Classroom Talk
Winter 2002 Archive
Re: Once the brick has hit your foot . . . Posted by Douglas on March 06, 2002 at 02:57:35:
In Reply to: Re: Once the brick has hit your foot . . . posted by Eddie on March 03, 2002 at 15:48:46:
Eddie:
Let me first explain that I have a cold and the following is not likely to be logical in the least.
Yes, I did laugh my ass off — not that there is much of an ass to laugh off. The scenario was priceless and had you proposed it via
AIM, (and you are always welcome to join the conversation) you would have had my co-operation for it would have been more than a
lesson in being “phony” around here, as Holden Caulfield would have described it. Unfortunately, you have given the game plan away
so I suppose we will just have to be honest,
To be personal, sometimes John’s descriptions don’t apply for I am more of an Escape Artist than a Con Artist.
Let me be biographical:
I grew up in a very dysfunctional family — if you could even call it a family. From the age of four, I lived with a domineering and
alcoholic Grandfather who unconsciously taught me many a lesson — lessons I still have yet to unlearn as my recent alienation of
Sally testifies to. My main escape from the horror of daily life was fantasy — I lived in fantasy land as an escape from the family.
By the age of fifteen my realm of fantasy was supplemented by recreational drug abuse which eventually led to alcohol abuse.
It is not a pretty picture.
Nevertheless, all these years later, and still being quite mad despite all the psychiatric and psychoanalytical help, I enjoy a good
fantasy and indulge in them frequently.
In terms of mindfulness, I don’t make a distinction here — the distinction between reality and phantasy, for they are both modes of
experience that one should pay attention to. On the one hand, to sever oneself from one’s internal life in the name of compromise
and compliance strikes me as personal suicide — a rebel’s stand perhaps but there is much to rebel against. On the other hand, co-
operation rather than competition is more than a virtue.
Vice, though, I suspect, has anticipated survival value.
My post upon “Tintern Abbey” though, may be a case in point when phantasy — well, nostalgia — intrudes upon reality, such as it is,
for I do prefer the term of “experience” to “reality”. When I was studying in London I fell in love with the Lake district —
England being generally depopulated of trees, elsewhere, to build a Navy that once ruled the world — where this poem was written
and it brings back more than a fond memory.
And I do believe that “The Politics of Experience” is the territory that we have entered here.
Excuse the rambling, but I felt that a response was necessary however feeble.
Douglas
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