El Final

So, 22 posts later, and here I am. My days of blogging will be coming to a close for a while because I need a break from the familiarity of this routine. I am going to be applying defamiliarization to my life and stepping away from the mundane consistency found in trying to make a post all the time. Hopefully, then, when I return, the joy of blogging will be joyous again. Like everything that we do, over time, things become routine, and this is why art is so vital to our sanity in life. It is able to defamiliarize us to the normality of everyday life. According to Shklovsky, this was the whole reason art existed. In some cases, it makes things that we see new again by making us freshly aware of their presence. Or, as in the case of the film 300, art can defamiliarize our ideas and perceptions of certain things like warfare or being a soldier. All in all, art is necessary for our lives if we desire to remember that we are alive (according to Vik). Honestly, if art fails at doing this, it ultimately fails at fulfilling its purpose. Art exists to remind us that things are beautiful and wonderful, that there are things that we have been given that can bring a vibrant joy to life once again. Or maybe not even joy, maybe, in our cases; we just need something to remind us that we are still actually alive. You know, it is kind of like a cut or physical pain. Without the sensation that we feel when we bleed or experience pain, would we forget that we are actually living? I don't know, but I do know that pain reminds us that we are, in fact, still alive. It shocks us back into reality in one sense. Art ultimately exists to do the same thing. This effect of art is the reason that it is so important that art defamiliarize us and our senses again and again. It is important that art remind us that we are alive and that things can be seen again and again as though for the first and each time with a different perception. Peace. Enjoyed it and enjoy life.

Jeff Bolger