[T]he artist must continually invent extraordinary classrooms and curricula. He or she must in life, become an intellectual alternative.One reads here the shadow of Gramsci's organic intellectual. And something more — intellectual with Stimpson is an adjective as well as a noun. The life of the mind is celebrated as is difference. This sets the stage for the approaching the act of witnessing as a way of seeing a way out.
The act of witnessing, when it returns to the shadows of the past and becomes elegiac, sees possibilities of wretchedness that, somehow, the witness evaded; the final losses that the ego did not, after all, have to endure. The act of witnessing, when it records the dreams that animated the past and were a source of its dignity, sees possible alternatives to wretchedness. In both cases, the witness is, in effect saying, "I wish my work to so alter circumstances that if I were to be born again, I would not have to fear death, and the death of my dream, as I once did."This is a life lived well beyond survivour guilt.
And so for day 690
02.11.2008