"And while we know that human suffering should not be - indeed cannot be - compared, we also know that its causes must be." - Stephen D. Smith, Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre
My god. Blogging is the lost resource for writers: other peoples' diaries. Won't replace writing craft, but what a resource. And as for history: there you have it, all those voices of 'ordinary people'. Characters. Just there.
frinstance. I'd like to see the archive of blogs from 1929, please!
Five out of 200+ miles of fence around Palestine. Pale Stine. (see Making a prison of Palestine by Brendan O'Neill).
What does a pre-emptive defence policy based on fear have to do with having a shit time at parties? It is a crap thing to even think of making a connection. A simple thing, fear, different scales. But they are not the same. Why should the world add up? Why should my experience have a place alongside large-scale problems? What are the individual patterns and trajectories within those larger scales? Pathological to seek out these connections? Or mundane? I don't know how to answer these things in 2003. What has the state got to do with my head? Have heads grown out of all proportion, orgy of individualism, epidemic-republic of Onan? Should dissatisfied, bored, impatient heads be quietened with pills, flattened their peaks and troughs their geography reduced to an impossible one-dimensional line.................
We should cultivate techniques of ignorance, C.H. Sisson says, in order to find out what's there, not what we expected to find. Ignorance, if we acknowledge it, is a useful instrument of self-effacement, a way of eluding prejudice, reflex, habitual response. As soon as we're properly ignorant we begin to develop a first rather than a second nature, to question even familiar things in ways that would not have occurred to us before, to hear sounds in poems that eluded our 'trained' ears.
Hoho, poseur and proud of it. Or stuck with it, anyway :p
(Some kind spark changed my enetation 'comments' to 'poseurs'. Poseurs nil - like it!)
...either that or everyone at enetation suddenly became a poseur for the day :)
