roachboy

you know, watching this affected me because it made me remember. not that day in october 1967, not any of the events it talks about--i was alive but not anywhere near and have no memory of where i was but i think i was somewhere----what i remembered was the split between the various levels of official narrative and the time-bound world we move through, the degrees of conflict between the two and the violence that can accompany attempts on the part of those who live in the official narrative to erase not just the actions but the entire reality of those who stray outside it along any number of trajectories--and this was what made the program interesting, really, this doubling of trajectories of straying outside the official narratives, that which followed doing what there was no choice but to do and that which followed from trying to protest what was happening both to the people locked into the former situations and because of those situations.

i remembered something of the fear of contamination that follows from investment in a metaphysical notion of purity. the violence that is shaped by the fear of contamination.
there has to be a better way to say that---and this is not appropriate for this thread perhaps: contamination becomes metaphor in a thread which is about contaminations in a more literal sense, regard for the effects of this literal contamination are stood on their head in the drift into metaphor.

but both are at play i suppose. reversibility is a continual possibility. one choices follows from another.

between the last post and this one i stood on the edge of the river again, as i do maybe too much these days, looking out toward the ocean, at fires burning on the backside of cranes beach, at the edges of fireworks exploding off castle hill, off annisquam, over the water, a microscopic world...it is low tide, unusally low it seems----i was standing over the surface of the moon. everything seems upside down.

i came back inside to erase the previous post, move it somewhere, turn things right-side up again in the microscopic world inside the microscopic world and here as there as everywhere else, previous choices are not reversible though meanings continually reverse, are reversed, are reversing.

i had the impression that the fireworks and such were about the opposite.
tonight they seemed more an axis around which the world was spinning.

it's all terribly odd.

i dont think i should watch television.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite