Think Of Civil Society And The State

Perhaps It’s That You Can’t Go Back In Time, But You Can Return To The Scenes Of A Love, Of A Crime, Of Happiness, And Of A Fatal Decision; The Places Are What Remain, Are What You Can Possess, Are What Is Immortal. They Become The Tangible Landscape Of Memory, The Places That Made You, And In Some Way You Too Become Them. They Are What You Can Possess And In The End What Possesses You.

There Are Those Who Receive As Birthright An Adequate Or At Least Unquestioned Sense Of Self And Those Who Set Out To Reinvent Themselves, For Survival Or For Satisfaction, And Travel Far. Some People Inherit Values And Practices As A House They Inhabit; Some Of Us Have To Burn Down That House, Find Our Own Ground, Build From Scratch, Even As A Psychological Metamorphosis.

More And More I Think Of Privatisation As Being Not Just About The Takeover Of Resources And Power By Corporate Interests, But As The Retreat Of Citizens To Private Life And Private Space, Screened From Solidarity With Strangers And Increasingly Afraid Or Even Unable To Imagine Acting In Public.

What's Your Story? It's All In The Telling. Stories Are Compasses And Architecture; We Navigate By Them, And To Be Without A Story Is To Be Lost In The Vastness Of World That Spreads In All Directions Like Arctic Tundra Or Sea Ice. To Love Someone Is To Put Yourself In Their Place, We Say, Which Is To Put Yourself In Their Story, Or Figure Out How To Tell Yourself Their Story. Which Means That A Place Is A Story, And Stories Are Geography, And Empathy Is First Of All An Act Of Imagination, A Storyteller's Art, And Then A Way Of Traveling From Here To There.

I Sometimes Wonder What Those Of Us Who Are Writers Would Become In A Nonliterary Culture - Storytellers? Hermits?