Local Food for Thought

Call & Response
(Courses w/o Borders Series)

Dear DD&D,

THIS (entry below) seems fair and representative—a
description of an aspect if not the whole …

(never the whole, can’t ever nail down the whole and
holy, though don’t I try? I’ve got a hammer)

…of the class, course, convention that meets twice
weekly in the windowless room.

Very interesting, says Jane:
discrete, digital, self-segregated souls,
each an individual, insular, outsider sealed-in
to my own bubble, box, cave, agenda, aims,
goals, purposes: each ME, a center-of-the-universe
gazing into a pool of mirrors fascinated by my own
reflection but thinking it’s OTHER PEOPLE I am
seeing, making statements & observations that reveal
ME, JANE, damnit—however insistent I am that
I’m remarking on other stuff—monkeys, movies, books,
weather, sporting teams, environmental crisis. It’s all
about me—do I have a problem with that? How could \
it be other wise?

see me hear me touch me feed me

Whatever the token topic of conversation, the true (primordial)
agenda is always relationship : strokes, status: phatic
communion (how you doon? What’s up? You ok?),
fit-in, fit-out: fitness.

IT is never about the trash or the dishes or the DUI or Grade
Point Average or E = MC^r2 or who gets the children or the dog…
Mere vehicles for What Counts.

Need we argue?

THIS (what I just said) may address if not explain the
assessment below. It’s typical. It makes sense. It expresses
and reflects what it is to be a ONE: enclosed, closet-dweller
among other closet-dwellers.

Or call IT l “cave.” Metaphors are always inadequate and any
one can push one over the edge. Replace. Substitute. Switch
in mid stream. The more ways of talking the better, if not the merrier.

Converse-action uber alles. Smoke signals from the caves on a
windy day: basis for relationship and community. Common
groundlessness--prerequisite for getting on the same page,
mixed meta force not worth standing..

&&&&&&&&&&

I have no response, here. None of these things
feel respond-able. It also feels like they're not
responding to any particular written thing, maybe
the metalogues every once in a while,

but for the most part, it's mind-on-page, self-segregated,
individual, refractory. I don't know what to do with that.

Do I follow suit and just talk about myself, my thoughts,
totally divided from the other minds sharing MY page?

I can do that. I can talk about my own existential crisis,
my total desire to sit and chain smoke until I cough out
my lungs like a frog and get a brief chance to wipe off
all the crap on it before I try and swallow it back. How
nothing really makes sense except from a very f**king
specific point of view, how everything still messes
with you, if only BECAUSE of how specific that sense is.

I mean, honestly, it feels somehow justified to write
out sh*t like that. And every time I write a response
for sam's class, in the back of my head, I've got this
strain of thought going along, well-suppressed, that
wants to make sure that everyone else knows exactly
what I'm going through.

And, I mean, if I search for it, I can usually connect
a few points, relate ideas to class, whatever I can do
to force it to work for myself. And I get something out,
and at the end of it, I feel like all I'm doing is filling
in the blanks.

Maybe I'm just so totally drawn into my own cave that
I'm having trouble noticing some level of connection.
Or maybe everyone is missing everyone else's point.

Basically, I think it'd be cool if more people responded
to each other, in the packet. Keep that conversation
separate, connected by our general consciousness as
a class, a collective, parallel to the talk-talk-talk.
Ultimate desire, I suppose. Nothing I can really do
about it, except try and develop my own individualism