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Wednesday, May 21, 2014

The Fifth Speaker

I suppose I was the Fifth Speaker this weekend, the fourth to be disappointing ...  As I've aged, I don't like to speak much .... my ability to hold to a line of thought-development or my interest in doing so has waned over the years.

"No kidding, Howard ... we who have been reading your posts sometimes find it hard to find the thread from blog to blog .... blah! blah! blah! or is it blog, blog, blog!"

Well, thanks for pointing that out.

I was talking about my sense that, in early life, we begin without much engagement with the inner world of others and even find their inner world "an inconvenient truth," to borrow from VP Gore. I sometimes repeat verbatim what someone else says and the very fact that I've uttered the words changes their meaning.

It takes us a long time even before we allow another to do things that are for us but not in our own voice.

In the best of circumstances, we seem to develop sufficiently to gather together -- in pairs and larger social settings -- a cohort of near and dear whose contributions to our way of thinking can have a life of its own ... maybe even say things that run counter to our own way of thinking.

Buber, the religious thinker, would try to separate out I-Thou from I-It kinds of relationships. In the former, my Other is experienced by my as a Subject in their Own Right .... someones entitled to their own way of embracing those close to them and having their own idiosyncratic way of relating to their own Gods, Theories and Ideas. In the I- It for, the Other fails to be seen as a Person entitled to their
own style of thinking and efforts are made to deconstruct or even demolish their contribution. Buber (and I following this other Brother Martin) saw this as the basic form of the Good and of the Moral.

In any case, my own experience with audiences is that many need to recoil from the speaker's unique contribution ... unique? if only because it's their own. This morning I'm speaking as Speaker .... wonder if I make a good audience member, especially thinking of my last posting ... sounded kind of snarky to me.

Damn ... Have I turned the Last Quarter corner into snarkyness?  That would be sad ....

It was so curious that one of the members of the group to which I was presenting was apparently incapable of getting into an other's boat and doing a little rowing inn the same direction, before deciding that 'this boat don't float' .... My own inner thoughts wondered why that was so hard for him ... was it that he was protecting the floor? ... was it that as a youngster no one shared the floor with him? .... was it that he was on the shorter side of most men? That seems too simple. Indeterminate, I suppose! Felt drawn into the breach .... we people are strange creatures, myself not excluded.

Came home to hear from M and a call-in visitor, both talking about how someone else couldn't just go with the flow ... you know, the "when in Rome, do as the Romans do" kind of joining.

Seems sad that we humans haven't gone beyond this to Brother Martin Buber's I - Thou or to Brother Martin Luther King's Dream of a world in which we find value in sharing in others' Dreams.

I'll keep trying and learn, maybe, to be satisfied with limited successes.










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