roachboy

the rule:

in this thread, the please address the question directly, that is don't provide informational demonstrations.

the other rule:

this thread might seem intrusive in that it is about quite personal matters.
i think it'd be an interesting exercise to indulge it, but not so much if what gets written here becomes ammunition for other debates/conflicts elswhere.
so the other rule is that what is written here stays here.
think of it as a constraint.
binding-like once you decide to play.


preamble

ok so in my 3-d life i do alot of work on left revolutionary politics, what they were, what happened to them, why there aren't any at this point. my own political views are intertwined with this research, which adds another level of pressure to what follows in my little world.

the problem:

if you work in a dissident space, you find yourself without the usual instituted checks that let you align your positions with those of others, and have to instead do more introspective work that lets you, to the extent possible, come to understand relations between your political views and psychological make-up and/or background or experiences. this is important because you need to be able to at least try to make a distinction between political claims about situations in the world and claims that are simple projections of desires or pathologies (say)...if you want to be able to imagine that what you write or say is interesting as something more than a psychological document.

so how do you align your politics and your background or psychological make-up as you understand it?

are there particular experiences that you think shaped your political development?
if you're willing to talk about them, what were they and how do you think the relation has played out?

are there particular personality tendencies that you have noticed about your 3-d self that make you wonder what the linkage is between these tendencies and your politics?


for example, i sometimes wonder about the links between the fact that my parents divorced when i was 5 and my desire to see solidarity as being possible amongst people--and as an extension that alternate social orders are possible---while at the same time deploring what exists. i sometimes see the scenarios i write as accidental repetitions of this experience, with an enormous theoretical construct sitting atop a viewpoint that repeats that of myself when i was 5.
this causes me to delete a lot of things, for better or worse.

i wonder if my tendency to critique almost all forms of hierarchical power link back to difficulties with authority in general that derive from the same source. this one i find it much easier to control for that the first.

but the main strange loop is that i wonder if there is a relation between my desire to see and work to help bring about a fundamentally different social arrangement is more than a displaced repetition of wishing for a family that simply did not exist.

i write alot about social revolution and find that these concerns turn up when i am editing. they put me in a strange place. it's not easy to navigate it.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite