restaurants than my hometown in Georgia, the only other merits of which include having been the birthplace of Carson McCullers and Coca-Cola.
When I’m not bemoaning Boston’s lack of diners, I like to think about varieties of human experience, and the ways we get by — the cultural minutiae where real life takes place, in which we go about making sense of, coping with, struggling against, and ultimately living through what Fitzgerald called ‘the inexhaustible variety of life.’
Practically, that translates to a list of eclectic academic interests that keep me on the fritz — especially those that crop up at the boundaries of philosophy, literature, and science — but most have some kind of relation to the history of cultures, of consciousness and self-expression, of ideas and systems of thought, and the visionary artists and thinkers who undermine and reinvent them. (Is anything not related to those things? Sadly, yes—)
If you seek me and haven’t found me under your bootsoles, keep encouraged; I stop somewhere waiting for you:
email: symplectomorphic at gmail dot com
I am kenotron on del.icio.us
November 6, 2007 at 3:05 pm
so this may be strange..but i’ve been reading your blog for quite a while. i’m a 15 year old still in highschool and i’m deeply interested in writing. this is why i was so enthralled to have found your site. the way you write, is just so clear, and sublime. i’ve become nothing but swayed by your amazing rhetoric and the way you manage to so clearly express yourself. i so rarely ever read someone who… anythings anything you do. i have to have it that vague and incomprehensible to cover it all. essentially what i’m alluding to is that academic prowess which you seem to wield. ah, i should get over lavishly lauding you shouldn’t i? i just thought that i’d say..you inspire.