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i didn't write that with the idea of making anyone defensive. but i suppose the slippage between what one thinks and how the same thing reads when you write it down is in this case something i should have anticipated. but i didn't.
what i suppose i should have made clearer is that from where i am now looking back on where i remember myself being in my late teens/early twenties, it seems to me that i was living in a box. it may well be that this is a memory function, cross-cut with a degree of that sort of vague regret-like sense that one acquires with time. i think the logic runs along the lines of where i find myself now seems ok (which is inevitable, i suppose, because one occupies a particular position, a particular vantage-point and if you didn't find it ok you wouldn't occupy it--so the evaluative dimension is circular---i guess as far as one can go with that is to say that it is circular--which doesn't put you outside of it---all it does is maybe function to relativize the position---maybe...) so where was one is necessarily something of a way-station. one's own life is a space in which the teleological fallacy seems to be less a fallacy.
ANYWAY (this is perhaps the wine talking)...
1) what makes you think that "the masses" have fucked shit up? it seems to me that most folk are kinda passive and like to like what they're told they like to like in the way they're told they like to like it. so if anyone's fucked shit up, it's the folk who orchestrate opinion management and the educational system that makes this mode of opinion management seem like a great idea...but this is the direction along which i moved personally that shifted this into a political problem. i make no pretense here that this is a necessary direction.
it's a little strange trying to move out from under the usual messageboard thing where anything you write amounts to an assertion of a position that appears entirely thought out. i don't know how this is going.
3) i do think it's more interesting to be curious than to be judgmental--but i've had this discussion alot in 3-d and it hasn't always turned out as i expected. folk tell me that i treat others like they're in a petri dish and i put myself in the position of a vague scientist who wants to figure out how these strange organisms react.
i haven't got a good response to that.
go figure.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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