This is the anniversary of my commitment to write once a day for an entire year on the encounters of an ordinary person leading an ordinary life. Granted two days were missed, one due to the difficulties of establishing internet connections in Scotland, another when I was just too sick. Posts these last few days have been more or less placeholders for a fuller exploration of a complex set of encounters occasioned by a family crisis. Recently some posts have been purely fictional or fictionalized.
The hope, dear reader (to use a 19th C politeness), was and still is that a compelling case can be made for the encounter, a meeting in 2nd person mode, as the basic unit of human value (underwritten by God-in-love's 2nd person encounter with the Beloved Other). I've tried to explore and illustrate this premise from my own life.
I've been the first needing to be convinced since I know it's hard for abstract ideas to learn to swim soon enough to survive the bottomless sea of day to day life, but perhaps you, reader, have also been skeptical not just of the conclusions but also the project itself. Life doesn't need to the interpreted, just lived.
Perhaps you're right. I've not looked to see if the 365 plus data points make any intelligible graph. These next days I'll try to do that, as well as explore direct and indirect and even fictional encounters.The project has taken taken on its own life. The discipline has been transformative. I've felt myself become more alert to what's happening around me, more sensitive in my contemplation of what I see,and more creative in my expression--whatever I or anyone may think of the results.
Perec's novel Life A User's Manual which I've just finished is perhaps his masterpiece in the art of constrained writing, and my day in day out writing project has imposed on me the kind of constraint which has been more positive for me than I can fully tell..
You're probably busy just living, without time to think, much less write, as indeed has been my case this week engaged as I've been in a family crisis. Events and situations require action first, contemplation after. But my conviction is that our musings, ponderings, cogitatings have a downstream impact not only on what we do but what we think is worth doing. If the quantum of what matters is the encounter, then the impact of any encounter rippling through us, will modify us. I can see it has me.
The hope, dear reader (to use a 19th C politeness), was and still is that a compelling case can be made for the encounter, a meeting in 2nd person mode, as the basic unit of human value (underwritten by God-in-love's 2nd person encounter with the Beloved Other). I've tried to explore and illustrate this premise from my own life.
I've been the first needing to be convinced since I know it's hard for abstract ideas to learn to swim soon enough to survive the bottomless sea of day to day life, but perhaps you, reader, have also been skeptical not just of the conclusions but also the project itself. Life doesn't need to the interpreted, just lived.
Perhaps you're right. I've not looked to see if the 365 plus data points make any intelligible graph. These next days I'll try to do that, as well as explore direct and indirect and even fictional encounters.The project has taken taken on its own life. The discipline has been transformative. I've felt myself become more alert to what's happening around me, more sensitive in my contemplation of what I see,and more creative in my expression--whatever I or anyone may think of the results.
Perec's novel Life A User's Manual which I've just finished is perhaps his masterpiece in the art of constrained writing, and my day in day out writing project has imposed on me the kind of constraint which has been more positive for me than I can fully tell..
You're probably busy just living, without time to think, much less write, as indeed has been my case this week engaged as I've been in a family crisis. Events and situations require action first, contemplation after. But my conviction is that our musings, ponderings, cogitatings have a downstream impact not only on what we do but what we think is worth doing. If the quantum of what matters is the encounter, then the impact of any encounter rippling through us, will modify us. I can see it has me.
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