…the ‘right’ thing would be to write; to chronicle occurrences, as they are occurring. But the reality is –that’s a difficult track to maintain. ..to be honest, as I get older I find it is better policy to keep my mind on what I’m doing, rather than to try and map my thinking along the way, or versify the topography.. Much.. –no; an immense amount of work has been going in the silence between my last entry and this one.
My father sent me a card when I was in junior high.. Don’t remember why, or where he was that he was writing home… But the saying on the front of the card struck me; to such an extent that I adopted it, as my yearbook quote, in my senior year of high school:
There are no rules about leaping into the new..
because no one has been there before..
These days of instant ‘access’, where information remains available for placing and plucking in the ‘cloud’, and history can be found in motion at You Tube, museums, to my mind, seem often to be overstepped, and their place as primary sources that can offer more visceral ‘context’ to an investigation of history or excavation of information, are second thoughts for the average Indiana Jones..
..It has always been my contention that community serves as the repository of local histories; the wealth of stories that rest unspoken, in the deeper levels of community memory, still remain connected to history; a name, spoken again, can suddenly reveal astonishing resonance and reach, as it reverberates out of the past, with incidents and events of a life’s journey.
It’s a fine art; a daily function of a writer, of course. But last night, the wrestling of a word was the spark for a lively after presentation debate by a room full of seasoned academics, savoring the deep intellectual, cultural refractions, ramifications and subtleties, which were presented by such options of choice.